Sixties Surreal - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300284500 ISBN 13: 9780300284508

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2025

Synopsis

A reevaluation of American art of the 1960s that foregrounds the role of surrealism during a period of social and political upheaval   Challenging what we think we know about art of the 1960s, this volume moves beyond the established movements of pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism to shine a light on how American artists created a unique type of surrealism, making works suffused with eroticism, dread, wonder, violence, and liberation. A series of essays reveals how this new surrealism enabled artists to reconnect art to an increasingly untethered reality following the period of rapid postwar transformation and to imagine new worlds and models for art rooted in political and social change. Presenting a new framework to understand the work of artists such as Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Nutt, John Outterbridge, Ralph Arnold, H. C. Westermann, Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Christina Ramberg, and Robert Arneson, this study features an expansive chronology that highlights how a broad group of artists across the United States connected to each other through exhibitions, galleries, and collectives, offering a fresh perspective on how artists in the 1960s harnessed psychoanalysis, wordplay, and assemblage, among other strategies, to create new horizons for subject matter and form that continue to reverberate in American art today.   Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art   Exhibition Schedule:   Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (September 24, 2025–January 29, 2026)

About this title

About the Author

Dan Nadel is curator-at-large at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Laura Phipps is associate curator, Scott Rothkopf is Alice Pratt Brown Director, and Elisabeth Sussman is curator, all at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300284500
• ISBN 13: 9780300284508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Dan Nadel