Art review: Sixties Surreal

The Whitney Museum of American Art — “‘Sixties Surreal’ might seem like a mea culpa on the part of the Whitney”

(Image credit: Deb Cohn-Orbach / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

At long last, an exhibition of 1960s art has arrived that “makes the decade weird again,” said Jerry Saltz in NYMag.com. For too long, museums have been mounting tributes to the era suggesting that pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, land art, and feminism were the only languages spoken. Happily, “Sixties Surreal” is “not the same old same old.” It uses an elastic definition of “surreal” to bring together some 150 works by 111 artists who plugged into the madness and openness of the period. The “electrifying” first sight that greets visitors is a trio of enormous double-humped camels created in 1969 by sculptor Nancy Graves. A bright-orange backdrop makes the display pop all the more, and “this blast of fresh air only intensifies as you make your way through the rest of the show.”

“‘Sixties Surreal’ might seem like a mea culpa on the part of the Whitney,” said Deborah Solomon in The New York Times. The museum played a major role, after all, in pushing many of these same artists to the margins of the story it told about postwar American art. Many of them arguably did carry on the surrealist project of celebrating the less rational realms of consciousness, often by way of psychosexual paintings and sculptures that “thwacked conventional standards of beauty.” Christina Ramberg, a Chicago painter, specialized in close-up images of women’s bodies constrained by bandages and tight corsets. Martha Edelheit, another of the 47 women in the show, is making her Whitney debut at age 94 with a 16-foot-wide painting she completed in 1965. In Flesh Wall With Table, nude female figures “sprawl from edge to edge of the canvas, their flesh graced with a rainbow of color that progresses from delicate ivories and pinks to dense ceruleans and purples.”

“If there’s a problem with the show, it’s that everything becomes surrealism in the end,” said Marion Maneker in Puck. There are plenty of worthy flag bearers here, including Martha Rosler, who was ahead of her time in creating photomontages that highlighted the sexual politics and global violence undergirding U.S. consumer culture. But the inclusion of well-known artists as varied as Faith Ringgold and Kenneth Anger “makes you wonder where the boundaries of surrealism lie.” And that’s true as well of one of the featured works: a 39-foot-wide reclining male nude by the painter Harold Stevenson. “Once dismissed as a gargantuan art-world curio,” Stevenson’s The New Adam “is now being considered as an ahead-of-its-time, era-defining masterpiece,” said William Van Meter in Artnet. Just be ready for it. When the Guggenheim Museum declined at the last minute to include the painting in a seminal 1963 group show, the curator told Stevenson it would be too distracting to exhibit “a phallus the size of a man.”