The Real Deal With 'Sixties Surreal' at the Whitney

Brian P. Kelly reviews the exhibition Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Organized by Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf and Elisabeth Sussman with Kelly Long and Rowan Diaz-Toth, the show makes a bold attempt to reframe the artistic history of one of America’s most turbulent decades, arguing in the exhibition texts that “surreal tendencies were among the most important forces shaping contemporary art across the United States” in that period, and that “artists from diverse backgrounds took license from the wildness of the Surrealist imagination to express the psychosexual, fantastical, spiritual, strange and revolutionary qualities of their time.”