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 the 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, 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.
