“This is not a show of ‘Surrealism’ proper, with a capital ‘S,’” Whitney Museum Director Scott Rothkopf said during the press preview for Sixties Surreal. “It’s a show about the surreal ways of picturing a world that had itself become surreal.” As Rothkopf flicked through his PowerPoint slides, Hyperallergic Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian leaned toward me and whispered, “How exactly is this surreal?” Not to get all Jaden Smith about it, but therein lies the problem: Can anything be surreal if everything is surreal?
Sixties Surreal recontextualizes American art between 1958 and 1972, arguing that Surrealism, not Cubism, was its guiding postwar aesthetic philosophy — in other words, content over form. An expanded version of Rothkopf’s 1999 undergraduate thesis (less White and New York-centric, he notes in his catalog essay), the exhibition gathers the work of 111 artists across a wide range of media as evidence that the sexual, fantastical, and unconscious undercurrents of the psychologically fractured 1960s surfaced in art. This was the era when the popularity of television introduced a new and insidious relationship with images to the American public; the postwar economic boom spurred us to base our identities on the products we purchased; and the United States/Vietnam War devastated not only that nation and its people, but our sense of what it meant to be American, spurring the countercultural movement in response. The exhibition roots its argument in and draws a number of its works and artists from several touchpoint exhibitions of the era, notably The Other Tradition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia in 1966, curated by Gene Swenson; Eccentric Abstraction at the now-defunct Fischbach Gallery in New York City, curated by Lucy Lippard that same year; and Funk at the University Art Museum at University of California, Berkeley, curated by Peter Selz the year after.
Installation view of Sixties Surreal, feauturing Claes Oldenburg’s “Soft Toilet” (1966, center) and Alex Hay, “Paper Bag” (1968; back left)
This is an ambitious remit, laudable for its attempt to unite disparate movements from across the country under the aegis of a single American impulse. Befitting such a formidable task, however, the result is far from neat. In the premise alone, cracks begin to show: The Bay Area’s Funk movement, for instance, which can (mostly) be said to focus on the bodily or tactile, gross, funny, and lowbrow, is often characterized as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism — a movement directly inspired by capital-“S” Surrealism. Obviously, a tradition formed in reaction to one inspired by Surrealism can itself be surreal — but it starts to get a little bit messy and a whole lot mindfucking.
There’s a lot to like about Sixties Surreal. It emphasizes affect, inducing a sense of uncanniness or disorientation via odd juxtapositions, vertiginous shifts in scale, and the slippage between subject and object. Step out of the elevator on the fifth floor and you’ll immediately find yourself before a trio of fuzzy lifesize camels made out of an unholy pastiche of wood, steel, burlap, animal skin, wax, and oil paint (Nancy Graves, 1968–69). Enter the dimly lit first gallery, and you’re met with what feels like a consumerist anxiety dream. Claes Oldenburg’s “Soft Toilet” (1966) — exactly what it sounds like — sags impotently, inducing the lurching feeling of an object meant to serve you suddenly buckling. Meanwhile, Alex Hay’s six-foot-tall brown paper bag looms imposingly over you, and Martha Rosler conflates the consumer object with flesh via photomontages splicing body parts onto kitchen appliances — a dishwasher becomes “Damp Meat,” an oven “Hot Meat” (both c. 1966–72).
Installation view of Sixties Surreal, featuring Andy Warhol, “Marilyn” (1967), screenprint (left); and Luis Jimenez’s “Blond TV Image” (1967) (right)
It is a beautiful, sensuous show. One of the rooms is painted a gorgeous, bloody plum; its rounded walls and a dense sectioning curtain create the atmosphere of a true theater of the mind, fitting for a section dedicated to the destabilizing impact of television on the American psyche. In Luis Jimenez’s sculpture “Blond TV Image” (1967), a bulbous face bursts out of the television frame as if intruding into the space of real life. This sense is heightened by the photographs of Lee Friedlander, which are titled after specific locations — “Galax, Virginia” (1962), for instance — but depict distorted faces on television sets in thresholds of nondescript rooms that could be anywhere, blending fiction and reality, the far and the local. The inclusion of Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn” (1967) in this section startled me in the best way: Here is a woman who was flattened into an image and circulated mercilessly through this very medium. What a way to reframe one of the touchstones of American art; I buy it.
Elsewhere, custom-built shelves with rounded edges house beautiful, strange objects and pieces of furniture with delightfully surprising textures and features, sometimes evoking a showroom or an odd domestic environment. Lee Bontecou’s gaping apertures (“Untitled,” 1961), Jeremy Anderson’s coffee table outfitted with a digestive tract (“Riverrun,” 1965), Louise Bourgeois’s tortured chrysalis (“Fée Couturière,” 1963), and Yayoi Kusama’s chair bursting with larva-like growths (“Accumulation,” c. 1963) make up a very abridged list.
Installation view of Sixties Surreal, featuring Jeremy Anderson, “Riverrun” (1965) in the center foreground
However, the countercultural edge of the 1960s feels like it’s been neutered. The senseless violence, the loss of faith in the future, the prevailing sense that the old institutions — the university, the government, marriage, the church, the very idea of a nation — had failed us, the resulting fury. The culture that came along with it — the music, drugs, style — isn’t absent, but its impact is dulled. Partly that’s due to the prevailing artistic trends of the day: the cool intellectualism of Pop Art, the cold surfaces of the Finish Fetish movement. Partly it’s a feature of surrealism itself. Combine Swensen’s remark that the movement was about “turn[ing] feelings into things so that we can deal with them” — also a hallmark of capitalism — and Suzanne Césaire’s claim that it is about “expressing the forbidden zones of the human mind to neutralize them,” and it makes sense that the resulting objects can feel inert.
Additionally, it’s a problem of how to bring a feeling into the museum space. Album covers and sketches, for instance, simply cannot capture the way that music pulsated in the charged air, became anthems to revolution. And it’s also a shortcoming of curatorial emphasis. Though the curators compiled a playlist, I’m told by my more musically schooled colleagues (namely, Reviews Editor Natalie Haddad) that there could have been some deeper cuts (see Natalie’s suggestions here). Moreover, the show’s playlist seemed thoroughly deemphasized, as it was mentioned neither in the introductory remarks nor the wall text nor the (very good and thorough) 400-page catalog — a surprising omission given the centrality of music to 1960s culture. And in terms of specifically art historical angles, what about some documentation of or even allusions to happenings — art that grew specifically from the social changes of the period, and was made out there in the world?
Installation view of Sixties Surreal, with Romare Bearden, “Pittsburgh Memory 2/6” (1964) at center (© BFA 2025; photo by Quadir Moore/BFA.com)
Regarding the disconnect between the worlds outside and within the museum, the exhibition’s approach to artists of marginalized identities can range from the nonsensical to the deeply problematic. The wall texts quote Romare Bearden: “As a Negro, I do not need to go looking for ‘happenings,’ the absurd, or the surreal, because I have seen things out of my studio window on 125th Street that neither Dalí nor Beckett nor Ionesco could have thought possible.” Similarly, thinkers like Amiri Baraka have argued that Black life itself is surreal (the catalog essays wrestle with this subject more thoroughly).
My problem is not with this conceit. My problem is that throughout the rest of the show, the sociopolitical facts that made the American sixties feel surreal — the Vietnam War, the advent of television, the postwar consumerist boom — were tied to that specific era, whereas the surrealism of the Black experience depicted here is rendered timeless, unchanging, in line with a much longer history of categorizing the “other” as such. As a result, the rationale for including certain works by Black artists feels less developed — case in point, the Harlem-centered quote above bears little relevance to the Dadaesque silver print “Pittsburgh Memory 2/6” (1964) that it ostensibly accompanies. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Movement — which lines up with the show’s dates nearly to a tee — is scarcely mentioned in the show’s wall texts: not once in the section texts, and only glancingly in labels for specific objects. Is there possibly anything more “surreal” than having to convince a country quite literally built by those you lay claim to that you deserve supposedly “inalienable” rights?
As a result, the show lays out an implicit definition of “real” that skews White, Christian, and Euroamerican, advancing it as a neutral experience from which others diverge in “surreal” ways — reproducing an established problem thoroughly considered by scholars such as Claudia Rankine. For instance, a wall text for artist Ed Bereal’s “Focke-Wulf FW 190” (1960), an assemblage sculpture consisting of detritus impaled into a metal body labeled with a swastika, tells us that he “rejected the embrace of the predominantly white art world in search of a more sociopolitical mode of artmaking.” Hmm. “Sociopolitical” just refers to social and political factors of life, which quite literally apply to all of us. What does the Whitney mean by a “sociopolitical mode of artmaking,” and why does it not apply to the predominant White experience?
Oscar Howe, “Retreat” (1968), casein on paper (© Oscar Howe Family; photo courtesy the Whitney Museum)
Next, take the framing of Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe’s abstract casein on paper work “Retreat” (1968), in which thorny red, blue, and black forms coalesce into a whirling form. First, the wall text positions the work mostly as an attempt to reframe the visuality of Indigenous art in the outside world — “countering ethnographic approach[es]” and “market pressure” and “expanding the visual language of Native modernism” — rather than the inward turn toward the unconscious on which the show is supposedly predicated. Next, it compares the experience of the work to being “caught directly within the action of a traditional Dakota ceremony.” Yet is it really surreal for an artist of a certain background to participate in its already well-established traditions? The section text groups these works under “alternatives” to “organized religion” — but isn’t taking the transubstantiated body of Christ on your tongue pretty surreal as well? Indeed, I wish this exhibition on surrealism had focused more on destabilizing the concept of “real” than reifying it.
By the end of the exhibition, I felt like I’d lost the plot on what “surrealism” even means — a pretty surreal experience of the unintentional kind. What makes Don Potts’s barebones sculpture “My First Car: Basic Chassis” (1970) surreal, other than the fact that his work was included in the Funk and Eccentric Abstraction exhibitions? The wall text states that the work “could stand in for that other locomotive machine: a human being,” presumably to argue for its surrealist bent, but I’m not certain of the case it’s even trying to make. If the melding between the “organic and mechanical, exposed and invulnerable” marks the surreal, were the Futurists surreal? From that perspective, what is decidedly not surreal?
Installation view of Marisol, “Women and Dog” (1963–64), wood, plaster, synthetic polymer, and taxidermic dog head
I want to be clear here: What Sixties Surreal is trying to do here is incredibly ambitious. It was never going to be an easy argument, and I’m convinced by much of it. But it’s because of the very importance of its aims that it needs to better define and operationalize its terms. What constitutes the “real,” and therefore, the “surreal”?
I’m reminded of a common comment I see on TikTok, usually under some video of a rat fighting a pigeon or someone dressed like a giant milk carton on the subway, or something ridiculous like that: “New York isn’t real.” On the L train after the press preview, showtime began. Music blasted, and a performer started flipping at the center of the car before leaping onto the metal handrails on the ceiling, dangling upside-down; his co-performer walked through the car, hat in hand, collecting bills. I thought about limbs twisting into the armature of machines, the organic and the mechanical. The absurdity of the ways we make ends meet. The arbitrariness of what we count as art and what we don’t. It felt, well, surreal.
Don Potts, “My First Car: Basic Chassis” (1970), wood, metal, and rubber (photo Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Lee Bontecou, “Untitled” (1961), steel, canvas, wire, and rope (photo Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
Faith Ringgold, “The American Spectrum” (1969)
Sixties Surreal continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, West Village, Manhattan) through January 19, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, with Kelly Long and Rowan Diaz-Toth.
Editor’s note 10/17/25 10:48 am: A previous version of this review misstated the year of Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard. The exhibition took place in 1966, not 1967.
