Surrealism in the 1960s

Counterculture sparks super-reality in new Whitney exhibit of 100+ artists

When I think of the 20^th century Surrealist movement, my mind turns to the post-WWI European art and cultural movement where artists, like René Magritte, pursued permitting the unconscious to express itself. Those incongruous dream-like scenes and ideas were a way to “resolve the contradictory conditions of dream and reality into a super-reality,” or surreality, according to leader André Breton.

“Women and dog” by Marisol

Aside from the undeniably prolific output of Spanish artist Salvador Dali, who himself joined the Surrealists in 1929, I don’t typically think of artists during the 1960s creating under the Surrealism banner. But, the new “Sixties Surrealism” exhibition at the Whitney argues that “surrealism was in the groundwater of American culture” by the end of the 60s and despite being considered “tasteless or passé, particularly by the New York-centric art world” it “had influenced everything from film and dance to design, fashion, and advertising.”

“Untitled (Movie house with female nude)” by Roger Brown

Turns out, the curators at the Whitney are so right.

“Humanscape #56” by Mel Casas. The Humanscape series by Casas explored different variations of Americana iconography, like drive-in movie theaters. Each painting is a screen-like image contrasted against a competing drama in the foreground, often parodying racist stereotypes of Latinx culture. This painting, critiques Fiesta, San Antonio’s annual festival commemorating the defeat of the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto. The festival crowned a white Fiesta queen by the Order of the Alamo, a group that limited membership on the basis of race and class. Casas’ painting asserts that the celebrated Texan revolution was actually an entrenchment of Latinx subjugation.

Featuring work from more than 100 artists, this brand new exhibit “proposes a radical new view of the decade,” and argues “that surreal tendencies were among the most important forces shaping contemporary art across the United States.” Covering 1958 to 1972, the featured 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.”

“The devil and his game” collage by Kay Brown

It was nice to see Chicago represented with the inclusion of members of the Hairy Who, an artist collective that mounted unconventional displays of bright, graphic work at the Hyde Park Art Center from 1966-1969. Their work embodied irreverence, spontaneity, and quietly transgressive humor during the distinct rise of counterculture amid a moment of profound national upheaval. We had the good fortune to see five of those six artists at a Chicago Humanities Festival presentation back in 2018.

DXO is reflected in Hairy Who member Karl Wirsum’s “Gargoyle Gargle Oil”

Aside from shoe-horning a Warhol “Marilyn Monroe” into the show, the rest of the thesis is borne out very successfully throughout the exhibit. Structured around many countercultural themes that challenged the status quo, the exhibit demonstrates that the “cascading social and political changes [happening during that historical time period] affirmed that life, itself, is surreal.”

In “Untitled,” Raymond Saunders transforms Emanuel Leutze’s history painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851), into a loosely rendered ghostly likeness. His collage-based painting mode alludes to racial and social issues, yet maintains a dream-like feeling.