Over the years, the old story of the artistic ’60s has grown more and more threadbare, but no other story has taken its place—I don’t think anyone has even made much of an effort to construct one. That’s changed with the current exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Sixties Surreal”—not that it succeeds (spoiler alert) in promulgating a convincing new story. But at least it tries, and that’s refreshing.
The show marks the debut of the museum’s recently appointed new curator of drawings and prints, Dan Nadel. He was a surprising choice for the job, because while Nadel has considerable experience in exhibition-making, he is better known as a writer, and in particular for writing about comics and other art forms that are usually considered tangential to the interests of an institution like the Whitney. Most notably, his recent biography of Robert Crumb has been lavishly praised. Naturally, Crumb is in the show, but unfortunately without his scene of wild-eyed cartoonists and illustrators (S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso). Although I agree with The New York Times’ Deborah Solomon that the exhibition “reveals the rising influence of Nadel,” it’s not altogether his show—the curatorial work is signed collectively by him and longtime Whitney curators Laura Phipps and Elizabeth Sussman as well as its director, Scott Rothkopf, whose foreword to the catalog claims credit for the show’s idea as rooted in his undergraduate thesis.
In any case, you won’t find much of the standard story, or its protagonists, in evidence in the show. Yes, there’s a Jasper Johns flag painting, effectively sidelined by being hung in an inconspicuous spot, and an Andy Warhol screenprint of Marilyn Monroe that seems out of place. (According to Solomon, these were both last-minute additions to the show at Rothkopf’s behest, on the grounds that “that the general public was more likely to see a group show at the Whitney if at least a few names were familiar.”)
The new story, according to the Whitney, is that Surrealism was a more important source for the art of the 1960s than abstraction and formalism. Such ’60s stalwarts as Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt are absent, not to mention the younger Conceptualists who began to emerge at the end of the decade, such as Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner. Robert Smithson is present and accounted for, but with a very early, quasi-Expressionist painting, Green Chimera With Stigmata (1961), rather than the Minimalist-influenced non-site sculptures and earthworks for which he gained attention starting in the mid-1960s.