A thrillingly revisionist history of the era at the Whitney Museum uncovers a current of art that sprang from eros and the uncensored minds of R. Crumb, Martha Edelheit and others.
The 1960s was one of the most visually distinct decades in history, and you don’t have to be a specialist to look at a photograph from that era and guess the approximate date. Everything seemed to break with the past, from Freedom Marches and antiwar protests to bell-bottoms and miniskirts, which allowed women to bare their knees in polite society for the first time.
Yet, curiously, the art that became emblematic of the ’60s did not reflect the social unrest of the era. Pop Art rose to icy peaks of impersonality and cool. There was no way to read an Andy Warhol painting of a Campbell’s soup can as a critique of the Vietnam War. By the end of the decade, Conceptualism and Minimalism, as exemplified by Sol Lewitt’s modular white cubes or Donald Judd’s gleaming rectangles, emptied art of any hint of the jangly dramas of everyday life.
But what if there was a missing layer, a lost generation of artists whose work ran hot-to-feverish in temperature and was driven by a Whitmanesque love of the human body and its longings? This is the question raised with appropriate hippie optimism in “Sixties Surreal,” an ambitiously revisionist exhibition opening on Sept. 24 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It brings together about 150 works by 111 painters, sculptors, photographers, collagists, cartoonists, junk assemblage-ists, and at least one Kabballah-ist, most of whom were pushed to the sidelines of the ’60s art scene for various unkind reasons. Some simply lived in “the wrong” cities — i.e., lands west of the Hudson River — and were dismissed by New York gallerists as local yokels, while others found their art careers stymied when they took up public struggles against sexism, segregation or homophobia.
OF THE 111 ARTISTS in the show, 47 are women — an impressive number, even if most of them are no longer around to savor the recognition. On a recent afternoon, I visited the studio of Martha Edelheit, a little-known, twice-widowed Manhattanite, now 94, who is about to make her Whitney debut. Dressed in a hot-pink T-shirt and jeans, she cheerfully recounted the ordeals of her career. A figurative painter when abstract art was in vogue, she sinned by rendering “the things I saw in front of me,” as she says, referring to the human body. She was part of a generation of proto-feminists who painted explicit nudes.
In 1965, she recalled, she had a show at the Byron Gallery in Manhattan. The New York Times critic John Canaday came in to look, only to politely explain to the gallery owner that he couldn’t review “that obscene woman.”
By today’s standards, the paintings that Canaday saw, including “Flesh Wall With Table” (1965) — which will be one of the largest works in the Whitney show — seem lushly decorative. Stretching 16 feet wide, across three panels, the painting is set indoors, in the artist’s studio, and embeds a group of female nudes in the space surrounding her drawing table. Languid bodies sprawl from edge to edge of the canvas, snoozing comfortably, their flesh graced with a rainbow of color that progresses from delicate ivories and pinks to dense ceruleans and purples.
Asked if she was glad to be tapped for the Whitney show, Edelheit exclaimed: “I don’t know why I was asked to be in it. The title of the show bewildered me because I don’t think of anything I do as Surreal. My dialogue has always been with Titian and Rubens.” She was referring to two old masters celebrated for capturing the dewy sensuality of flesh.
I reminded her that the show’s title, somewhat confusingly, refers less to the Surrealist movement than to a general embrace of psychosexual imagery in American art. Some viewers will invariably be disappointed to arrive at the Whitney and find nothing by Dalí or Magritte, who were still alive in the 1960s, or by their best-known American acolytes, such as Joseph Cornell, who made poetic shadow boxes, and William Copley, a pioneer of sexy cartoon-based figuration.
But European Surrealism had its limitations, one of which was its cliquishness. Despite the existence of many outstanding female Surrealists, André Breton, the poet and so-called pope of the movement, was fond of arranging group photographs that featured male artists only, wearing ties and jackets and looking as somber as physics professors.
The Whitney show, by contrast, is admirably inclusive. If not quite a Be-In, to borrow a ’60s phrase, it seems likely to be a see-in.