Alternative view of an alternative decade

At New York's Whitney museum, the exhibition Sixties Surreal finds ways to highlight the less dominant artistic forces of the revolutionary era

- By Veronica Esposito

We all know the familiar story of art in the 1960s - pop art, conceptualism and minimalism ruled the decade, dominated by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt and Jasper Johns. Bringing a welcome dose of counter-narrative to this calcified story, the Whitney's bold new show Sixties Surreal aims to introduce a new cohort of 60s artists who channelled the chaotic id of the decade but only got a fraction of the acclaim.

"A generation of artists who were young in the 60s increasingly looked for artistic vocabularies that they could use to explore the weird and wild time they were living in," says show curator Scott Rothkopf, who has longed to curate this exact show since his student days in the 1990s. “The 60s was a time of so much change - the fear of the atom bomb, multiple sexual revolutions, the civil rights movement, drug culture ...”

Sixties Surreal collects the work of 111 artists, many of whom didn't fit into any of the narratives governing the 60s art world and others who worked far from the centres of tastemaking. It's an in-your-face experience, with screaming colours, laugh-out-loud humour and bodies galore.