Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Many artists in the 1960s presented everyday American life as being off kilter, uncanny, or unexpected—in other words, surreal. This was particularly true of photographers, who increasingly found that if they looked at the world from a certain angle the disorientation of modern life became evident. The artist and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek even suggested “the Social Surreal” as the title for a 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, ultimately called New Documents, of young photographers who took this new documentary approach.

Images and videos capturing the strangeness of postwar American life became even more ubiquitous as television sets transmitted this novel visual language directly into American homes. Artists such as Lee Friedlander, Paul Thek, and Luis Jimenez were unnerved by television’s presence—the oddity of bringing this technology into a domestic space, an object that might confront you with images of Count Dracula one moment and the Vietnam War the next.

Person wearing a white mask creates a giant bubble while a child reaches out and a cyclist passes by.

Cartoon man with bulging eyes and smoke from his head, titled "BURNED OUT," on a 1970 magazine cover.

Square sculpture of a stylized human face with closed eyes, painted in gold, brown, and blue tones.

Mike Henderson, Dufus, 1970/73

Ed Ruscha, Surrealism, 1966

Romare Bearden, Pittsburg Memory 2/6, 1964