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.

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

Created for the cover of the counterculture newspaper The East Village Other (1965–72), the flaming, eye-popping, and tongue-wrenching figure of Burned Out suggests a character whose internal panic is mirrored by an alarming physical transformation. Crumb describes this drawing as "the end of the 1960s" and a visual representation of a time when the psychedelic drug use and free love of the decade's counterculture movement crashed into the new reality of an increasingly conservative political environment. As a key figure in the underground comics movement of the late 1960s, Crumb's humorous—and often raunchily stylized—characters recognized the inscrutability of the world.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Social Surreal

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Robert Crumb, Burned Out, cover of the "East Village Other" 5, no. 10, 1970

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