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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"As a Negro, I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd, or the surreal, because I have seen things out of my studio window on 125th Street that neither Dalí nor Beckett nor Ionesco could have thought possible." In this quote from 1964, Romare Bearden reflects on his experience being Black in America. Here he depicts not Harlem but Pittsburgh, where he briefly lived with his grandparents and spent time with steel workers. He represents the city by combining found images and enlarging the photographically, making photomontages that morph his memories of the city into spiritual and political rituals.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Social Surreal

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Romare Bearden, Pittsburg Memory 2/6, 1964

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