Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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In the 1960s television brought reports of political assassinations, the oppression of protests, and the escalation of the Vietnam War (1955–75) into the comfort of American living rooms. The works in this gallery illustrate the many ways in which the violence and oppression of the era were experienced, internalized, and expressed through art. Some artists drew on the visual and literary vocabulary of historic Surrealism, a movement that embraced and extolled revolutionary actions, to communicate the experience of racial or colonial oppression. Other artists manipulated the very material of mass media to excoriate the culture it portrayed—framing violence as a kind of rupture in the fabric of logic.

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Nancy Spero's War Series consists of antiwar manifestos or, as she called them, "a personal attempt at exorcism." The paintings feature American military weaponry, from helicopters to detonated bombs, reworked to resemble parasitic insects, reptiles, or male genitalia. Years before she created Female Bomb, Spero was living in Paris and witnessed the French police's violent response to protests against the Algerian War (1954–62). That experience, alongside the escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War, led Spero to produce "angry works, often scatological, manifestos against a senseless, obscene war" and influenced her approach to antiwar activism.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Nancy Spero, Female Bomb, 1966

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