The rise of the sixties

by Thomas E. Crow

The 1960s have become fixed in our collective memory as an era of political upheaval and cultural experiment. Visual artists working in a volatile milieu sought a variety of responses to the turmoil of the public sphere and struggled to have an impact on a world preoccupied with social crisis. In this compelling account of art from 1955 to 1969, Thomas Crow, author of the critically acclaimed Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, looks at the broad range of artists working in Europe and America in the stormy years of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture, exploring the relationship of politics to art and showing how the rhetoric of one often informed - or subverted - the other. Moving from New York to Paris, from Hollywood to Dusseldorf to London, Crow traces the emergence of a new aesthetic climate that challenged established notions of content, style, medium, and audience. In Happenings, in the Situationist International, in the Fluxus group