“I like the strong personal visionary stuff that generally doesn’t fit in the mainstream,” the artist Robert Crumb once wrote in a letter to the cartoonist B. N. Duncan. Dan Nadel quotes that letter in Crumb, his recent biography of the artist, but it’s a statement that may as well apply to Nadel himself, a curator whose work has centered those who exist on the margins of American art history.
Open-minded comic artists, wacky sculptors, and weirdo painters recur throughout Nadel’s exhibitions, books, and writings. Many of these artists were active during the postwar period, and almost none of them made work that conformed to the dictates of New York–based art magazines, which preferred styles like Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism.
Now, it’s voguish to scour art history for figures such as these, to ask ourselves: What else don’t we know? But it was not always that way—not even in 2014, when Nadel curated “What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present” for the Rhode Island School of Design’s art museum. That show centered around the Hairy Who collective in Chicago, the Funk art movement in the Bay Area, and other out-there groups and styles; to see it felt like gazing into another art history beyond the one taught in undergraduate college programs. Critics responded with due praise, as did dealers such as Matthew Marks, whose gallery traveled “What Nerve!” to New York the year after its debut. Marks ended up taking on Suellen Rocca, a Hairy Who member who had little visibility in New York beforehand.
Future shows by Nadel proved equally prescient. In 2018, Nadel curated an eye-opening exhibition for Karma gallery about Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago painter whose tiny paintings of cloistered, quiet interiors have drawn comparisons to Surrealist art. It was the first time Abercrombie had exhibited in New York in more than 60 years. The Whitney Museum acquired its first Abercrombie painting two years later; the first traveling Abercrombie retrospective is now on view at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.
Nadel now works for the Whitney, where he was recently hired as a curator of prints and drawings. This week, he will unveil “Sixties Surreal,” an expansive show that aims to rewrite the history of the era. Working with co-curators Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, Nadel has designed a show that includes figures ranging from Luis Jimenez to Carlos Villa, from Jae Jarrell to Shigeko Kubota, from Ed Bereal to Fritz Scholder.
The exhibition does not entirely avoid ’60s giants: there’s an Andy Warhol “Marilyn” print,” a Yayoi Kusama chair strewn with phallus-like forms, and a ghostly Jack Whitten painting. But this revelatory show offers a fresh “pathway” for viewing art of the era, as Nadel put it, providing both a new understanding of much-loved artists and lesser-known figures alike.
ARTnews sat down with Nadel to talk about “Sixties Surreal,” Crumb, and the value of comic books.
ARTnews: A lot of the work you’ve done has centered around artists who could be called alternative figures or “outliers,” to borrow curator Lynne Cooke’s term. What draws you to these artists?
Dan Nadel: I wouldn’t say that I’m drawn to outsiders or outliers because they are outliers—that’s not necessarily what I’m looking for. When I was much younger, I discovered things in the gaps, so things that lie between art and design, art and comics, paintings and comics. I do like the mixing of things, and often that kind of mixing occupies an outlying area in various histories.
The fact is that for a lot of what I’m interested in, the [visual] language tends to be on some level colloquial or vernacular. Because of the postwar shift in the emphasis of art history, this stuff became “marginal.” When we talk about “marginal,” it’s like, well, marginal to whom? A lot of these artists were even showing in places like New York, or their work was making it there. I can’t think of anyone in “Sixties Surreal” that didn’t show in New York at least or once or twice. Many of them were in Whitney Annuals or in group shows like the Whitney’s “Human Concern/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art” in 1969, which was critically reviled. It’s just that the discourse took another path.
“Sixties Surreal” features many artists based outside New York, in places like Chicago, Texas, and Los Angeles. Do you think that played a role in their exclusion from that narrative?
Yes. I think it was sort of like taste masquerading as theory. And I think that’s really changed as a lot of those old academic tastes have started to crumble in the last 10 to 12 years. When I first showed Karl Wirsum, in 2010, he hadn’t shown in New York in around 25 years. Really, very few Chicago Imagists had at that point shown in New York in a very long time in any concentrated way. And now, there are major galleries representing these artists.
Do you feel like something has shifted?
I do. Who’d have thought there’d be a touring Christina Ramberg show or a Peter Saul retrospective at the New Museum? When I did “What Nerve!” at the RISD Museum and then it went to Matthew Marks in 2015, it was a huge shift. Certainly, Matthew had already started showing Chicago artists that were outside his normal program. I don’t claim responsibility for this, but I do think there has been an enormous shift in the larger art historical discourse. Lynne Cooke’s show [“Outliers and American Vanguard Art,” from 2018] helped with that. Also, there’s a reckoning with how the formalist and conceptualist mode, starting in the late ’60s and early ’70s, was exclusionary in terms of race and class. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Robert Colescott recently had a museum retrospective.
How did you and your fellow curators start on “Sixties Surreal”?
It really began with Scott Rothkopf’s thesis on [critic and curator] Gene Swenson and his 1966 show “The Other Tradition” at the ICA Philadelphia. The show was asking: What if subject matter, not form, had dominated postwar art? On some level, we forget that subject matter never went away—it just fell out of favor in what became a New York–centric discourse. We’re trying to get at something similar about subject matter.
Then there was “Human Concern/Personal Torment” at the Whitney. There was “Funk” in Berkeley. There was “Eccentric Abstraction,” which was developed in some ways as a response to “The Other Tradition.” There were the Hairy Who shows in Chicago. And then, of course, there was “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage” at MoMA, which traveled to Chicago. This all really accelerated in the ’60s and then started tapering off in the early ’70s as a kind of formalism took hold.
We started realizing that there were a series of group shows that featured overlapping artists. Many of these artists were having their first solo shows, and many of them fell out of the New York–centric history that followed. There were all sorts of theoretical reasons, but there were also market reasons: people that lived in Chicago didn’t have the kind of market support that people in San Francisco did.
We drew a map of all these shows. It turned out that there were key figures, like H. C. Westermann, who was very important. We asked: If we do a reconstruction of these exhibitions, what would that look like? Well, it sure would look like a segregated art world, so we didn’t want to do that. Then it became: let’s use these historical shows as a sort of scaffolding, to identify our own themes and make more room.
The epigraph of Crumb is a quote from Robert Crumb, who is in “Sixties Surreal”: “No one understands . . . But of course, how could they?” That could be something many of the artists in the show might say of their work.
In the last 50 or so years, artists have been offering clear explanations for their work. Many of the artists in [“Sixties Surreal”] were not doing that—and maybe were even averse to that. A lot of these artists deal in the inexplicable and the irreducible, which is something I’m very interested in.
Were these artists rebelling against rational thinking?
Good question. In talking with a lot of these artists over the years, I found they were pursuing their own personal visions, and the rebellion part was incidental. In some cases, there were artists who were very much making statements that were political in nature, to really push back against something. But the more inscrutable work is just somebody finding their language. Somebody might say, “That’s awfully rebellious,” but it’s almost an accident.
How much were these artists in dialogue with Surrealism?
“Dialogue” is such a funny word. There are definitely things in this show that are explicitly [about that movement], like a Roger Brown painting explicitly calling out Duchamp, who wasn’t technically a Surrealist. But my sense is that you couldn’t not be responding to Surrealism in some way, just as if you live in New York, you can’t see graffiti and have it not seep into your mind.
My sense is that a lot of this weirdness is also just a weirdness that recurs throughout American vernacular culture, comic books, and such.
The dissonance and the far-outness of it is eternally appealing to people looking for an alternative to whatever’s around them.
You’ve worked a lot on comics in particular. Did you grow up with them? What influence did they have on you?
I grew up totally comics-obsessed—they were my gateway. I wish I had a grand idea about why, but it’s just what made sense to me as a kind of second language. Like a lot of people, I found Maus by Art Spiegelman, and I found Dan Clowes and Julie Doucet. It was a way of thinking for me. My earliest work was about comics history, and I was trying to find what had been left out. There’s just acres of it, because until recently, there was no infrastructure for the study of comics history.
One thing I thought you did well in Crumb was dealing with the racist and sexist nature of some of his work. You must have had to deal with that for some of the artists in “Sixties Surreal,” who are equally known for provocative art.
I don’t think of it as fortunate or unfortunate. Yes, with Crumb, some of the work is racist and sexist, but you don’t get the person without the gnarly stuff. With the book, I did not want to moralize about it. And with the show, yeah, there’s difficult work. We have to take these artists whole and then choose what we want to show.
I think it’s important to think hard about it. It’s tricky. It’s threading a needle, understanding that when Peter Saul is dealing with racial stereotypes, he’s doing it in the language of caricature, a language that goes back 200 years, and that he’s showing people the Other. But it’s not clear-cut—it’s messy. I never want art to feel safe, and I don’t look to it for affirmation, but I don’t want to harm people. It takes a lot of care.
Is one goal of “Sixties Surreal” to establish a new canon?
Well, I’m one of four curators, and we all have different ideas about it, but the short answer is no. I think we’re past the idea of canons. I don’t know what a canon would look like right now.
We’ve tried to show how all these artists could [offer] a different vision of the long ’60s. It’s not to exclude Minimalism or Conceptual art. It’s just to add to it. It’s another pathway. I think the goal of “Sixties Surreal” was to offer a different set of players and ideas for people to consider. We wanted to say: Here’s a map of a new terrain or a new constellation. Go dig in deeper on Karl Wirsum or Miyoko Ito or Mel Casas. Follow some of these leads and see where they take you.
