‘Sixties Surreal’ Curator Dan Nadel Is Expanding American Art History, One Outlier at a Time

Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | 22nd September 2025

The textbook story of post war art seems neat and tidy – abstraction, Pop, Minimalism and so on. Yet plenty of art didn’t fit this “New York centric” discourse.  Viewing such work from the 1960’s, one writer detects a common thread – psychosexual imagery. A curator suggests differently – these artists simply didn’t fit the “formalist” conversation of that time. Old academic views have “started to crumble” but the aim is not to establish another canon, just “a different set of players and ideas”.