The Rise of the Sixties

Thomas Crow's analysis of the art of the 1960s remains as fresh as ever as he expertly follows 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. At a time when visual artists 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, Crow explores the relationship of politics to art, and shows how the rhetoric of one often informed - or subverted - the other. He also traces the emergence of a new aesthetic climate that challenged established notions of content, style, medium and audience.