The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Sixties Surreal, Filippino Lippi

December 5, 2025·1 hr 22 min·8 clips

What does it mean for artists to neutralize the forbidden through surrealist exploration?

The first segment stays with 60s Surreal. Green describes the Whitney exhibition as a correction to a stiff version of United States art in the nineteen sixties, the kind that moves through movements before it gets to artists. Geography does real work here. The exhibition looks past New York and its market toward artists elsewhere in the United States, many of them dealing with political and social extremes. The curatorial question tightens when the conversation turns to European surrealist histories and American history at the same time. T.C. Cannon becomes the charge point. Andrew Myrick Let Him Eat Grass is discussed through its reference to a United States trader's contempt for Native people, but the painting is not treated as a history note. It has that strange, heightened pull where the real starts to feel more than real. Green names the pressure plainly: Cannon's image is real and surreal at once, close to the older European idea of surrealism as the hyperreal, while American violence stays in view. Laura Phipps widens the frame with Mel Casas and other artists who pull moments from the country's formation into the present, where they are harder to file away. Cannon's biography enters without taking over. His service in Vietnam and departure from art school sit inside the larger discussion of disillusionment, representation, and historical pressure. The second segment moves back several centuries. Alexander J. Noel talks about Filippino Lippi and Rome at the Cleveland Museum of Art, especially the artist's relation to Leonardo. The ending avoids the easy ladder. Noel wants Filippino and Leonardo read through what they took from each other, not as a simple case of Leonardo inspiring the younger artist. The drawings leave the door open. The catalog and exhibition hold onto threads for further study instead of tying the story off too neatly.

As heard by us

A sharp museum conversation on 60s Surreal, followed by a quieter look at Filippino Lippi, Leonardo, and artistic exchange.

Sixties Surreal, Filippino Lippi opens with Tyler Green at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where Dan Nadel and Laura Phipps discuss 60s Surreal as a challenge to the neat march of isms that still flattens much U.S. art history of the period.

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Why you'd press play

You want one episode that moves from 60s Surreal at the Whitney to Filipino, Lippi, and Rome at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

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