The 1960s and 1970s resonate in our collective memory as a time of upheaval and social change, both in the United States and abroad—decades marked by the struggles of the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War and student protests internationally, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, and the murder of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi. Images of flower children and of graffiti-covered subways come to mind; New Yorkers, especially, think of a grittier-than-usual city on the brink of bankruptcy. It comes as no surprise that this superheated political and cultural climate was reflected in the work of many young artists who defied traditional conceptions of what a painting could be, rejecting establishment norms no less boldly than did the students occupying university buildings across America or erecting barricades in Paris. (The artists, of course, can be said to have enriched their environment, as opposed to the sometimes destructive student protesters, but that’s another matter.)

Now a tightly focused survey at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Expanded Painting in the 1960s & 1970s,” celebrates a small, disparate group of these rebels.1Organized by Amanda Sroka, the museum’s assistant curator of contemporary art, “Expanded Painting” is listed as a full-scale exhibition but would be more accurately described as a narrow installation in the broad central corridor of the galleries devoted to modern and contemporary art. Works by seven artists are on display from the museum’s collections, loans, or promised gifts. Each embodies a different challenge to the