The Sixties: Britain and France, 1962-1973 - The Utopian Years

In that exciting decade, Britain and France exchanged ideas but devised their own powerful and different responses to the aspirations of sixties' youth - in painting, photography, graphic art, film, posters, fashion, music, architecture and interior design, television, revolution and protest. The striking visual momentos of these years of unprecedented prosperity and consumerism have become almost mythical - from images of the Beatles, the Who and Johnny Halliday, to Pop and Op Art, students' revolts and pleas to make peace and love, mini-skirts and fshion magazines, happenings, swinging London and Carnaby Street, to psychedelic fantasies, material abundance, outrage and scandal.

British Pop music flooded across the world, Quant invented the mini-skirt which was popularised in France by Courreges and Ungaro, CND posters, drawings from Steadman and, in France, comic strips perpetrated protest and satire. The New Wave films of Godard and Truffaut were admired in Britain, and television became central in the family life of both nations. The collection of pictures here shows the work of the most famous artists and designers - Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Allen Jones, Pauline Boty and Eduardo Paolozzi as well as Rancillac, Erro, Cueco and Martial Raysse - and of such photographers as Robert Whitaker, Lewis Morley, David Bailey and Sarah Moon.

At the end of the twentieth century, this book examines the effects of the revolution in behaviour and politics brought about in the sixties, as well as generating astonishment, gaiety, the pleasure of discovery and the warmth of memory.

This book accompanied the exhibition 'Les Sixties' at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.