I emember the 1960s quite well, so according to the old joke, I can't really have been there. Perhaps this is because I was only an occasional visitor to London. While it would be absurd not to recognise that the rest of the country participated in the social upheaval that threw off much of the conformism of the postwar era, the artistic activity that put Britain at the centre of world attention during this decade was predominantly focused on the capital. In my undoubtedly rose-tinted memory, the London of that time was a place of enchantment, bathed in perpetual sunshine and optimism (it was, of course, also the London of Rachman, the Krays and ruthless property development). Unfortunately, it is difficult to recapture very much of this hedonistic feeling from Tate Britain's new exhibition Art and the 60s: This Was Tomorrow, which will be coming to Birmingham in October. A definitive overview of the 60s is probably now due, but this isn't really it. This is more a display drawn from the Tate's own collection, and while it obviously has many of the key works of the time, it means there is a certain predictability or over-familiarity about it. It needed either to be larger or more focused. In trying to cover such a wide field in inadequate space, the exhibition manages to do no more than touch a number of bases. There is a small, rather cursory section devoted to architecture, for example (commercial high-rise at Centre Point, Pop Art-wacky in the fantasies of Archigram). In including photography the Tate continues what has now become its normal curatorial practice (see the displays of socially-focused work from the 1930s in a nearby gallery, for instance), but images like David Bailey's series of Swinging London celebs have become so internalised a part of our visual culture that their presence on the Tate walls seems curiously redundant. Maybe we're Beatled-out. In these circumstances it's a bit of a lottery as to how well some major figures are reflected. Peter Blake could hardly be better served and Richard Hamilton, whose Interior II still looks one of the coolest images of the time, doesn't do badly either. But it's a puzzle that the sculptor and printmaker Eduardo Paolozzi, for me an indispensible 60s artist, is represented only by some collages from the late 1940s in the small pre-60s ante room. This room is quite interesting, by the way, showing how young British artists were beginning to shift their attention from Paris to America. Apart from Paolozzi cutting up lurid American mags, there is the abstract-expressionist influenced work of William Green, Robyn Denny and Gillian Ayres. These three painters had contrasting careers from this point on. Green, whose radical methods included working with bitumen and setting fire to his paintings, achieved a brief notoriety in 1957 through an early Ken Russell documentary, which it is suggested inspired Tony Hancock's comedy film The Rebel. He then promptly disappeared, whereas Denny changed style abruptly and became one of the leading exponents of hard-edged abstract painting, of which there is an example later in the exhibition. Since then his stock has fallen, as has that of Richard Smith, whose shaped canvases inspired by transatlantic packaging (like 1963's Gift Wrap, shown here) were once regarded as the most advanced and serious British modern art, but can now be picked up at auction for a song - if you have anywhere big enough to put them. Ayres worked right through the 60s (no examples here) to emerge by the end of the century as one of Britain's most respected senior artists. Twenty of her recent paintings were a much more serious loss in the fire better known for claiming Tracey Emin's tent. Other major artists who worked through the 60s, like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, are completely omitted, so the exhibition seems to be more a reassessment of what was noticed at the time than of the period itself. Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi were prominent members of the Independent Group, whose intellectual discussion of popular culture in the 50s laid the foundation for Pop Art. Their exhibition This is Tomorrow, reflecting the 50s eagerness for a future of consumerism and gee-whizz labour-saving gadgetery, is referred to in the title of this one. The second wave of Pop came with the group of painters who emerged from the Royal College of Art at the beginning of the 60s, among whom the most important were David Hockney and the American, R B Kitaj (another artist who is seriously under-represented here). The work of some of their colleagues looked thin and intellectually suspect even at the time, though much could then be redeemed by a sense of fun. For example, is Anthony Donaldson's pin-up painting a complaint about the sexism of the time, as the blurb seeks to justify it, or merely a reflection of it? It is surprising to be reminded how much performance art took place in the 1960s, sometimes in the face of direct police intervention. As an essentially ephemeral form this is not easy to show. But the organisers have had a good go at it, assembling photographs and film footage, including some of Yoko Ono in her Cut Piece (1964), in which members of the audience were invited to step up and cut her clothes off. There is also some footage of the pioneering "lightshows' of Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. Time has dealt kindly wth the "Op" work of Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgley (whose Yellow Attenuation from 1965 is a stunner) and with the visual language explorations of the Cohen Brothers, Bernard and Harold. Less so with the plastic sculptures of Philip King and William Tucker, taken seriously at the time but now looking awkwardly like the sort of thing you might have picked up at a trendy boutique to adorn a groovy pad. On the other hand, Nicholas Monro's group of little green Martians from 1965, which it happens I'd never seen before, retain an unpretentious talent to amuse. Whatever happened to Monro's King Kong, all-too-briefly the most popular sculpture ever to adorn Birmingham city centre? :: Art and the 60s: This Was Tomorrow is at Tate Britain, Millbank, until September 26 (daily 10am-5.40pm: last admission 5pm; admission: £6.50, concessions £5). It transfers to the Gas Hall, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, from October 25 until April 3. | 
