Listen to the Color of Your Dream

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The Summer of Love in 1967 was supposed to change the world, and all we had to do, according to Harvard professor and LSD guru Timothy Leary, was turn on, tune in and drop out. Drug-induced visions inspired posters, clothes and album covers in dazzling, swirling colors; later generations were disappointed that they'd missed out on all the fun. Now it's time to don the kaftans and give the visuals another chance. "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era" runs at the Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt from Nov. 2 to Feb. 12, and then at Vienna's Kunsthalle Wien from May 5 to Sept. 3. The original organizers (it started life at Tate Liverpool in England) say it's time to rediscover "this forgotten and repressed aesthetic." It's already happening: bizarre flower prints are back in style, and '60s furniture is highly collectible.

The show, with art from the U.S., Europe and Japan, assaults most of the senses with concert posters, films, photographs, light shows, soundtracks and an installation—Phantasy Landscape Visiona II (1970) by Danish furniture designer Verner Panton—that resembles a colorful digestive tract designed to be crawled around in. The Fool, a three-person design team employed by the Beatles, created the poster A Is for Apple (1967), with its warped landscape, stars, parrots and smiling Native American. It demonstrates how designers of psychedelia recycled old kitsch: Art Nouveau squiggles, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Victorian advertisements and early Hollywood movies. Thanks to the invention of DayGlo in the late '40s, artists turned this ragbag into something hallucinatory. This was the art that teenagers peeled off hoardings to hang in their bedrooms.

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In New Aleph Sanctury (1963-71) by German-born Mati Klarwein, painted panels crawling with multicolored figures form a small room that glows like stained glass. Richard Lindner, a genuine product of '20s Germany whose style influenced the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968), is represented by one oil painting of a striped-jerseyed rock star with a guitar against a sunburst (Rock-Rock, 1966-67).

Psychedelia was supposed to induce a trance-like state with or without drugs—try the effect of the many videos and light shows, like Brits Mark Boyle and Joan Hills' Beyond Image and Son of Beyond Image (1969). With a soundtrack by British progressive rockers Soft Machine, it features projections of colored oil floating on water. Or how about German-born Gustav Metzger's Liquid Crystal Projections (1965/2005), a chill-out room with moving images of colored blobs flung onto the walls—why not turn up, drop in and tune out? tel: (49-69) 2998820; www.schirn-kunsthalle.de