Art and Politics in the Early Cold War: The Americas and Beyond

In 1955 Diego Rivera’s Gloriosa Victoria was exhibited for the first time at an exhibition of Mexican art in Warsaw. It was his response to the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état backed by US military and economic interests. That same year, as part of a strategic Cold War move, Picasso’s Guernica (1937) was shown at the Haus of Kunst in Munich, once a landmark of Nazi cultural propaganda.

These paintings reflect the complexities of the early Cold War and the key role that art and exhibitions played in the cultural wars that ensued; and while Gloriosa Victoria was time-specific, Guernica transcended its original Spanish Civil War context. Here was an image that could be re-signified and fought over by the Communist Left, the Capitalist Right, and the non-aligned.

Taking the Americas as our starting point, this session aims to investigate the role of exhibitions and visual culture in the 1950s—a decade marked by the death of Stalin, the Thaw, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It was also a period of anticolonial wars and the emergence of the ‘Third World’, a geopolitical space of dissent and resistance, as articulated by Franz Fanon. With this we seek to examine the role that the Americas played in the artistic and political landscape of the 1950s and beyond.

Session Convenors:

Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez, Saint Louis University, Madrid

Beatriz Cordero Martin, Saint Louis University, Madrid

Laura Katzman, James Madison University

Speakers:

Barbara Jaffee, Northern Illinois University

One World or None: Art Through the Ages 1948-1959

In November 1945, at work on the third edition of her perennially popular textbook, Art Through the Ages, the Chicago art historian Helen Gardner joined with her peers on the campus of the University of Chicago as they formed The Committee to Frame a World Constitution. Her solidarity with the Committee’s rallying cry, “unify or perish!” led to a radical reorganization of her book, already a remarkably inclusive survey of world art and material culture.

The results, published in 1948, were unprecedented: a wide-ranging, panoramic survey of the world’s diverse cultures, pressed into urgent service as a demonstration of the progress of world art towards a unified visual culture based in science and technology. Gardner’s treatment of the art of the Americas makes this point vividly, through four great, near-horizontal slices: Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern, in each of which the arts of Central and South America and of the Caribbean take pride of place.

Sadly, little of Gardner’s integrated scheme survived the Cold War revision of her text by the art history department at Yale University, published in 1959 as the more familiar Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (Gardner died in 1946 as her third edition went to press). With a brutalizing new set of geopolitical designators, “European” (comprising Early Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque) and “Non-European” (a seemingly timeless space that the ancient and modern Americas now shared with Asia, Islam, and the so-called “Primitive”), the Yale edition tried putting the emerging Third World decidedly in its place.

Lola Lorant, Université Rennes 2

From New York to Houston via Mexico City: AICA’s decentering itinerary across North America (1959-1962)

The AICA held its first general assembly outside Europe in New York in 1959, ten years after its foundation. The encounter in this new and proud cultural stronghold was optimistically seen as a salutary moment to break the art world’s chauvinism of the Cold War. But the geopolitics of art came back with a vengeance on the occasion of the general assembly in New Mexico in 1962. Discussions regarding David Alfaro Siqueiros, sentenced to an 8-year imprisonment for “social dissolution”, spark disagreements within the ranks of the AICA. In an entirely different way, the assembly offered James Johnson Sweeney the opportunity to bypass the influence of New York and to put into the limelight other peripheral artistic centers. Within its framework, he organized a two-day trip in Houston, where “world’s top art critics” gathered. The city was, after all, geographically closer to Mexico City than New York.

The place may not have appeared predestined for such a meeting… But it would have been without counting on James Johnson Sweeney’s leadership, then president of the International Association of Art Critics and director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. This paper aims at analyzing how Sweeney astutely used AICA’s networks and activities to reshape the American art scene. Additionally, it will put into scrutiny his discourses promoting apolitical supranational artistic relationships, both delivered to a foreign audience and indirectly geared towards the U.S. art world.

Lucy Weir, University of Edinburgh

Modern dance and Cold War diplomacy: The contrasting cases of Katherine Dunham and José Limón

This paper considers the relationship between American dance and diplomacy during the Cold War. Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) and José Limón (1908-72) each played a pivotal role in the evolution of modern dance, building extensive bodies of work and devising techniques that remain highly influential. During the 1950s, they both spent significant periods touring internationally. In this era of escalating tension and increasing surveillance, however, the politicised content of performance came under close scrutiny, and Dunham and Limón’s fates would starkly diverge.

José Limón, a Mexican-born naturalised citizen, was feted by the State Department and, in 1954, became the first American artist sent abroad as an official envoy. Limón’s ensemble was the first modern dance company to be sponsored for an international performance and lecture tour, dispatched to Latin America to promote an impression of racial harmony and integration in the United States. Four years prior, however, dance proved to be a point of serious contention for the international reputation of the United States. Katherine Dunham unveiled Southland in Santiago, Chile, which opened with a monologue attesting to the ongoing issue of racist violence, and graphically depicted a lynching. American government envoys had pressured Dunham to cancel the performance, and media coverage was suppressed.

In this paper, I examine the motivations behind the State Department’s promotion of Limón, and its antagonism towards Dunham, considering the surprising role that modern dance played in the American political project during the Cold War, and how this intersects with issues of race, identity, and belonging.

Michel Otayek, Freie Universität Berlin

A Shiny Pearl: Federico Tell’s Photographs of Cuba in the 1950s East German Picture Press

After the Second World War, a small number of German Jewish exiles returned to the Soviet Occupation Zone and, after 1949, to the newly founded German Democratic Republic. Among them was the journalist and photographer Federico Tell (1916 – 1959), who fled Germany in 1933 and spent time in Spain and France before settling in Cuba, where he lived for over a decade. On the Caribbean island, he was part of the Comité Aléman Antifascista de Cuba, an activist network founded by the exiled German artist Gert Caden. Tells’ decision to return with his family to Germany in 1950 reflects his ideological affinity with the GDR’s self-proclamation as an anti-fascist state. Among the possessions he took with him on his return journey was an archive of his photographic work in Cuba. Comprising hundreds of images, his archive offers a rich panorama of life on the island throughout the 1940s. Although details about Tell’s life in exile are scant, archival materials suggest that he underwent a process of professionalization as a photographer during his stay in Cuba. The climax of his photographic career, cut short by his untimely passing in 1959, was the publication of some of his work in East German picture magazines. In this sense, his surviving correspondence points to some of the tensions shaping the reorganization of the picture press during the GDR’s early years. My presentation will trace Tell’s photographic practice against the backdrop of a global democratization of the photographic medium in the mid-twentieth century, with close attention to the circulation politics of his photographs of Cuba. My analysis will focus on a seeming gap between Tell’s understanding of Cuban society, politics, and culture and their presentation to the public through state-sponsored internationalist discourse prevalent in East German picture press.

Jay Curley, Wake Forest University

Hale Woodruff’s Africa and the Bull: The Racialized Unconscious of Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War, circa 1958

Abstract Expressionism served as an important cultural weapon for the United States during the Cold War, symbolizing “artistic freedom” against Soviet control. However, Hale Woodruff’s painting Africa and the Bull (ca. 1958) offers a critical counter-narrative to this dominant interpretation. Created contemporaneously with “The New American Painting” – a USIA-sponsored exhibition that toured European capitals – Woodruff’s canvas exposes the racial dynamics and cultural appropriation underlying American art’s Cold War triumph, even while working within the movement’s stylistic vocabulary.

Through loosely adapting Titian’s Rape of Europa (1560-62), Woodruff reframes Abstract Expressionism’s “heroic” gestures as potential acts of cultural violence against Black diasporic influences. The painting’s themes of abduction and exile echo Franz Fanon’s analysis in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) of how colonial power operates through both physical and cultural domination. Woodruff’s work exposes how Abstract Expressionism internationally proclaimed universal values of artistic freedom while perpetuating systems of white supremacy that marginalized Black artists and cultural influences in the U.S. during the late 1950s.

Susanneh Bieber, Texas A&M University

The Brazilian Pavilion: Alternative Cold War Climates at the 1958 Expo in Brussels

Visitors who approached the Brazilian Pavilion at the 1958 Expo in Brussels on a sunny day caught sight of a red balloon hovering above a concave, hanging roof. Upon entering, they encountered a six-meter-wide oculus at the centre of the roof, pierced by a guyline that tethered the balloon above. On cold and rainy days, the red balloon was reeled in and—having a diameter of seven meters—fit neatly within the oculus. However, a small gap remained between balloon and roof, so that rainwater could pool around the balloon to create a circular waterfall that cascaded into the tropical courtyard garden within the pavilion.

Architect Sérgio Bernardes, who collaborated with landscape designer Burle Marx on this project, called the oculus an impluvium, a classical feature of domestic architecture that captured rainwater. The impluvium and balloon ingeniously upended a one-dimensional techno-utopian worldview propagated at the Expo by both capitalism and communism, East and West. The Brazilian Pavilion embodied a more complex notion of progress, one not just beholden to new scientific discoveries and technological advancements but one that entangled science, economics, and culture with nature. Drawing on traditional ways of knowing, Bernardes and Marx integrated the natural properties of air and water into their design. The pavilion, representing a country deemed to be underdeveloped, conveyed a consciousness of Cold War “climates” by literally paying attention to the natural environment, and thus constituted an important precursor to critiques of progress that emerged during the 1960s.