Global Art and the Cold War [Hardcover]

In this readable and highly original book, John J. Curley presents the first synthetic account of global art during the Cold War. Through a careful examination of artworks drawn from America, Europe, Russia and Asia, he demonstrates the inextricable nature of art and politics in this contentious period. He dismantles the usual narrative of American abstract painting versus figurative Soviet Socialist Realism to reveal a much more nuanced, contradictory and ambivalent picture of art making, in which the objects themselves, like spies, dissembled, housed and managed ideological differences.John J. Curley is Associate Professor of Art History at Wake Forest University. He has published widely on European and American modernism in art and is the author of A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War. Global Art and the Cold Waris a vigilant re-contextualization of Cold War art.This ambitious work succeeds as a narrative re-evaluation of Cold War art.is refreshingly un-alarmist yet consistently surprising. It is a recommended resource for librarians whose patrons study twentieth-century global art and politics, especially as a research aid for academic libraries. Art Libraries Society of North America(ARLIS/NA)With this book, John J. Curley confirms his reputation as the pre-eminent historian of the visual arts during the Cold War. Clearly written, generously illustrated, and imaginatively conceived,Global Art and the Cold Warextends traditional boundaries of that subject into the also dangerous realms of imagination, representation, and creative survival. Not to be missed.Pulitzer-Prize winning Cold War Historian John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University Throughout these tumultuous decades, artists have sought to express themselves in harrowing circumstances. John J. Curley provides a lucid summary of the era and unique insights into famous and unknown artists. NY Journal of Books This ambitious study examlC4