Global Art, the Cold War.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Curley, John J.

Series:

Global Perspectives Art History Series

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (289 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : Laurence King Publishing, 2019.

Summary:

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 "In shifting our understanding of Cold War art away from easy binaries (communism versus capitalism; American Abstraction versus Socialist Realism) and towards nuance and complexity, Global Art and the Cold War offers an important and timely examination of how art helped shape history in the mid-to-late twentieth-century." Lydia Pyne for Hyperallergic "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 War extends 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 "It is not often that one comes across a book on contemporary, or near contemporary, art that shifts one's view of what it is, how it has developed, and that direction those developments are likely to take in future. Here, however, is one such book..." Edward Lucie-Smith, in Artlyst, the UK's leading art information website "This ambitious study examines how the geopolitical realities of the Cold War shaped late-20th-century art... Cold War researchers have not entirely ignored the arts, but now Curley (Wake Forest Univ.)...brings the analytical and interpretative skills of an art historian to the discussion. ...The book abounds with provocative insights... CHOICE Reviews " Global Art and the Cold War is 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)

Contents:

Cover

Contents

Introduction: The Cold War as a Way of Seeing

Against Modernism and the Cold War

Chapter 1: Marking Territory: American Abstraction, Soviet Figuration, and the Early Cold War

The Socialist Roots of American Abstraction

The Modernist Origins of Socialist Realism

Universalizing Aesthetics

Sly Subversion

Exporting Styles

Chapter 2: Art, Technology, and the Cold War

Transforming the Invisible-"Nuclear Painting"

The Cybernetic Imagination

Cold War Constructions

Art as Irrational Technology

Chapter 3: The Cold War and Global Pop Art

The Cold War Family of Photography

Aesthetics of Indifference

Capitalist and Communist Pop

Gerhard Richter and Christo-between East and West

Collaging the Military-Industrial Complex

Coca-Cola and Global Pop

Chapter 4: 1968-Art and Politicson the Barricades

Steel, Lettuce, and Dead Hares: The Politics of Materials

China's Cultural Revolution

France and Czechoslovakia: Art and Protest

Television: The Electronic Street

Banding Together, Attacking Museums

The Cold War, 1968, and Deconstruction

Chapter 5: Art and Détente

Nothing to Say: Conceptual Art

Bodies and Surveillance

Détente and Artistic Exchange

Limits of Détente

The End of Détente

Chapter 6: A Return and then the End

Neo-Expressionism: Common Ground in the 1980s?

Other Alternatives to Socialist Realism

Strategies of Appropriating the Cold War

Total Environments: Installation Art and the Cold War

Art as Activism in the 1980s

The End of the Cold War

Conclusion: Art and the Legacy of the Cold War

Artistic Dilemmas after the Cold War

Globalization and the End of the Cold War

Bibliography

Picture Credits

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.