It is nearly three years since the two-volume anthology Hot Art, Cold War was published under the Art in Translation flag. With some 250 texts translated from 25 languages, the anthology offers a spectacular overview of the reception of US art in Cold War Europe, from 1945 to 1990. The journal’s interest in the topic did not expire, however, with the anthology, and Art in Translation has been vigorously pursuing the subject further. The main vehicles were five workshops held in 2022 and 2023, and generously funded—as was the anthology itself—by the Terra Foundation (for details see the AIT website “Events”). They were hosted in Lisbon, Madrid, Dresden, Bucharest, and Poznań, and selections of the papers drawn from the workshops will be published in Art in Translation. The first will appear early next year as AIT 16.1, under the title “Cold (War) Embraces,” drawing on contributions from the Iberian workshops. A second issue—scheduled to appear online in 2024 as AIT 16.3 and titled “Hot Art, Cold War: Supplements, Extensions, Alternative Narratives”—will publish papers given at the three Eastern European workshops.
As a taster, this issue of AIT offers a broad spectrum of texts on the reception history of US art in Cold War Europe, as seen from both sides of the Iron Curtain, newly translated from Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Some of these texts were discovered after the submission deadline for the anthology, others were held back on grounds of length and balance, by the delayed arrival of rights to translate and publish, or to avoid duplication. Brought together in this issue and made accessible to the English-speaking readership for the first time, they add a further dimension to the ongoing investigation of the cultural politics of the Cold War.
The texts selected offer a broad spread of responses. Although located at the liberal end of Soviet scholarship, Andrei Chegodaev’s notably well-informed account predictably and elegantly rails against Western “formalism,” the official Soviet term for abstraction. In direct contrast, Hellmut Kotschenreuther, writing in West Berlin and surrounded by the Berlin Wall, gives an understandably positive response to two exhibitions staged in the divided city in 1958 and devoted to US art: Die neue amerikanische Malerei [The New American Painting] and Jackson Pollock 1912-1956. In a similarly positive vein Carlos Areán praises the “stunning beauty” of the Rauschenberg works at the highly controversial 1964 Venice Biennale.
A recurring theme that emerges from this selection of text is that the debate at the time was not simply between the West and the Soviet Bloc, but also between the art of Western Europe, exemplified by contemporary production in Paris, and the USA, with New York emerging as the epicentre of radical new art. As Kotschenreuther rather grudgingly admitted, the works by Sam Francis, Clyfford Still, and James Brooks displayed in West Berlin had “aesthetic qualities that are in no way inferior to those of the latest Paris school.” A similar position informs Chrysanthos Christou’s wide-ranging survey of the transatlantic dialogue in the arts, seen very much through European eyes.
There are countless sub-plots in the world of Cold War cultural politics. Those who wish to learn more should turn to the compendious account in Hot Art, Cold War.
Founding Editor, Art in Translation
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