Cold War Art Conference, Copenhagen, 8th - 9th March 2013

Conference Questioning Cold War, Copenhagen, 8th - 9th March 2013

The conference Questioning Cold War Art 1945 - 1965 in Copenhagen, organized by the PhD fellows of the Department of Art History of the University of Copenhagen, gave a good insight into current debates around the Cold War from an academic perspective. The relation between the US and Russia was the central concern of the international contributors, whereas the organizers consistently reevaluated the Danish art scene of the post-war years. The presentations mainly centered around two issues: In the wake of Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983) further archival research shed nuanced light on the formal and informal relations between the US and USSR in the post-war years and beyond. Specific case studies questioned canonized paradigms in art history concerning the post-war period and were shifted towards a more complex picture.

Perspectives on the relation between the US and USSR:

Susan E. Reid (University of Sheffield, Cold War Optics and the Construction of Artistic Dissident) dealt with the Norton R. Dodge collection of ‘non-conformist' Russian Art put together between 1955 and 1988.  Norton R. Dodge, a professor in economics, first went to the Soviet Union between 1955 and 1960 for research purposes. During his trips, he collected art that was, in his eyes, against the official doctrine of socialist realism. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, he accumulated 9000 pieces, which he first named ‘dissident-‘ and later ‘non-conformist’ art. By investigating the policy behind the selection strategy, Reid convincingly showed that Dodge operated very much along the lines of the Cold War binary. By promoting free Western art as opposed to totalitarian Soviet art, he dedicated his enterprise to the endorsement of Western liberalism.

Dodge himself promoted his collection as a philanthropic enterprise dedicated to free art and free individuals within an oppressive system. For Reid, Dodge provided a framing narrative of coherence for his collection, which was absent in the works themselves. Dodge subsequently commissioned established art historians to write on his ‘non-conformist art’. They argued very much along his line portraying these artists as liberal individuals within a totalitarian cluster. This view, these artists nurtured a counter culture, which resisted and overcame the suffocating constraints of the system. Reid claimed that Dodge fostered and even created this non-conformist art scene as he provided an alternative economy for the artists, whose works he bought or commissioned. She compared Dodges' collecting activities to clandestine CIA operations targeted at subverting the Soviet system from within. For Reid, the Cold War binary still influences how we approach art from the period of the Soviet Union. This approach doesn't leave space for the possibility of more fluid boundaries between official and dissident art, which has been argued for more recently.

Oliver Johnson (University of Sheffield, England, The Invisible Other: Anti-Formalist Hysteria in the Soviet Art World, 1945-1953) showed how art critics and members of the Artists' Union in Moscow in Soviet Russia wrote and thought about abstract art from the West. Art journals and bad black and white prints allowed a very limited access to the art scene in the West for a few critics. Johnson diagnosed an anti-formalist hysteria, which led to a rigorous repudiation of Soviet painters experimenting with abstraction. In this limited view, the figurative style of socialist realism was considered life affirming, whereas Western modernism with its distortion of the human figure was seen as anti-humanistic. Henry Moor’s sculptures, for example, were described as beasts destroying the ideal human body. The question still to be answered is: How representative is this polemic view and do we have to question it as a product of our perception?

Simo Mikkonen: (University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Soviet Artistic Exchanges with the West: From Official to Transnational Networks) focused on the nature of official exchange programmes between East and West in the years after Stalin’s death (1953). As he showed, they were very successful in the fields of music and dance. Whole opera ensembles, ballets and orchestras toured the West and vice versa. In visual arts, however, these programmes were much smaller and failed generally. The most prominent example, as Mikkonen showed, was the travelling exhibition conceptualized and arranged by Alfred Barr, Director of Collections of MoMa in 1957. 120 paintings of Western modernism were about to be displayed in Moscow in exchange for a selection of Russian constructivist paintings. This delicate enterprise was cancelled at the very last minute due to diplomatic stubbornness on both sides. In this situation, it was Alfred Barr among others who continued these contacts on a personal level and established a transnational network with museums and artists in USSR. Whenever a Soviet colleague came to visit the MoMa, Barr would welcome him personally and present him his book What is Modern Painting (1946). These informal networks operated, as Mikkonon concluded, as a third space beyond the interests of the Communist Party and the U.S. Department of State.

Other Perspectives: In addition, Barr played a vital role in promoting and establishing abstract expressionism as the artistic language of freedom, thus contributing fundamentally to the narrative of Western capitalism. As Serge Guilbault showed, abstract expressionism was not recognized as the lingua Americana of the immediate post-war years. Dorothy Miller, for example, included in her survey show 14 Americans at the Whitney in New York in 1947, works in different styles, among them figurative tendencies. Using the term ‘contemporary art’, Miller argued at the time that the current artistic production was international and diverse.

Abstract expressionism, as the dominant artistic position of the free, capitalist world art, was openly contested in these years by leading US republican congress members. Guilbaut concluded that Alfred Barr and the MoMa, as a private institution, engaged so deeply with abstract expressionism because it was so heavily rejected by official US politics. With Rockefeller’s financial support (President of the MoMa), the MoMa’s touring exhibition became a kind of private and secret branch of US foreign diplomacy that was strongly tied to the CIA. Frances Stonor Daunders, who had investigated the entanglement between the MoMa’s touring exhibitions and the CIA in her 2002 book (Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and Cultural Cold War (2002), underscored her former claims with new archival findings.

Overall, these diverse contributions suggested that only a few people shaped and constructed the influential view that abstract expressionism signified the values of the West.  The battle for abstract expressionism, as Guilbault demonstrated, was also the struggle for the most advanced art of the time as played out between France and the US in the post-war years. In this respect, it was Clement Greenberg who set the discourse arguing for abstraction as the leading art. In the end, as Guilbault concluded, not elitist abstract expressionist paintings established America’s supremacy but Rock’N Roll and Jazz and other forms of popular culture.

Perspectives on Danish Art

Karen Westphal Eriksen (University of Copenhagen; Reconstruction – building a new world through art) re-evaluated concrete geometric abstraction in Denmark as a space between gestural abstraction of the Cobra movement (with Asger Jorn) and the figurative school around Axel Johanson. She argued convincingly that all three artistic articulations were engaged with the condition of mankind after the devastating experience of World War II. Contrary to the still prevailing belief that concrete geometric abstraction was only interested in the formal organisation of the surface, Westphal showed that its members such as Robert Jacobsen (1912-1992), Richard Winther (1926-2007) or Richard Martensen were concerned with the re-construction of the figure of man. The relation between figure and ground as outlined in Edgar Rubin’s “Gestalttheorie” of 1915 was central to their investigation. Westphal suggested that concrete geometric abstraction could be considered as a third option between the Cold War binary of abstraction and figuration.

Liza Burmeister Kaaring (University of Copenhagen and National Gallery of Denmark, The artist group Man and the question of a genuine Cold War Art expression) presented detailed research on the exhibitions called “Man” (1956, 1958, 1959) at the Clausen Gallery in Copenhagen. Widely discussed in public at the time, but neglected in Art History, these shows with works by the member of the artist group Man depicted the human condition in the face of a third world war. Following Edward Steichen’s famous photo exhibition Family of Man (1955) they portrayed a life-affirming vision of the future of mankind and were heavily accused for being naïve on this issue.

Helle Brons (National Gallery of Denmark, Museum Jorn and University of Copenhagen, Asger Jorn between Cold War and the Society of Spectacle) shed new light on Asger Jorns Trialectic Theory, which the painter developed after his Cobra years. In the face of a possible nuclear war in 1950, Jorn abandoned his former belief that dialectic materialism was able to delineate a world beyond the ideological binary. Jorn's Trialectic aimed to unite science, art and philosophy in order to create a third force.

Conclusion: One could argue, that this reiterated focus on the specific national paradigms of Danish art was in danger of being a bit too much of an insider discussion. However, it was beneficial in a wider sense, as it allowed an exemplary deconstruction and extension of the hitherto overtly simple binary of figuration versus abstraction for the Danish post-war art. It would be most rewarding to have such case studies in other national contexts. This would challenge the bi-polar narratives of modernism still dominant today and allow a more complex picture. In this reevaluation, as several speakers argued, the concrete art movements of the post-war years will play a key role, as place to look out for a third space. As the conference in Copenhagen has made clear, after more than 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the dogmatic and long standing implications of a binary worldview are finally being faced and overcome.

26/3/13 Heidi Brunnschweiler