Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception: Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World

by Dennis Broe

" Cold War  Expressionism is a bold, meticulously researched challenge to our understanding of Western art in the second half of the twentieth century.  Broe pulls apart the familiar narratives of Abstract Expressionism's ascension in the years after World War II.  In detailed analyses of artists, works, movements and contexts, he shows us how traditions of engaged, progressive art in the United States were silenced and marginalized by forces whose political motives were clear.  Like the best radical history, this is a book full of lessons for our own era, in which art's spectacular institutional and economic power grows alongside renewed interest in its political possibilities." --Will Straw, McGill University, Theory Art asTheory, Theory as Art .
Is Russia without the Reds the new Red Menace? As a contemporary McCarthyism and ever broadening media witch hunts brew and New Cold Wars now appear periodically,this is an ideal time to contemplate the cultural chaos and repression unleashed during the first Cold War. Today's repression is of a different order in the age of the internet and the tweet but no less brutal in its suppression of alternative opinions and cultural artifacts committed to real change. There is much to be gained for artists and those involved with all forms of political and cultural expression in a more thorough understanding of the post-war onslaught on public opinion that produced, as is happening today, a significant narrowing of thought.
 
Cold War Expressionism is an expose of the art world after World War II where a new triumphalism and a growing conservatism and domination of business interests in the US helped bring to power a depoliticized art which went under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism and which functioned as an advertisement for American capitalism while erasing the social impulses of prior European Modernisms and the American Social Expressionists of the 1930s and mid-1940s.
 
What the Critics Are
 
This book outlines the way the blacklist and the machinations of an imperial foreign policy adversely affected those American and global avant-garde artists who opposed it while boosting the careers of those who seemingly were politically neutral. Broe is an astute critic of art and the art world and lays bare the mechanisms by which a certain cohort of artists were endowed with a high degree of cultural capital at the expense of other groupings such as the Mexican Muralists who presented another route to modernity and were sidelined in the wake of the Abstract Expressionist triumph.
-Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-50: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists and The Final Victim of the John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten.
 
Cold War Expressionism uniquely analyzes previously disparate information concerning the role the CIA and U.S. State Department played in the promotion of formalist painting in the American art world, and in the marginalization of challenges to that elitist tendency from within the avant-garde itself.  Broe deftly locates the materialist core of Abstract Expressionism in Cold War political and economic struggles and traces a corresponding radical praxis by blacklisted American artists and renowned Mexican muralists of the same period.  This dialectical context founds a necessary call to revisit the abiding legacy of McCarthyism.
-- Terri Ginsberg, author of The Political Aesthetics of Ideology and A Companion to German Cinema .
 
Dennis Broe, who has taught at the Sorbonne, is the author of Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood ; Class, Crime, and International Film Globalizing America's Dark Art ; and Maverick or How the West Was Lost . He is an art, film, television and culture critic for WBAI and Pacifica Radio in the U.S., for Art District Radio in Paris, and for Culture Matters and Crime Fiction Lover in the U.K.
     

284 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 16, 2015

About the author

Dennis Broe has taught at the Sorbonne and is the author of Maverick (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Class, Crime and International Film Noir, and Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood. His television series TV on TV is broadcast from Paris on Art District TV.