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.