Global Art and the Cold War

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.