Making Art History in Europe After 1945 9780815393795, 9781351187596

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 The (Re)makings of Art History and Europe After 1945
SECTION 1 Europe After the Rain
2 The Allied Cultural Policies in Germany: Between ‘Re-Education’ and the Politicisation of the Arts (1945–1949)
3 UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions Project: Bringing (French) Art to the World
4 Curatorial Experiments at the National Gallery After the Second World War: Reframing History and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Experience
5 The Venice Biennale at its Turning Points: 1948 and the Aftermath of 1968
SECTION 2 Re-Reading Cold War Narratives
6 Artists in Service of the Masses: The Untold Story of the Yugoslav Socialist Realist Project
7 The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and Post-Revolutionary Desire: Producing the Art History Narrative of Yugoslav Modern Art
8 Simultaneous Equations: Early Cold War Cultural Politics and the History of Art in Greece
9 Cold War Art Historiography: Some Observations on an Interdisciplinary Approach Through the Social Sciences
10 Something Is Happening Here: Spaces and Figures of Change in Post­War Portugal
SECTION 3 A New Europe?
11 Art Policies, Identity, and Ideology in Spain During the 1980s
12 Official Art Becoming Resistance: Adopting the Discourse of 'Dissent’ into Estonian Art History Writings
13 Gender and Art History in Poland: A Constant Story of Subversion
14 Narrating Dissident Art in Spain: The Case of Desacuerdos. Sobre Arte, Políticas y Esfera Pública (2003–2005)
Index

Citation preview

Making Art History in Europe After 1945

This book analyses the intermeshing of state power and art history in Europe since 1945 and up to the present from a critical, de-centred perspective. Devoting special attention to European peripheries and to under-researched transnational cultural political initiatives related to the arts implemented after the end of the Second World War, the contributors explore the ways in which this relationship crystallised in specifc moments, places, discourses, and practices. They make the historic hegemonic centres of the discipline converse with Europe’s Southern and Eastern peripheries, from Portugal to Estonia to Greece. By stressing the margins’ point of view this volume rethinks the ideological grounds on which art history and the European Union have been constructed as well as the role played by art and culture in the very concept of ‘Europe.’ Noemi de Haro García is Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow in the Art History Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Patricia Mayayo is Senior Lecturer in the Art History Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Jesús Carrillo is Senior Lecturer in the Art History Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Studies in Art Historiography Series Editor: Richard Woodfeld University of Birmingham

The aim of this series is to support and promote the study of the history and practice of art historical writing focusing on its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the past to the present day in all areas and all periods. Besides addressing the major innovators of the past it also encourages re-thinking ways in which the subject may be written in the future. It ignores the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the Anglophone expression ‘art history’ and allows and encourages the full range of enquiry that encompasses the visual arts in its broadest sense as well as topics falling within archaeology, anthropology, ethnography and other specialist disciplines and approaches. Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism International Experiments in Italy Marin R. Sullivan Comparativism in Art History Edited by Jaś Elsner Constructing the Viennese Modern Body Art, Hysteria and the Puppet Nathan J. Timpano Messerschmidt’s Character Heads Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History Michael Yonan Time in the History of Art Temporality, Chronology, and Anachrony Edited by Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey New Narratives of Russian and East European Art Between Traditions and Revolutions Edited by Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina Making Art History in Europe After 1945 Edited by Noemi de Haro García, Patricia Mayayo and Jesús Carrillo For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Studies-in-ArtHistoriography/book-series/ASHSER2250

Making Art History in Europe After 1945

Edited by Noemi de Haro García, Patricia Mayayo and Jesús Carrillo

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Noemi de Haro García, Patricia Mayayo and Jesús Carrillo to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Haro García, Noemí de, editor. | Mayayo, Patricia, editor. | Carrillo Castillo, Jesús Ma. (Jesús María), 1966– editor. Title: Making art history in Europe after 1945 / edited by Noemi de Haro García, Patricia Mayayo and Jesús Carrillo. Description: 1. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2019041129 (print) | LCCN 2019041130 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815393795 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351187596 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art—Historiography. | Art criticism—Europe—History— 20th century. | Art and state—Europe—History—20th century. Classifcation: LCC N7480 .M36 2020 (print) | LCC N7480 (ebook) | DDC 701/.18—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041129 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041130 ISBN: 978-0-8153-9379-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18759-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC “Newcomer to Paris” illustration and caption for the frst page of the article “New UNESCO H.Q. Rises in Paris”, The UNESCO Courier, vol. IX, no. 11–12 (December, 1956): 2. Photograph by the editors

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1 The (Re)makings of Art History and Europe After 1945

vii x xii 1

N O E M I D E H ARO GARCÍA , PATRICIA MAYAYO, AND JESÚ S C AR R ILLO

SECTION 1

Europe After the Rain 2 The Allied Cultural Policies in Germany: Between ‘Re-Education’ and the Politicisation of the Arts (1945–1949)

23 25

M O R G A N E WALTE R

3 UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions Project: Bringing (French) Art to the World

41

R A C H E L E . PE RRY

4 Curatorial Experiments at the National Gallery After the Second World War: Reframing History and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Experience

67

A N A B A E Z A RUIZ

5 The Venice Biennale at its Turning Points: 1948 and the Aftermath of 1968

83

S TE FA N O C O L L ICE L L I CAGO L AN D VITTO RIA MART INI

SECTION 2

Re-Reading Cold War Narratives 6 Artists in Service of the Masses: The Untold Story of the Yugoslav Socialist Realist Project I VA N A H A N AČ E K

101 103

vi

Contents

7 The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and PostRevolutionary Desire: Producing the Art History Narrative of Yugoslav Modern Art

125

J A S M I N A Č UB RIL O

8 Simultaneous Equations: Early Cold War Cultural Politics and the History of Art in Greece

149

A R E TI A D AMO P O UL O U

9 Cold War Art Historiography: Some Observations on an Interdisciplinary Approach Through the Social Sciences

167

N A N C Y J A CH E C

10 Something Is Happening Here: Spaces and Figures of Change in Post-War Portugal

179

L U Í S TR I N DA DE

SECTION 3

A New Europe?

193

11 Art Policies, Identity, and Ideology in Spain During the 1980s

195

D A N I E L A . VE RDÚ SCH UMA N N

12 Offcial Art Becoming Resistance: Adopting the Discourse of ‘Dissent’ into Estonian Art History Writings

212

K Ä D I TA LV O JA

13 Gender and Art History in Poland: A Constant Story of Subversion

228

PAW E Ł L E S ZKO WICZ

14 Narrating Dissident Art in Spain: The Case of Desacuerdos. Sobre Arte, Políticas y Esfera Pública (2003–2005)

251

A L B E RTO LÓ P E Z CUE N CA

Index

269

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

3.9 3.10 3.11 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

The UNESCO Courier, vol. II, no. 11 (1 January 1950): 1 Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949 (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). Private collection Interior of Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949 (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). Private collection “The Popularization of Art through Colour Reproductions,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. II, no. 10 (November 1949): 16 “Art Treasures to Be Put Within Reach of All,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. I, no. 8 (September 1948): 6 UNESCO Travelling Print Exhibition (Paris: UNESCO, 1949) “Colour Reproduction, Unesco’s First Travelling Exhibition,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. II, no. 7 (August 1949): 12 Formal Opening of UNESCO Travelling Exhibition of Colour Reproductions Prior to 1860 in Manila, Philippines, 20 March 1952. Dr. Eduardo Quisumbing, Director of the National Museum, Mrs. Lopez, wife of Vice-President, and Mr. William Ellia, UN Technical Assistance Representative beside Fragonard’s The Love Letter Jean Leymarie, “Masterpieces You Can Now Buy,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. VIII, no. 7 (1955): 21. Photograph by the author André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire, 1953 [1950] Map of Global Distribution of Catalogues of Colour Reproductions in 1949 Krsto Hegedušić, Pepek and his friends at noon (from the prison drawing series), 1932 Krsto Hegedušić, In chains (from the prison drawings series), 1932 Vilim Svečnjak, School and after school activities, two murals at the Nikola Tesla School, 1950, Rijeka Photograph showing the location of one of the murals by Vilim Svečnjak, School and after school activities, at the Nikola Tesla School, 1950, Rijeka Petar Kos, Comrade from [the mountain] Kozara learns how to write, 1948–1949 Cover and title page of Brčko-Banovići mapa crteža (Brčko-Banovići folder of drawings), 1948 Two of the drawings reproduced in Brčko-Banovići mapa crteža (Brčko-Banovići folder of drawings), 1948

42 43 44 46 46 47 48

50 51 53 57 107 108 110 111 114 115 116

viii 6.8 6.9 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

8.6 8.7 8.8

Figures Kosta Angeli Radovani, Woman with a Wheelbarrow (front, side, and back views), 1948–1949 Photographs of the temporary sculptures constructed for the frst post-war Congress of the Antifascist Womens’ Front of Croatia (AFŽ), 1945, Square of the Republic of Zagreb Tito’s photograph of the Modern Gallery/MoCAB under construction View from Kalmegdan. New Belgrade panorama with Museum of Contemporary Art and the building of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia across the Sava River Statue of the Victor. New Belgrade panorama with Museum of Contemporary Art and the building of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia across the Sava River Museum of Contemporary Art Miodrag B. Protić guides Josip Broz Tito and Jovanka Broz through the permanent exhibition of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967 Miodrag B. Protić guides Josip Broz Tito and Jovanka Broz through the permanent exhibition of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967 Miodrag B. Protić guides Josip Broz Tito and Jovanka Broz through the permanent exhibition of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967 Tito signing in the guest book of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967 Nadrealizam, socijalna umetnost (Surrealism and Social Art. 1929–1950) (ed. Miodrag B. Protić), Beograd 1969, book cover Četvrta decenija. Ekspresionizam boje, poetski realizam (The 1930s. Expressionism of Colour and Poetic Realism, 1930–1940) (ed. Miodrag. B. Protić), Beograd 1971, book cover Jugoslovenska skulptura. 1870–1950 (Yugoslav Sculpture. 1870–1950) (ed. Miodrag B. Protić), Beograd 1975, book cover Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by Branibor Debeljković, ca. 1965 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Henry Moore, Zappeion Megaron, Athens, 3–25 March, 1951 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Caravaggio and his Followers, Zappeion Megaron, Athens, 27 November 1962–6 January 1963 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Byzantine Art. A European Art, 9th Exhibition of the Council of Europe, Zappeion Megaron, Athens, 1 April–15 June 1964 Cover of the exhibition catalogue 1st International Exhibition of Sculpture. Panathenaia of Contemporary Sculpture, Athens 1965 Auguste Renoir, Venus Victrix, 1914. Bronze, 180 × 90 × 130 cm. Musée de Cagnes, Cagnes-sur-Mer. Here as presented at the Panathenaia of Sculpture, Athens 1965. Published in Marmo. Rivista internazionale d’arte e d’architettura 4 (1966): 209 Henry Moore, Standing Figure, 1961. Bronze, height 284,5 cm. Here as presented at the Panathenaia of Sculpture, Athens, 1965. Published in Réalités 239/12 (1965): 101 Cover of the frst issue of Epitheorisi Technis (Art Review), Christmas 1954 Cover of Prokopiou’s book Aesthetics and Art in America, Athens 1961

116 118 132 133 134 135 136 137 137 138 139 139 140 143 155 155 156 157

158 159 161 162

Figures 12.1

12.2 13.1

13.2

American collector Norton Dodge, Estonian artist Siim-Tanel Annus, curator Eda Sepp, and a local journalist at the exhibition Baltic Art during the Brezhnev Era: Nonconformist Art in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in Toronto 1992. Film still Curator Eda Sepp at the exhibition Baltic Art during the Brezhnev Era: Nonconformist Art in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in Toronto 1992. Film still The section “Ganymede” in the exhibition Ars Homo Erotica, The National Museum, Warsaw. The art works: Barbara Falender, Ganymede II (1987) marble sculpture and Barbara Falender/Grzegorz Kowalski, The performance artists Krzysztof Jung posing with Wojtek Piotrowski for the sculpture Ganymede (1984) photography The section “Time of Struggle” in the exhibition Ars Homo Erotica, The National Museum, Warsaw 2010. The art works: David Černý, Entropa. The Polish Panel (2009) installation, the image on the wall Harmodius and Aristogeiton (Tyrannicides), reproduction of sculptures from the collection of the National Museum

ix

220 221

236

240

Contributors

Areti Adamopoulou is Reader in Art History at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Ioannina, Greece. Her main research interests focus on Greek and European post-war art, the history of art history in Greece, and the history of art exhibitions in the Cold War period. Ana Baeza Ruiz is Curator at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (Middlesex University, London). Her research explores 20th-century public art museums to understand changing professional and policy discourse and practice with a specifc regard to democratisation. She has published articles in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Museum History Journal, and International Journal of Heritage Studies. Jesús Carrillo is an art historian, cultural critic, and project organiser working at the intersection of contemporary art, politics, and art institutions. He was the editor of the collective research project on Spanish contemporary art narratives Desacuerdos (2004–2014). He currently teaches Contemporary Art History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Stefano Collicelli Cagol is Curator at La Quadriennale di Roma, Rome, and Lecturer in ‘Exhibition and Display’ at the 2nd Level Specialising Master in Design for Arts at Politecnico di Torino. He holds his PhD in histories of exhibitions and curatorial practice at the Royal College of Art, London. Jasmina Čubrilo is an art historian, PhD, based in Belgrade. She is Senior Lecturer in Modern Art History on the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. She has published essays, articles, chapters in edited volumes, and books on modern and contemporary art. Ivana Hanaček is an art historian and curator based in Zagreb, Croatia, with an interest in art and social movements, as well as in the history of the democratisation of culture. She is a PhD candidate at the Post-graduate Study of Humanist Sciences, Art History programme, at the University of Zadar. Noemi de Haro García is Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow in Art History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research focuses on the relationship between art, visual culture, art history, and politics in the Cold War period, especially in the case of Spain. She is the author of the book Grabadores contra el franquismo (CSIC, 2010). Nancy Jachec has published extensively on Cold War cultural and intellectual history. Currently a research fellow at the Leverhulme Trust, she is working on a new book,

Contributors  xi Italy and Jean-Paul Sartre (I. B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Academic). This follows on from her recent Europe’s Intellectuals and the Cold War (I. B. Tauris, 2015). Paweł Leszkowicz is Professor at the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. He is also an independent art curator specialised in international contemporary art and LGBTQ studies, having organised numerous queer exhibitions and symposia in Poland and in the UK. Alberto López Cuenca is Senior Lecturer in the Master’s Program in Art and Aesthetics at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico), where he teaches contemporary art history and theory. He has widely published and lectured on these topics, especially in Latin America. His contributions have appeared in Afterall, PARSE, and Culture Machine, among others. Vittoria Martini is an independent art historian. She has extensively published on the Venice Biennale’s exhibition and institutional history. She is working on the publication of her PhD thesis, “The Venice Biennale 1968–1980. The Unattainable Revolution.” Since 2013 she teaches History of Exhibitions at Campo, the course for curators run by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Patricia Mayayo is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research focuses on issues of gender, feminist art practices, and the history of contemporary art in Spain. Key publications include Arte en España, 1939–2015 (2015), Frida Kahlo. Contra el mito (2008), and Historias de mujeres, historias del arte (2003). Rachel E. Perry lectures at the University of Tel Aviv and is a fellow at the Strochlitz Institute at the University of Haifa. She received her doctorate in Art History from Harvard University, specialising in French Art of the 1940s. Kädi Talvoja is a researcher at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts. Her research focus lies in the historiography of Soviet visual art, especially the developments of national discourse(s) in Soviet art ideology, policy, and practice. Luís Trindade is a cultural historian. His most recent book, Narratives in Motion. Journalism and modernist events in 1920s Portugal, was published in 2016. He edited The Making of Modern Portugal and is currently doing research on the history of audio-visual culture in Portugal during the Cold War. Daniel A. Verdú Schumann is Lecturer at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His main topics of research are art and film criticism from the 1960s onwards, particularly in Spain and Latin America. He is the author of Crítica y pintura en los años ochenta (Madrid, 2007). Morgane Walter is doing a PhD in art history at the University of Paris I PanthéonSorbonne and was PhD associate at the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin (2015–2017). Her thesis focuses on the role of art criticism in the spreading of a specific theoretical and ideological discourse on abstract art in the Federal Republic of Germany (1945–1964).

Acknowledgements

Academic conversations take place both at a distance and face to face. While a growing number of technologies make the former possible, the latter still plays an important (and, in our opinion, irreplaceable) role. This book is the outcome of both practices. Several of the contributors to this volume met in Madrid in June 2015 for the conference “Politics, State Power and the Making of Art History in Europe After 1945.” We would like to remember here Michaela Marek who participated in this conference and sadly passed away in 2018. The Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía generously funded the conference, which also had the fnancial support of the Goethe Institut, the Instytut Polsky, and the Instituto Camões. We thank all these institutions for making it possible that we could all meet and discuss for three intense days in Madrid. Some other contributors in this book did not participate in the conference but happily joined this project later on. We would like to express our most sincere gratitude to Richard Woodfeld for having encouraged us to publish a selection of the investigations presented at this conference and for his challenging and useful remarks. The comments and suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers were extremely helpful to improve specifc aspects of the project. It is an honour to see this book published in the “Studies in Art Historiography” series. We wish to thank the Vicerrectorado de Investigación of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid for providing the funds to pay for the fnal copyediting of the book. We would certainly not be the frst ones refecting on the expenses required to undertake research and to publish in the feld of art history. From the costs of trips required to work with archives and collections to those of paying copyright fees, researchers must pay nonnegligible sums to carry out and disseminate their work. In the case of non-native English speakers, the costs of translations and/or text revisions by professional translators must be added on top of all this. In some cases, the funds provided by research projects and research institutions might help to pay for many (or even most) of these expenses, but one should not take this for granted: the realities of research funding throughout the world are very diverse, and they have been deeply affected by the impact of the fnancial crisis, especially in the feld of humanities. Instability and precarity are common among researchers and academics: this certainly has a bearing on who, if, how, on what, where, and when one can conduct research, write, and publish. We consider that a book dealing with the making of art history should, at least, acknowledge the existence and relevance of these elements in the institutional shaping of the art history ecosystem at present. We, contributors and editors are, of course, solely responsible for our fndings, mistakes, and arguments. As editors, we would like to sincerely thank all authors for their effort, hard-work, and patience.

1

The (Re)makings of Art History and Europe After 1945 Noemi de Haro García, Patricia Mayayo, and Jesús Carrillo

On the night of 11 August 1977 viewers in Spain could choose to watch the flm A Touch of Larceny (Guy Hamilton, 1959) on the frst channel of the Spanish public television, or the cultural programme Trazos (Strokes) on the second channel. Those (few) who had decided upon Trazos would fnd its two directors, Paloma Chamorro and Ramón Gómez Redondo, discussing the art courses held between 4 and 16 July at the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo in Santander.1 If they were loyal viewers of Trazos they would remember that on 6 June, the 1977 edition of the courses had already been presented in Trazos: it had been celebrated as the inauguration of the event’s third epoch which its new director, the art history chair of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Antonio Bonet Correa, wanted to make different to the preceding ones. Above all he wanted it to be different to the second epoch because, even if Bonet did not explicitly say so, that was the one that had taken place during the dictatorship.2 Instead of the former sponsorship by the Spanish national radio, from 1977 the courses would depend solely on the university even though this would mean its funds were far more modest. The way in which the issue was discussed in Trazos seemed to suggest that this was the price to pay for independence, as well as the guarantee that the courses’ invited participants would genuinely be interested in contributing to the discussions. Indeed, the serious engagement of its participants, as well as the moderation and restraint of the new epoch of the courses was stressed because all this contrasted with the invitations to the 100 to 200 artists and art critics “to summer in Santander” that had become the tradition for the courses up until then.3 The keywords that stand out in the interventions of Bonet, Simón Marchán, and Francisco Calvo Serraller (who were the three organisers of the courses present in the set of Trazos) are: methodological and scientifc rigour, free discussion and debate, ideological pluralism, creativity, and participation. These notions acquire further resonance if we take into account that on 15 June 1977, i.e. the day before this programme was aired, Spaniards had voted in democratic general elections for the frst time in 40 years. It is thus not by chance that, after having been to the courses, Chamorro and Gómez Redondo told their viewers that the 1977 edition showed “the democratisation of the courses” and that they thought (it was Paloma Chamorro who said this) that, in the future, this particular edition would become an important reference.4 In one of the interviews flmed on site and included in the programme, Simón Marchán stressed that there were opposing views and positions in the courses and that this was something they had looked for “after years of gag and censorship.” He said that there had to be “absolute freedom” so that each one could manifest his own opinions; people “should get used to coexisting with different ideological perspectives,

2

Noemi de Haro García et al.

that is logical for a democratic and pluralistic society such as ours.” Reinforcing this idea, the voiceover in the programme expressed that indeed, the democratisation of the courses was evident; in accordance with this, it would outline that dialogue and polemic had been constantly present in the courses.5 The courses were announced on other media as well, newspapers such as the newly born El País provided accounts of its contents and stressed that it had created a space for discussion and debate. As Chamorro had predicted, the heated discussions at the 1977 courses in Santander are among the milestones that the history of art in Spain regularly includes in the accounts of the art of the period. Interestingly, in this part of the story, the main characters are not the artworks or the artists, but art historians and art critics (many of whom were also the authors of publications that frst historicised this period and in so doing provided the blueprint for subsequent narrations) and their ideological clashes and disciplinary debates. The presence of this and a few other related episodes of confrontation in the narratives of the history of art seemed to demonstrate that coming to terms with the legacy of the dictatorial past and the democratisation in the feld of the arts only required getting rid of the structures and practices that suffocated free debate. Despite the need to work to constantly improve it, everybody seemed to welcome the democratisation of the artistic feld and tried to participate. This proved that, as Marchán had said in Trazos, Spanish society and by extension the arts feld were already “democratic and pluralistic.” Some of the aspects that had been stressed in Trazos during the discussions about the 1977 art courses in Santander, namely the importance of fostering pluralistic debate and dialogue and the relationship between such practices and democracy, were among the main characteristics of specifc programmes that public television had started to broadcast in that transitional period such as A Fondo, La Clave, or, indeed, Trazos. The relevance of those programmes was later outlined by scholars who considered that they contributed to the rebirth of democracy in Spain.6 Others have stressed the actual importance of culture in carrying out and experiencing the transition when they said that it was indeed “lived as culture” by society.7 For example, in her studies of the cultural policies of the transition Giulia Quaggio has argued that the party that won the 1977 elections used culture as a governance medium so that the discourses of power were better assimilated and incorporated by individuals.8 The way in which the 1977 art courses of the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo were discussed on television and the relationship between this and art historiography in Spain is an example on the one hand of the political role played by the telling and the writing of the history of art in the creation of the democratic identity of the discipline in Spain—and on the other—of the strategic political role played by the cultural feld during the Spanish transition.9 It is also an example of one of the many concrete and localised ways in which art history and politics were interwoven in Europe after 1945. This book examines the intermeshing of state power and art history in European countries since the end of the Second World War and up to the present. The fourteen contributors to this volume explore the specifc ways in which this relationship and the tensions stemming from it crystallised in specifc moments, places, discourses, and practices: from exhibitions to institutions, from cultural policies to the making of proposals aimed at approaching otherwise the research objects, questions, and/or methodologies in the historical study of art.

The (Re)makings of Art History and Europe

3

The spectrum of publications that study the history of art historiography is vast. A number of perspectives, histories, institutions, methodological approaches, problems, concepts, limitations, and potentialities, are the subject of books and articles, specialised journals, and book series.10 The attention devoted to the critical study of the interrelationships between the writing of art history and state power in 20th-century Europe has tended to focus upon specifc countries and totalitarian periods. For example, since the late 1970s art historians writing in German have worked in collectives on research projects and publications to investigate the relationship between art history—its discourses, practitioners, and institutions—and politics in Nazi Germany and the occupied territories.11 Research into the history of Soviet art historiography has also been carried out by groups and projects which focus upon specifc countries or topics. Some of the earliest publications that concentrate on this issue started to appear at the beginning of the 21st century. Since then publications have continued to be produced, including some recent books that inquire into the specifc rules that applied within socialist art history and how they were interpreted across the Soviet bloc.12 It is noteworthy that the study of the relationship between the making of art history and power after 1945 seems to follow the Cold War division as it frequently focuses mainly or solely upon one of the two blocs. It is also striking that this relationship is rarely the object of collective critical analyses in what concerns the periods following totalitarian regimes.13 Yet, after the Second World War the arts played a relevant role in cultural diplomacy initiatives aimed at conveying ‘universal,’ ‘democratic’ values. It would also play a crucial part in shaping the complex combination of affnities, rivalries, antagonisms, hegemonies, and infuences involved in the dynamics of the Cold War. Furthermore, it would help establish turning points that created a sense of a break with the past, as well as that of a new beginning. In this regard, the states’ reactions to the political upheavals of May 1968; the fall of the dictatorships in Portugal, Greece, and Spain in the 1970s; or the creation of national communities for the states created after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Yugoslav wars (1991–2001), are cases in point. The ways in which the European states dealt with the very intense revision of collective memory in Southern and Eastern Europe that followed and the challenges posed by the need to face the dynamics of globalisation also need to be considered. In summary, it is evident that art and art historical knowledge would continue playing a very relevant role in the (re)construction of Europe after 1945 and up to the present and this complex political period would, no doubt, beneft from a thorough critical analysis. While analysing its own political involvement with diffcult pasts is doubtless hard for any discipline,14 studying its political role in ‘less-diffcult’ (and less-distant) periods is perhaps no easy task either. The international group of scholars who have contributed to this book discuss specifc case studies with the aim of starting to draw the spectrum of the role played by art and art historical discourses in legitimising totalitarian regimes as well as their place within the new symbolic order created during and after the transitions to democracy. We are aware of the differences that exist between the concrete forms adopted by the relationship between art historiography and politics over such a long period of time and in very different political, cultural, and geographical contexts. Consequently, each of the chapters will address those differences and specifcities while, considered as a whole, the collection of chapters will reveal the existence of points of intersection, common threads, and resonances as well as differences, divergences, and even

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conficts. This will contribute to providing a richer and more complex picture of the ways in which art history was ‘made’ after 1945. In her introduction to the book Making Art History, Elizabeth C. Mansfeld reminds us that an institution is essentially a deliberate and recognisable set of organising principles that can manifest themselves in more or less tangible forms. She states that art history is a practice that is “not bound by any single institutional allegiance” and that it “is better understood as a medium for the circulation of ideas—and ideology— throughout contemporary Western culture.” She argues that because of this the institutions with (or against) which art history responds are, therefore, diverse.15 We could say that it is in this relationship when and where art history is actually and constantly in the making. The investigation of this process and its contingent results requires attending to both the ideas and ideologies that have circulated with the mediation of art history (while at the same time contributing to creating and disseminating an idea of art history itself) as well as to the tangible or intangible forms that have resulted from the relationship between art history and a number of very diverse institutions and institutional discourses: from exhibitions aimed at a wide lay audience, to specialised academic texts. While opening the feld to encompass both the former West and East as well as the diversity existing within each of them, which their names tend to cover, the contributions to this book demonstrate that the making of art history since 1945 has also involved coming to terms with notions lying at the core of the discipline. These include its relationship with nationalism, as well as with ideas that do not seem to easily ft into—or even clash with—the nationalist discourse such as cosmopolitanism or universalism.16 In close connection with the latter, the search for common principles in the objects studied by art history remains a major problem, for the category of ‘art’ itself has deeply Eurocentric connotations whilst also bearing the potential of being understood as a human universal.17 As will become clear in the analysis provided by several of the chapters included in this book, the ways in which this universal character was called upon and consciously or unconsciously interpreted, understood, and used, still remains complex and problematic.18 Several chapters in this book participate in the renewed interest of recent art historical scholarship in the study of the different forms adopted by the ‘medium’ of the exhibition. It is obvious that making art history through the spatial disposition of works involves some challenges that are different to those posed by doing so in a written form. Of course, this does not mean that engaging in one or the other medium automatically produces a more conventional or, conversely, a more innovative or even alternative art history. Furthermore, it does not mean that both media delimitate disconnected worlds either. For example, whereas the authors writing in the book The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University acknowledged the differences between the art historical practices taking place in each of these institutions, many also stressed the interconnections existing between the two despite being shaped by different organising principles.19 The essential role of exhibitions in the (re)writing of art history in Eastern Europe after 1989 has been stressed and refected upon by a number of scholars.20 Nevertheless, this is a characteristic of the art feld in general nowadays, and consequently not in vain Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne have argued “exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known. . . . [They] are the primary site of exchange in the political economy of art, where signifcation is constructed, maintained and occasionally

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deconstructed.” With words that in some ways resonate with Elizabeth C. Mansfeld’s arguments regarding the disparate intellectual and commercial endeavours that art history originated from and the discipline that it had to come to terms with in its professionalisation process,22 Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne conclude that “part spectacle, part socio-historical event, part structuring device, exhibitions—especially exhibitions of contemporary art—establish and administer the cultural meanings of art.”23 It is with the aim of providing a better understanding of the very diverse ways, practices, and media through which art history is made that this book incorporates chapters that refect upon exhibitions alongside others that engage with written texts. Art history appears as a discipline that is constantly and constitutively negotiating the tensions arising between what is considered local and what is presented as transcending it, between the written word and the sensuous experience, between its purported autonomy and its connection with political and economic powers. And it does so as a discipline that, as we know and recognise it, is still defned by its Westernness.24 To our knowledge only the book Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks and the research network funded by the European Science Foundation that produced it has an explicit and pioneering European geographical framework.25 Written by different ‘local’ specialists, the 16 chapters in this book devoted to “the geography of the discipline” deal with the history of art historiography in specifc countries. Whereas in some cases the relationship between art history and politics is thoroughly addressed, in many others the issue is not mentioned at all. It is far from our intention to cover all European countries in this collection. Instead this book focuses on in-depth analyses of a selection of specifc case studies with the aim of putting into dialogue the usual historic hegemonic centres of the discipline, namely Italy, Germany, France, and the Anglo-American context, with Europe’s Southern and Eastern margins, from Portugal to Estonia to Greece. As a result, several chapters focus on case studies that have been under-researched or under-represented in existing publications in English because of their purported local, marginal, or peripheral nature. The limited circulation and impact of the very interesting work carried out by specialists researching, publishing, and discussing in languages other than English also plays a part in this. This book therefore seeks to introduce some of the important debates that already exist in these local historiographies to a wider English-speaking audience and to foster a transnational dialogue between scholars coming from different parts of the continent. It may be worth remembering that, as Brian Graham, Gregory J. Ashworth, and John E. Turnbridge stated while discussing heritage in the 19th century, in the ethos of a singular and totalised modernity “it was assumed that to be modern was to be European, and that to be European, or to espouse European values (even in the United States) was to be at the pinnacle of cultural achievement and social evolution.”26 Indeed, for a long time the idea of Europe has been presented as a civilising power around the world, and one of the missions of art history was to demonstrate the uncontested supremacy of European standards. The weakening of Europe’s political hegemony during the Cold War eroded this cultural model, both disrupting the idea of European art history as universal and altering the traditional centre-periphery relationships that had affected the development of regional art histories within Europe. We are convinced that the study of the intermeshing between the history of art and politics in Europe would beneft deeply from incorporating the perspective of the (Southern and Eastern) margins of Europe into the dialogue. This will help to rethink 21

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the ideological grounds on which the European Union has been constructed as well as the role played by art and culture, specifcally of art history, in the very concept of ‘Europe.’ As Manuela Boatca stressed, it is important to question the myth of a unifed European “civilisation” and to point to the different, unequal ways in which “multiple Europes” have contributed to forge the hegemonic notion of modernity.27 Regarding the questioning and overfowing of the master narratives, canons, and hierarchies of the history of art in Europe after 1945, perhaps the latest most challenging contributions could loosely be described as those critically participating in the ‘global turn’ in art history.28 The fact that, explicitly or implicitly, the recent projects that are committed to this approach challenge existing conceptions and intend to propose alternatives better able to deal with multiplicity and complexity also implies a different view about what Europe might, could, and should represent. The interest of the institutions of the European Union in fostering refections of the sort within the feld of art history is revealed by its fnancing of academic research networks and projects that are underpinned by this approach in particular.29 It also provides support for projects involving institutions such as museums that combine the activities of research, publication, education, and exhibition to pursue similar ends; for instance, this is the case of Former West and L’Internationale whose activities are co-funded by the Creative Europe programme.30 The chapters in this collection are organised into three sections that are sequenced in a roughly chronological order. The frst section, entitled “Europe After the Rain,” deals with the ways in which a sense of new beginning(s) was circulated after 1945 through ways of presenting (and telling) art in exhibitions that were presented as innovative for different reasons. The second section, “Re-Reading Cold War Narratives,” proposes alternative models to think and write about the art produced in this period either by proposing a critical refection on the art historiography of the matter or by dealing with subjects and research questions that exemplify what the actual results of such re-readings can be. Finally, the third section entitled “A New Europe?” critically investigates the politics underpinning the production of art history discourses, especially those associated with identity and dissent, since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Europe After the Rain After the war cultural events that were, at least in theory, open to specialists and nonspecialists alike, such as exhibitions of all kinds of artefacts (from works of art to kitchens), dance, music, and sport performances, became important ingredients in cultural diplomacy.31 Indeed, the relevance of art exhibitions for the creation, dissemination, and consolidation of canons and narratives that shape art history (even more so in the case of modern and contemporary art) has been stressed by a number of scholars.32 Anna Brzyski has signalled the importance of analysing the mechanics of the canonical system in art history; that is, “how and where canons are formed, by whom, and why, how they function under particular circumstances, how they are maintained, and why they may undergo change.”33 It could be argued that, from different angles, the chapters in this section study precisely the mechanics of the art history canon as they were embedded in the specifcally historically situated exhibition practices that were launched soon after the end of the war. These exhibition practices played a very relevant role in producing a sense of rupture with the immediate past. They also provided ideas and models to inform new beginning(s). The multiple facets of the specifc crystallisation of the relationship between power, knowledge,

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authority, and the processes of canon formation, reinforcement, and dissemination, are evidenced in each of the case studies proposed here. The ways in which they were localised is noteworthy because, as the content of the chapters indicates to a certain extent, the proposals advanced in each case resulted from the interplay between the local, the national, Cold War divisions in the making, the Western cultural tradition (often identifed with the idea of Europe), and universalist ideals. In her chapter entitled “The Allied Cultural Policies in Germany: Between ‘ReEducation’ and the Politization of the Arts (1945–1949),” Morgane Walter studies the ways in which the Allies tried to have an impact on the reception of fne arts in Germany between 1945 and 1949. Indeed, years before the documenta series commenced, the allied occupying forces had already started using the power of exhibiting modern art to ‘re-educate’ the German population. Walter considers and compares the actions carried out in all the four zones of occupied Germany i.e. the American, the British, the French, and the Soviet, although she devotes most of her attention to the French case. The relationship the allies established with Germany, in combination with the one existing between them, was shaped by their different objectives. These were the creation and dissemination of a German national artistic tradition to substitute that of Nazism so it could serve as the democratic foundation for creation in Germany, the education in the political values and ideas that each considered best (which could, roughly, be identifed with the two blocs of the Cold War), and the competition with the other occupying countries to infuence the new German culture with their own. The priorities that governed each frequently resulted in a similar selection of pieces that were to form the new German artistic tradition. For example, the art that had been previously despised as ‘degenerate’ was included and assigned a prominent position. Nevertheless, as the comparison of the discourses of Eastern and Western allies shows, each interpreted this shared selection in totally different terms and frameworks, incorporating it into their own specifc narratives and genealogies, i.e. in their own (coexisting and competing) canons. In her study of the frst decade of operation of the Archives of Colour Reproductions of Paintings project entitled “UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions Project: Bringing (French) Art to the World,” Rachel E. Perry investigates the publications and exhibitions of highquality art reproductions that feshed this project and that transformed the education, appreciation, and consumption of art globally. She demonstrates that because French professionals dominated the project, the initiative reasserted the cultural pre-eminence of Western Europe and its main centres, especially Paris. Therefore, this contributed to reinforcing and disseminating a particular French modernist canon internationally. Having been launched by an intergovernmental organisation with a global scope such as the UNESCO, the analysis of the results of the implementation of this project provides sheer evidence of the limitations of universalism, as it can easily be used in a conscious partisan (in this case French and nationalistic) way. In the same vein that a new artistic tradition had to be devised for post-war Germany, so liberated Paris had to be rebranded in an attempt to maintain its central position in the art world. In addition, colour reproductions were considered to be useful tools for promoting France as a destination for tourists wanting to contemplate the originals on display in French museums. Involving originals and reproductions, educational aims and tourism, consumerism and idealism, (national) state power, and international organisations, the Colour Reproductions project is a paradigmatic example of the different institutions and the complex intertwinements which shaped the cultural and artistic feld after 1945.

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The new curatorial logics that lay behind the rehangs in London’s National Gallery between 1946 and 1951 as well as their reception are studied in Ana Baeza Ruiz’s chapter “Curatorial Experiments at the National Gallery After the Second World War. Reframing History and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Experience.” Following the lead of wartime experiences and converting the necessary reconstruction of the gallery into an opportunity for experimentation, its new director Philip Hendy temporarily broke away from the previous curatorial tradition and replaced its organisation according to schools and nations with another privileging temporal resonances across geographies. Thus, the ideas shared by many intellectuals at the time who conceived art as a universal medium that could promote unity across national boundaries and thus contribute to preventing war, informed the criteria governing this rehang. However, these criteria did not question the preference for the accepted original masterpieces, which were considered to represent the best of the European tradition. The idea of the museum as a democratised, accessible public space also served to justify these experiments because the rehangs were supposed to facilitate the contemplation of the pieces by a lay audience. Visitors were supposed to experience art in an aesthetic, sensuous way, employing a modernist contemporary way of looking at art. Historical knowledge was not necessary for this. Of course, all these approaches to art were not new and counted with their own tradition in art history, aesthetics, and the feld of museums. For instance, art historians writing in that same country at the time, such as Ernst Gombrich (who had fed to the West before the Anschluss), also rejected (German) historicism. The reception of these experiments by visitors and the press provoked mixed reactions. This could be interpreted as indicative of some of the problems underpinning the conception and implementation of the growing amount of initiatives for the popularisation of the arts that were fostered at the time. The fact that, despite the existence of these previous referents and traditions, this experience is labelled an ‘experiment’ indicates that not only was this something out of the ordinary but also that the usual hanging was identifed with the logics of (art) history, whereas, at the time, the ‘daring juxtapositions’ were presented as something else which could, possibly because of this, better embody the idea of a new beginning. In “The Venice Biennale at Its Turning Points: 1948 and the Aftermath of 1968,” Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Vittoria Martini study the relationship between culture and politics in Italy after the Second World War by looking into the transformations of the Venice Biennale in 1948 and in the 1970s. They argue that these two moments were signifcant turning points in the transformation of an institution that had been the mainstage for fascist cultural propaganda. Whereas in 1948 the Biennale adopted a ‘museum dimension’ that followed the purportedly objective logics identifed with art history in order to establish a break with the fascist past and deal with Cold War tensions, in 1973 the norms regulating the Biennale were reformed with the aim of making it a democratically organised institution. In accordance with this a non-media-based organisation as well as a thematic and politically engaged approach which resonated with the power of the 1968 protest waves were adopted for the Biennales from 1974 to 1978. In those years’ Biennales, political engagement implied supporting antifascism and democracy whilst respecting the sensibilities and the balance of the forces in the Italian parliament. The authors argue that, at that time, the Biennale and its hyper-democratised institutions became the laboratory for a new way in Italian politics, a new form of participatory democracy. The respect of pluralism was the dominant tone at the beginning of this period. This equilibrium

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was splintered later, when the Biennale was used as the testing ground for the socialist party’s new course in Italian politics. Experimentation and participation were key ideas underpinning the conception of the Biennales between 1974 and 1978. Interestingly, neither of those two notions are considered here as informing (or at least as having the potential to revolutionise) the discipline of art history, either in the 1970s or later. The same could be said about the thematic approach to the study of art. Nevertheless, it is well known that some of the proposals made through exhibiting in those Biennales were not only informed by thinking of the arts from a historical point of view (perhaps demonstrating this was compatible with participation and experimentation) but also deeply infuential on the writing of the history of art produced in the 20th century. In this respect the case of the invited (non-state organised) exhibition, which gave an account of Spanish art during Francoism in the 1976 Biennale, comes to mind. Not in vain, the artists and works selected for the show, entitled Spagna. Avanguardia artistica e realtà sociale. 1936–1976 (Spain. Artistic Avant-Garde and Social Reality. 1936–1976), are present in almost every account of the history of art in Spain for that period. This applies to texts published in Spanish as well as to those in other languages. Of course, the specialists involved in the Spanish exhibition expressed their views in other venues before and after the exhibition. Still, one cannot but wonder if their selection would have had such an impact on the discipline and especially on art historiography had it not been on display at the Biennale. However, this does not mean that, only because they share a roster of artists and artworks, all the texts that talk about them participate in the same approach, discourse, and aims as those of the organisers of that exhibition. The milestones might coincide, but the actual paths and roads connecting them trace quite different routes, and those routes count the Spanish exhibition at the Biennale itself as one of its milestones.34 Its role as a relevant liminal event is confrmed by its re-staging and re-thinking in two exhibitions inaugurated in 2018, the year celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Spanish Constitution: Poéticas de la democracia. Imágenes y contraimágenes de la transición (The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition) in Madrid, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) and España. Vanguardia artística y realidad social, 1936–1976 (Spain. Artistic Avant-Garde and Social Reality, 1936–1976) exhibited at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia.35

Re-Reading Cold War Narratives As Nancy Jachec convincingly argues in her contribution to this section, “Cold War Art Historiography: Some Observations on an Interdisciplinary Approach Through the Social Sciences,” Cold War art historiography has undergone signifcant changes over the last decades. Scholars’ interest in the role played by culture in the Cold War is certainly not new. Since the 1970s, art historians, particularly in the United States, have promoted a revisionist approach to Abstract Expressionism, underlining the political uses of abstraction during the Cold War and its role in American expansionism. Serge Guilbaut’s infuential book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War was surely a major turning point in this regard.36 Subsequently, other scholars expanded on Guilbaut’s fndings, providing better knowledge of the role played by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom as well as other individuals, journals, and institutions involved in the history of Abstract

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Expressionism in promoting the ideology of anti-communism.37 Additionally, more recent studies have explored the role played by design, architecture, or cinema in the Cold War battle of images, thereby showing that the link between art and Cold War politics was not circumscribed to the realm of painting.38 Although this body of work has signifcantly contributed to unmasking American cultural policies, it has often tended to consider Europe primarily as a battleground between the Soviet Union and the United States.39 However, this idea is now being reconsidered and important publications have analysed, as Jachec points out in her text, the role of “Europe and its former colonies as active participants in cultural dimensions of the confict.”40 This new perspective into the culture and visual arts in Europe during the Cold War has also been fostered by the former socialist countries through the opening of their archives. Although there still is a great deal of research to be done, the gaps in our knowledge regarding art under socialism have been partially flled in. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western fascination with ‘the other side’ of the Iron Curtain encouraged a boom in exhibitions in Berlin, Bonn, Vienna, and other cities, offering the frst overview of the art of socialist countries.41 Subsequent studies have allowed us to become acquainted with lesser-known aspects of contemporary art practice in Eastern Europe, such as performance, mail art, geometrical abstraction, feminism, or conceptual art.42 In addition, this growing feld of inquiry has led art historians to refect critically upon the discipline of art history and the centre/periphery dialectics in Europe. For example: how to avoid reproducing Western methods, canons, and hierarchies of values when writing art history in Eastern Europe? How to develop tactics and methodologies of self-empowerment when addressing the art of the ‘marginal’ East? Following the Polish scholar Piotr Piotrowski’s proposal to adopt a “horizontal art history” as opposed to the Western “vertical” paradigm,43 considerable attention has been paid by Eastern European art historians to reinvent, or at least disrupt, dominant terminologies and narratives.44 As these debates have pointed out, the problem does not only lie in the asymmetry between East and West implied in the traditional canon of art history but also in the contention that these two geographical areas constitute homogenous entities. According to Mathilde Arnoux, “the continued use of the term ‘former East’ as a generic entity has perpetuated the logic of opposing blocs in the writing of the history of Cold War art in Europe, an approach that has been reinforced by the way in which the former East has frequently endeavoured to differentiate itself from ‘Western’ discourse.”45 Is it not possible, to continue quoting Arnoux, to “consider the history of the Cold War from a perspective other than the one based in binary oppositions”?46 It is therefore understandable that recent scholarships granted to art under socialism have particularly insisted on the singularity of the former satellites of Moscow in comparison to the USSR, as well as on the diversity of traditions, histories, and art scenes conforming Eastern Europe. As Jasmina Čubrilo and Ivana Hanaček explain in their contributions to this book respectively entitled “The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and Post-Revolutionary Desire: Producing the Art History Narrative of Yugoslav Modern Art” and “Artists in Service of the Masses: The Untold Story of the Yugoslav Socialist Realist Project,” Yugoslavia is a particularly interesting example of this diversity. Because its president, Josip Broz Tito, was one of the key fgures in the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, the evolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Cold War cannot be easily explained in terms of its allegiance to one of the two

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blocs. Furthermore, as the leader of a multi-ethnic, multi-national federation, Tito had no other choice but to address diversity as one of the major issues of his cultural and political project. The history of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MoCAB) refects, as Čubrilo’s chapter demonstrates, the complexities and paradoxes of the Yugoslav case. Intended to represent the new, modern people’s democracy and its particularities compared with other socialist regimes, the museum was dedicated specifcally to Yugoslav art and conceived in a different way to most of its counterparts in Eastern Europe. The Board appointed Francophile art critic Miodrag B. Protić as the museum’s frst director, who promoted a formalist and modernist reading of contemporary Yugoslav art, thus translating into the Yugoslav context the dominant Western narrative. Besides challenging the view of Eastern Europe as a monolithic space, a growing number of scholars have sought to overcome the binary logic of the Cold War by inquiring into the circulation of artists, ideas, and art works between East and West. In their introduction to Art beyond Borders. Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe, 1945–1989, Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski advocate for a transnational history of arts, focusing not only on the exchanges between socialist countries but also across the Iron Curtain, which they describe as “successively porous or on the contrary impassable.”47 In keeping with this new approach, recent studies have also called attention to the complexities of Socialist Realism and its embeddedness in each local context. In other words, if the Eastern bloc was not a monolithic category, neither was the art of Socialist Realism. Jérôme Bazin, for instance, has explained how painters in the German Democratic Republic chose to defy the Soviet model, turning instead towards French and Italian realism and especially towards Mexican Muralism.48 Similarly, Ivana Hanaček’s contribution to the book, “Artist in Service of the Masses: The Untold Story of the Yugoslav Socialist Realist Project,” questions the dominant narrative discrediting Socialist Realism in Yugoslavia as a form of ‘orchestrated’ or ‘programmed’ art. This narrative started very soon in Yugoslavia compared with other socialist countries, because the breakup of Yugoslav-Soviet relations (Tito–Stalin split) led to the offcial abandonment of this style in the early 1950s. As Hanaček points out, subsequent art historical research has generally followed a consensus that Socialist Realism was only a brief and irrelevant episode in the history of post-war Yugoslav art, devoting very little attention to the subject.49 However, according to the author, the artists’ interest in working ‘in the feld,’ the relevance attributed by the new regime to artistic interventions in the public space, as well as the founding of new institutions, such as the Houses of Culture, should lead us to re-evaluate Socialist Realism as part of an “ambitious project of democratisation of culture in the region.” Together with the consideration of Socialist Realism, another important issue raised by recent research on Eastern European art is the role of civil society under socialism. Without losing sight of the political and cultural repression exerted by communist regimes, scholars have stressed the need to rethink the traditional clichés about totalitarianism.50 Rather than presenting individuals as completely deprived of agency and hopelessly subdued by the overreaching power of the state, we need to look closely into micro-history in order to map the diversity of individual initiatives and promote a more nuanced view of the relationship between art and power. Thus, in “Cold War Art Historiography,” Jachec advocates for “art history’s entering into dialogue with the Cold War Studies in a larger sense,” and she underscores the importance of institutional history, collective biography, and network theory in order to elucidate the

12 Noemi de Haro García et al. question of agency. In her view, this multidisciplinary approach can help us better understand “the diversity of ways in which the link between political and cultural spheres was acted” and the complex role of institutions as a feld of tensions, negotiations, and alliances between collective and individual agents. The need to review dominant narratives of the Cold War by taking into account the ‘margins’ of Europe has also been underlined by scholars coming from Southern Europe, particularly Greece, Portugal, and Spain.51 In her contribution entitled “Simultaneous Equations: Early Cold War Cultural Politics and the History of Art in Greece,” Areti Adamopoulou argues that the emergence of new museums and art galleries, the birth of a market for contemporary Greek art, and the introduction of art history as an autonomous discipline in Greek universities after 1945 should be regarded as part of an ongoing effort to advance Greece’s integration into the Western European frame. This was aligned with the redefnition of the country’s political and cultural identity in the 1950s and 1960s in order to affrm its Western and European status. In his chapter “Something Is Happening Here. Spaces and Figures of Change in Post-War Portugal,” Luís Trindade notes that in Portugal (and the same could be said about Greece or Spain), art history and cultural history have played an important role in what we could call, following Alexander Kiossev’s well-known term, the selfcolonising narratives of national identity: by adopting Northern European standards as universal, these self-colonising cultures also adopt the belief in their own inferiority.52 Trindade proposes that we should rethink, instead of the imagined geography of Portuguese culture in the period, marked by deep geopolitical transformations, the simultaneous but contradictory processes of African decolonisation, North-American infuence, and European integration. Going beyond the binary oppositions implied in the master narratives of Portuguese culture (capitalism/communism and originality/ backwardness), he focuses on urbanisation and the development of audio-visual cultures as decisive loci of cultural transformations in Portugal at the time. In doing so he indirectly points to the last key issue when considering Cold War cultural history: the very defnition of the concept of ‘Cold War.’ As Jachec observes in her contribution to this section, this is still an open question in Cold War historiography. Can we defne the Cold War specifcally as an ideological confict spanning from 1945 to 1991 or, rather in a broader sense, as a period that included many developments that were concurrent with the confict; for example, European reconstruction or the economic miracle and the rise of consumer society?

A New Europe? According to Piotr Piotrowsky, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, art history was to assume a different role in Eastern Europe, one of recovering the ‘normality’ interrupted by the long parenthesis of the war and its sequels.53 After having served for decades as a means to promote the new socialist hegemony, it was now meant to work as a healing balm for the national ego, damaged by years of subordination to foreign powers. As Boris Groys pointed out, art exhibitions and publications helped to restore the visibility of Eastern Europe in the global context, providing the territories hidden behind the Iron Curtain with a suitable and distinct image.54 Similarly, Jorge Luis Marzo noted that, during the so-called Spanish transition to democracy, the government used art and culture in two different ways that in fact mirrored each other. On the one hand, they served to convey a convenient representation of a national identity

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indoors, exorcising the image of the ‘Two Spains’ confronted in the Civil War. On the other, they contributed to the projection of an appealing image of Spain, capable of attracting foreign investments and tourism.55 The texts included in this section show that the urgency to leave behind the ‘historical exception,’ as well as the schizoid terms in which the new self was defned, both assertively identitarian and anxious to match global standards, refects the contradictions underlying these apparently smooth processes of normalisation. They also show the weakness of local art scenes and institutions when facing the dynamics of globalisation. In fact, culture, invoked as a benevolent and restorative spirit was often serving transnational political and economic interests.56 As Maja and Reuben Fowkes describe when analysing Hungarian Neo-avant-garde, this situation was particularly acute in Eastern Europe, where the quick dismantling of the cultural state system impelled art to comply with the rules of the global market and international art institutions in a very short time.57 The texts in this section do not intend to cover all the different national and regional cases, nor do they propose a complete diagnosis of the art historical discourses in their specifc territories. However, they do convey a powerful vision of the way in which art and art history were complicit in the promotion of a suitable image of ‘normality’ after the end of the Cold War. They also examine how this hegemonic discourse of ‘normalisation’ has been contested, producing counternarratives and making dissent visible. These transition processes in Eastern and Southern Europe did not necessarily succeed in eliminating the ideological ties that had constrained art history during the Cold War. Following Marzo’s argument, in his contribution titled “Art Policies, Identity and Ideology in Spain During the 1980s” Daniel A. Verdú Schumann examines how, after the end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, the new regime strove to build a symbolic order suitable for the young Spanish democracy. According to the dominant narrative at the time, in the context of liberal democracy, art and culture would fnally fourish, free from any ideological constraint and, by the same token, devoid of any political intention.58 However, as Verdú Schumann shows, the Francoist cultural model was in fact partially perpetuated, and state interventionism in the realm of culture continued to be the rule. The chapters in this section demonstrate that the Estonian, Spanish, and Polish cases prove that the lines defning the new ‘normality’ were far from clear. Actually, the retour à l’ordre implied antithetical positions: the strengthening of national or regional identity principles and the craving for foreign infuence, the inertial continuity of such infuences and the radical reorientation of the models to follow, the recovery of the critical art of the past, and the marginalisation of any dissidence in the present. For instance, in “Offcial Art Becoming Resistance. Adopting the Discourse of ‘Dissent’ into Estonian Art History Writings,” Kädi Talvoja explains how the eagerness of post-soviet historians to recover a dissident art scene in Russia affected the way in which the ‘non-offcial’ and rather less heroic Estonian scene was interpreted by local art historians and institutions. On the contrary, according to Verdú Schumann, in Spain the offcial narrative of the transition period marginalised the anti-Francoist artistic scene, which could be considered as equivalent to the dissident art practices canonised in the former Soviet republics. Instead of reclaiming the political and conceptual art of the 1970s, Spanish art historians, critics, and institutions decided to support mainly abstraction and Transavantgarde painting, which was easier to assimilate in the global art scene. Coinciding with the rise of the art market in the 1980s, Spanish

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art was promoted at home and abroad, both as part of the international mainstream and as distinctively local. Thus, despite their differences, the cases of Estonia and Spain reveal a similar reliance on external patterns of value and interpretation. In Spain, the frst solid critique of the artistic discourses built in the transition took place by the end of the 1980s. As later acknowledged by many accounts of the period, the article “Síndrome de mayoría absoluta” (Absolute Majority Syndrome) by Mar Villaespesa paved the way for a new generation of art critics.59 In his contribution to this volume, “Narrating Dissident Art in Spain: The Case of Desacuerdos. Sobre Arte, Políticas y Esfera Pública (2003–2005),” Alberto López Cuenca describes a second wave of contestation of the offcial narratives on art and culture in Spain. Around 2000, the reinforcement of the normalisation discourses and the growing intervention in the cultural feld displayed by the conservative governments in power elicited an important reaction from dissident critics, art historians, and institutions. Highly institutionalised and commodifed, culture was proudly exhibited as the attribute of an accomplished modern society. In response to this political use of culture numerous critics and artists felt the need to vindicate the critical and antagonist cultural tradition that had been dismissed by what would later be called the “Cultura de la Transición” (Culture of the Transition).60 Indeed, the ideological interests underlying the cultural and artistic discourses of transition were soon contested by many dissident voices. As early as 1999, Slovenian thinker Igor Zabel remarked that this urge towards “democratic normality” was dislocating cultural discourses in Eastern European countries and inducing intensive processes of acculturation, cultural colonisation, self-colonisation, and selfexoticism.61 Shortly after, the Moderna Galerija of Ljubljana, under the direction of Zdenka Badovinac, set up the project Arteast 2000+. Conceived as a reaction against these neo-colonial processes, it brought together an inter-regional art collection and promoted historical interpretations based on a dialogue between different local perspectives. However, the lack of funds put an end to this early attempt of creating an alternative internationalism from Eastern Europe.62 In a similar vein, Talvoja’s contribution challenges the Estonian transition art history. She unveils the spurious foundations of a narrative that demonised the offcial art of the Soviet period while sacralising a supposedly heroic dissident art scene. As she points out, this dualistic characterisation was imported from Russia’s own transition narrative that hardly ftted the actual Estonian artistic practice. Her text makes clear that colonial dynamics persisted even after the disaggregation of the Soviet system. She also describes how the construction of the new narrative was mediated by foreign agents, namely collectors and institutions from the new hegemonic power, the United States of America. Meanwhile, the dismantling of the state apparatus left a vacant space that would become occupied by private initiatives. Thus, the Soros Foundation, a multinational agency that had since become hegemonic in the whole region, assumed the promotion of art and its historical and critical interpretation. The current situation in Europe offers an additional turn; art institutions and the academia seem to have become a sort of trench from which to defend and preserve the memory of activism and dissidence. Accordingly, antagonism and social critique have achieved a pivotal role in art historical narrative, formerly organised around notions of aesthetic quality, progress, and consensus. This apparent anomaly, according to Talvoja and López Cuenca, involves the risk of encouraging a political co-optation and the museifcation of activism. As Paweł Leszkowicz underlines in his contribution,

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“Gender and Art History in Poland: A Constant Story of Subversion,” this unexpected alliance between institutions and activists may respond to the urgency, both inside and outside cultural institutions, to create a common front against the regressive cultural values and the historical revisionism promoted by populist conservatism and neofascism all over Europe. To some extent, the European continent is experiencing a climate of culture wars that could be compared to the rise of fascism in the thirties or to the polarisation of the Cold War. The growth of traditionalist and nationalist populisms in European politics may justify a common front in defense of the critical and emancipatory role of culture. Hungarian historian Edit András has analysed the impact of conservative politics on the local art scene and the rise of new forms of cultural activism in her country.63 Likewise, Leszkowicz contends that the artistic, curatorial, and historical productions of feminism and sexual dissidence form a front line in the ongoing struggle against the growing power of nationalist patriarchy in Poland. *** As previously stated, this collection does not intend to cover all possible themes, problems, and places that could be analysed in a critical study of the intermeshing of art history and state power in Europe after 1945. The aim of this book is not to be encyclopaedic; it does not harbour the fantasy of offering a closed totality but the hope of presenting a few engaging questions that serve to open up spaces for future research and conversations. We wonder to what extent art history might have contributed to creating and celebrating the (problematic) image of the “lofty Europe of ‘inventiveness and creativity, democracy, liberty, critical sense and tolerance and respect for other cultures’” that prevailed in what Roberto Dainotto has described as “the tranquil waters of European studies.”64 We also wonder in what ways it might have participated in the conficts, violence, and exclusions that such an image covers. We hope that the issues raised in the chapters of this book can help to open the lock, enabling the stagnant waters described by Dainotto to start fowing.65 This seems particularly urgent, especially when citizens all over Europe are experiencing the multi-layered effects of the fnancial crisis, the expansion of Euroscepticism, the violent and fear-flled reactions to migration, and the growing appeal of far-right parties. It is to be expected that, whatever is occurring now and whatever will happen next, art history will be playing a part in it. James Elkins wrote that Hans Belting’s The Germans and their Art: a Troublesome Relationship was “a salutary read for anyone who assumes that art historians are driven by purely personal passions, unconnected to politics, or by a disinterested sense of historical veracity.”66 We can only hope that discussing the political role that art historians and art historical discourses have played all around Europe over the past 80 or so years will help to raise awareness so that art historians can make their decisions and play the parts they wish to consciously and responsibly.67

Notes 1. Trazos, 17, broadcast on the Second Channel of Televisión Española (TVE), 11 August 1977. 2. The frst epoch was that of the frst summer courses of the Universidad Internacional de Verano de Santander created by the Second Republic in 1932. In Trazos Paloma Chamorro pointed to a connection between the 1977 courses and those republican summer courses in

16 Noemi de Haro García et al.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

which Pedro Salinas and Federico García Lorca had been involved. The Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo was created in 1945 during Francoism; it would start its activities in 1947. About the history of the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo see “Historia,” Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, www.uimp.es/institucional/historia.html [Accessed: 17/07/2019]. The team working under the direction of Antonio Bonet Correa was formed by the lecturer Simón Marchán Fiz, who was the courses’ secretary, and by two of Bonet’s PhD students, Francisco Calvo Serraller and Juan Antonio Ramírez, who organised the two seminars of the courses. These four academics are very relevant fgures in the history of art history in Spain. Only Ramírez was absent from this television programme. Trazos, 9, broadcasted on the Second Channel of TVE, 16 June 1977. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are ours. Trazos, 17, broadcasted on the Second Channel of TVE, 11 August 1977. Trazos, 17, broadcasted on the Second Channel of TVE, 11 August 1977. Manuel Palacio, La televisión durante la Transición española (Madrid: Cátedra, 2012), 100. José Carlos Mainer, “La cultura de la transición o la transición como cultura,” in La Transición, treinta años después. De la dictadura a la instauración y consolidación de la democracia, eds. Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs (Madrid: Península, 2006), 153. Giulia Quaggio, “Política cultura y transición a la democracia: el caso del Ministerio de Cultura UCD (1977–1982),” Historia del Presente, no. 17 (2011): 109–125. See also her study of the politics of the Spanish Ministry of Culture in Giulia Quaggio, La cultura en transición. Reconciliación política y cultural en España, 1976–1986 (Madrid: Alianza, 2014). About the role of Trazos and these debates in the history of art historiography in Spain see Noemi de Haro García, “La historia del arte español de la transición. Consecuencias políticas de una representación,” in Arte y transición, ed. Juan Albarrán (Madrid: Brumaria, 2012), 225–246. About the role of this and other cultural programmes in the transition see Noemi de Haro García, “Diálogo y arte en la televisión de la transición,” in La Historia, Lost in Translation?, eds. Damián Alberto González Madrid, Manuel Ortiz Heras and Juan Sisinio Pérez Garzón (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2017), 2959–2968; Noemi de Haro García, “Transición, historia del arte y televisión,” in El arte y la recuperación del pasado reciente, eds. Miguel Cabañas Bravo and Wifredo Rincón (Madrid: CSIC, 2015), 385–399. Apart from being beyond the scope of this text, it would be impossible to list here even a small selection of the existing books and articles on the matter. In the arena of the academic publications in English the “Studies in Art Historiography” series and the Journal of Art Historiography are two of the most visible loci that are entirely devoted to these issues. Magdalena Bushart, Agnieszka Gąsior and Alena Janatková, eds., Kunstgeschichte in den besetzten Gebieten 1939–1945 (Köln, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2016); Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters and Barbara Shellewald, eds., Kunstgeschichte im “Dritten Reich.” Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008); Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister and Michael H. Sprenger, eds., Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus. Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930–1950 (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005); Jutta Held and Martin Papenbrock, eds., Kunstgeschichte an den Universitäten im Nazionalsozialismus (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2003). Among the frst publications that dealt with Soviet art historiography was the section that focused on the post-1945 period in Robert Born, Alena Janatková, and Adam S. Labuda, eds., Die Kunsthistoriographien in Ostmitteleuropa und der nationale Diskurs (Berlin: Mann Verlag, 2004). The book, edited by Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, and Michaela Marek, investigates how the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was ‘invented,’ refned, and interpreted during the Stalinist period and the Khrushchew Thaw. Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, and Michaela Marek, eds., A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2019). Indeed, more often than not, and especially in what concerns art historiography in the former West, these periods are identifed with and celebrated as the mere ‘liberation’ of the

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14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

17

discipline. There are books about art history in Germany after 1945 and after 1968; the fact that they have been published in the “Kunst und Politik” series is indicative of their approach: Martin Papenbrock and Norbert Schneider, eds., Kunstgeschichte nach 1968 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010); Martin Papenbrock, ed., Kunstgeschichte an den Universitäten in der Nachkriegszeit (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2006). For example, Charlotte Schoell-Glass observed that, even in the case of Germany, “no systematic history of Nazi art history has yet been written.” Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “Art History in German-Speaking Countries,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, eds., Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 341. Elizabeth C. Mansfeld, “Introduction. Making Art History a Profession,” in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth C. Mansfeld (New York and Oxon: Routdlege, 2007), 1. Nationalism was central to the formation of art history as a modern academic discipline in the 19th century and continues to be the framework for many art historical investigations. Nevertheless, there were also art historical traditions that, already in the 19th century, resisted narrow nationalistic interpretations of art history. The Vienna School, for instance, promoted a cosmopolitan vision of artistic evolution, and authors like Ulrich Pfsterer and Marlite Halbertsma have argued that it is possible to fnd elements of the beginnings—or at least of the demand—of a world art perspective in the study of art in the proposals and practices of some researchers writing in German in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. Matthew Rampley, “The Construction of National Art Histories and the ‘New’ Europe,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, eds. Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 231–246; Michela Passini, La fabrique de l’art national. Le nationalisme et les origines de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne. 1870–1933 (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2012); Ulrich Pfsterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000)” and Marlite Halbertsma, “The Many Beginnings and the One End of World Art History in Germany, 1900–1933,” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, eds. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), 68–89 and 91–105, respectively. Pfsterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History,” 84. It is worth mentioning the discussion about universal history, cosmopolitan history, Eurocentrism, and the possibility of writing a non-Eurocentric world art history in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Refections on World Art History,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, eds. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice JoyeuxPrunel (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 23–38. Charles W. Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (New Haven and London: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002); Charles W. Haxthausen, “Beyond ‘the Two Art Histories’,” Journal of Art Historiography, 11 (December 2014), https://arthistoriography.fles.wordpress.com/2014/11/haxthausen.pdf [Accessed: 17/07/2019]. In this vein, the book entitled Curating “Eastern Europe” and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition is noteworthy, especially its introduction and four initial chapters that directly engage with the analysis of this matter. Mária Orišková, “Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond. Art Histories through the Exhibition: An Introduction”; Louisa Avgita, “The Rewriting of Art History as Art: Mapping the ‘East’”; Kelly Presutti, “Les Promesses du Passé: Shaping Art History via the Exhibition”; Cristian Nae, “Retrospective Exhibitions and Identity Politics: The Capitalization of Criticality in Curatorial Accounts of Eastern European Art after 1989,” all in Curating “Eastern Europe” and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition, ed. Mária Orišková (Frankfurt and Bratislava: Peter Lang, Veda, 2013), 7–18, 19–35, 36–43, 44–64, respectively. It is interesting to note that Agvita’s, Pressutti’s, and Nae’s text were originally presented at the “Exhibitions as Art History” panel, in the second seminar of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s Eastern-Central Europe Seminar Series entitled Unfolding Narratives: Art Histories in

18 Noemi de Haro García et al.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

East-Central Europe After 1989. This second seminar was celebrated in Brno in November 2010 and was entitled “Art History on the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe.” The series was an international initiative of the Research and Academic Program at The Clark and received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as with additional support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. This is just one example of the connections existing between the making of art history in Europe and in the United States. Karel Císař, “Review of Curating “Eastern Europe” and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition, edited by Mária Orišková,” Umění 64, no. 5 (2016): 441. Programme of the seminar “Art History on the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe,” www.clarkart.edu/CMSPages/GetFile.aspx?guid=babed858-e0b2-420c-8bed12c2d4e788ec [Accessed: 17/07/2019]. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, “Introduction,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1996), 2. Mansfeld, “Introduction,” 2. Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne, “Introduction,” 2. James Elkins argues that, by the way it is currently practiced, art history is shaped by Western ideas, but this does not mean (as Elkins and many other authors contributing to Is Art History Global? indicate) it is not practiced outside the West. James Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?,” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, eds. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), 107–118; James Elkins, “Art History as a Global Discipline,” in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 3–23. The network was called Discourses of the Visible. National and International Perspectives and was funded by the European Science Foundation between 2004 and 2006. One of the outcomes of which was the publication: Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and Kitty Zijlmans, eds., Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012). Brian Graham, Gregory John Ashworth and John E. Turnbridge, A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture & Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 17. Manuela Boatca, “Múltiples Europas y la mística de la unidad,” in Descolonizar la modernidad, descolonizar Europa. Un diálogo Europa-América Latina, eds. Heriberto Cario and Ramón Grosfoguel (Madrid: Ipsala, 2010), 193–208. To name just a few recent books that approach the study of the arts from this perspective and in some cases are connected to conferences and/or exhibitions: Bojana Piskur, Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned (Ljubljiana: Moderna Galerija, 2019); Paula Barreiro, ed., Atlántico frío. Historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del Telón de acero (Madrid: Brumaria, 2019); Beáta Hock and Anu Allas, eds., Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present (New York and London: Routledge, 2018); Mathilde Arnoux, La réalité en partage. Pour une histoire des relations artistiques entre l’Est et l’Ouest en Europe pendant la guerre froide (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2018); Annika Öhrner, ed., Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop (Huddinge: Södertörn University, 2017); Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989) (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2016). The critical refection on the history, identity, limitations, and challenges of the discipline is the subject of projects on their own, or is the foundation of projects that work to provide a richer and more complex understanding of artistic practices of the period. Two different projects exemplify this. As previously mentioned, the network Discourses of the Visible. National and International Perspectives was funded by the European Science Foundation (2004–2006) and addressed the question of the place of art history in a globalised society, one of the outcomes of which was the book: Lenain, Locher, Pinotti, Schoell-Glass, Rampley and Zijlmans, eds., Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. As a result of a ERC Starting Grant (2010–2016), the research project To Each His Own Reality investigated the artistic relationships between countries separated by the Iron Curtain. Own Reality. To Each His Own Reality, https://dfk-paris.org/en/ownreality [Accessed: 17/07/2019].

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30. Former West (2008–2016) was a transnational research, education, publishing, and exhibition project searching for ways of ‘formerising’ the persistently hegemonic conjuncture that is ‘the West.’ It was conceived and developed by Slovak curator Maria Hlavajova and was funded mostly by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, an art institution based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. More at: https://formerwest.org [Accessed: 17/07/2019], and the book Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds., Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). L’Internationale is a confederation of museums of contemporary art intended to create a de-centered space of collaboration, dialogue, and critique within Europe. Its current project, tellingly entitled Our many Europes, promotes a heterogenous ‘cultural front’ to exorcise xenophobia and ethnocentrism, reclaiming the emancipatory and internationalist promises of art. More at www.internationaleonline.org/ [Accessed: 17/07/2019]; its publications can be found in www.internationaleonline.org/ bookshelves/ [Accessed: 17/07/2019]. 31. Michaela Marek and Eva Pluhařová-Grigienė edited a special issue of the Journal of Art Historiography that compiled contributions by a dozen specialists who explored the communication of art historical content in popular media during the Cold War era in Eastern and Western Europe. Journal of Art Historiography, special issue “Baroque for a Wide Public,” eds. Michaela Marek and Eva Pluhařová-Grigienė, 15 (December 2016), https:// arthistoriography.wordpress.com/15-dec16/ [Accessed: 17/07/2019]. 32. In that vein, see for example, Walter Grasskamp, “For Example, documenta, or, How Is Art History Produced?,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 67–78; Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made Art History. Volume 1: 1863–1959 (London: Phaidon Press, 2008); Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions that Made Art History: 1962–2002 (London: Phaidon Press, 2013); Maria Bremer, “Modes of Making Art History. Looking back at documenta 5 and documenta 6,” Stedelijk Studies, special issue “Rewriting or Reaffrming the Canon? Critical Readings of Exhibition History,” 2 (2015), https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/modes-of-making-art-history/ [Accessed: 15/07/2019]. 33. Anna Brzyski, “Introduction: Canons and Art History,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 34. de Haro García, “La historia del arte español en la transición,” 225–246. 35. The MNCARS exhibition was divided into two halves, one of which was dedicated to Spain’s exhibition at the Biennale. The exhibition was accompanied by a conference and a publication of the “Carta(s)” series entitled Libidinal Economy of the Spanish Transition. It is telling that the two were connected to the ‘other’ half of the exhibition and therefore did not approach the Biennale that is characterised as containing within it “a closed and representative discourse of the anti-Francoist art of the time.” www.museoreinasofa.es/en/ exhibitions/poetics-democracy [Accessed: 15/07/2019]. For its part, the IVAM exhibition produced a seminar, a conversation, an exhibition tour, and the publication Caso de Estudio Espanya. Avanguarda Artística i Realitat Social. 1936–1976, curator Sergio Rubira (Valencia: IVAM, 2018), which all historically revisited and analysed an exhibition that is said to have “determined the [art history] account that is still accepted now” and is considered “fundamental for understanding the art produced in Spain in the last century.” www. ivam.es/en/publicaciones/caso-de-estudio-espanya-avanguarda-artistica-i-realitat-social1936-1976/ [Accessed: 15/07/2019]. 36. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 37. Frances Stonnor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2001). 38. See Jack Masey and Conway Lloyd Morgan, eds., Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and their Role in the Cultural Cold War (Baden: Lars Müller, 2008); David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, eds., Cold War Modern Design, 1945–1970 (London: V&A Publishing, 2008); and Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggles for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). 39. See for example David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

20 Noemi de Haro García et al. 40. See also Nancy Jachec, Europe’s Intellectuals and the Cold War: The European Society of Culture, Post-War Politics and International Relations (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 4. 41. Ryszard Stanislawski, ed., Europa, Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittelund Osteuropa (Bonn: Stiftung Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1994); Matthias Flügge, ed., Der Riss im Raum. Positionen der Kunst seit 1945 in Deutschland, Polen, der Slowakei und Tschechien (Berlin: Guardini Stitfung, 1995); Lóránd Hegyi, ed., Aspekte/Positionen. 50 Jahre Kunst aus Mittleuropa, 1949–1999 (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stitfung Ludwig, 1999). 42. Ranier Fuchs and Lóránd Hegyi, Reduktivismus. Abstraktion in Polen, der Tschechoslowakei, Ungarn, 1939–1980 (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 1992); Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe, Katrin Mrotzek, and Kornelia Röder, Mail Art: Eastern Europe in International Network (Schwerin: Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 1997); Zdenka Badovinac, ed., Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998); Petra Stegmann, ed., Fluxus East. Fluxus-Netzwerke in Mittel Europa/Fluxus Networks in Central Europe (Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007); Bojana Pejic, ed., Gender Check (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stitfung Ludwig, 2009). 43. Piotr Piotrowski, “On the Spatial Turn or Horizontal Art History,” Umeni/Art (2008): 378–383. 44. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “Welcome to Slaka: Does Eastern (Central) European Art Exist?” Third Text 18, no. 1 (2004): 25–40; Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). 45. Mathilde Arnoux, “To Each His Own Reality: How the Analysis of Artistic Exchanges in Cold War Europe Challenges Categories,” Artl@s Bulletin 3, no. 1 (2014): 33. 46. Arnoux, “To Each His Own Reality,” 31. 47. Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski, “Introduction: Geography of Internationalism,” in Art Beyond Borders. Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe, 1945–1989, eds. Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski (Budapest and New York: Central University Press, 2015), 2. See also Ioana Popa, “La circulation transnationale du livre: un instrument de la guerre froide culturelle,” Histoire@Politique no. 15 (2011), 25–41, and Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War (University Park: The Pensylvannia State University Press, 2003). 48. Jérôme Bazin, “Le réalisme socialiste et ses modèles internationaux,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 1, no. 109 (2011), 72–87. 49. Ljiljana Kolešnik, “Prilozi interpretaciji hrvatske umjetnosti 50-ih godina. Prikaz formativne faze odnosa moderne umjetnosti i socijalističke Države,” Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnost 29 (2005): 307–315. 50. See for example Sandrine Kott, “Pour une histoire sociale du pouvoir en Europe communiste: Introduction thématique,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49, no. 2 (2002): 5–23. 51. In the case of Spain, several researchers have studied the political uses of abstraction by Francoism during the Cold War, thus proving the interest in analysing this issue from a perspective other than the American-centred narrative. See Julián Díaz Sánchez, La idea de arte abstracto en la España de Franco (Madrid: Cátedra, 2013); Jorge Luis Marzo, Arte moderno y franquismo. Los orígenes conservadores de la vanguardia y la política artística en España (Girona: Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani, 2006). 52. Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures,” in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, eds. Bojana Pejic and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), 114–118. 53. Piotr Piotrowsky, “The Grey Zone of Europe,” After the Wall, 36. 54. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 5. 55. Jorge Luis Marzo, “Política cultural del gobierno español en el exterior,” Desacuerdos 2. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, 2005), 57–117. 56. Alexander Alberro, “Institutions, Critique and Institutional Critique,” in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 18.

The (Re)makings of Art History and Europe

21

57. They studied the growing interventionism of Western art institutions, which have recently developed several ambitious research and exhibition projects in the area, such as Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) by MoMA, Russia and Eastern Europe Acquisitions Committee (REEAC) by Tate or Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe by Pompidou. Clearly, these initiatives beneft from human and fnancial resources beyond the reach of local museums or institutions. Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes, “Placing Bookmarks: The Institutionalisation and DeInstitutionalisation of Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde and Contemporary Art,” Tate Papers, no. 26 (Autumn 2016), www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/26/placingbookmarks [Accessed: 17/07/2019]. 58. Jorge Luis Marzo, ¿Puedo hablarle con libertad, excelencia? Arte y poder en España desde 1950 (Murcia: CENDEAC, 2010). 59. A decade after the approval of the 1978 Constitution and seven years after the arrival in power of the socialist party, Villaespesa pointed out the problems of the Spanish art system, which was still largely subsidised and supervised by the political sphere. According to her, such a system could only produce provincial versions of the international mainstream. Mar Villaespesa, “Síndrome de mayoría absoluta,” Arena internacional del arte, no. 1 (1989): 81–83. 60. This term, used for the frst time in 2013 in a collective book edited by the journalist Guillem Martínez, designates the ideology of consensus that monopolised the Spanish cultural sphere for at least three decades and is still invoked by conservative powers. Guillem Martínez, ed., CT o la Cultura de la Transición (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2013). 61. Igor Zabel, “Otherness Again,” in After the Wall, 112. 62. The project was revisited, ffteen years later, by the Moderna Galerija, together with the Muscovite Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, in the exhibition Grammar of Freedom/ Five Lessons: Works form the Arteast 2000+ Collection, ed. Ruth Addison (Ljubljana and Moscow: Moderna Galerija and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015). 63. Edit András, “Hungary in Focus: Conservative Politics and its Impact on the Arts,” Artmargins, 17 September 2013, www.artmargins.com/index.php/interviews-sp-837925570/721hungary-in-focus-forum [Accessed: 17/07/2019]. 64. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Duke: Duke University Press, 2007), 4. 65. This has to be, no doubt, the result of collective work. There is a growing number of projects that are contributing to it. To the ones which were previously mentioned in this chapter, it would be worth adding the recent publication Rethinking Postwar Europe. Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the late 1940s and 1950s. Like the present book, this is a collection of case studies; it aims at contributing “to discussions on Europe’s place in art history”. Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt, Agata Pietrasik, eds., Rethinking Postwar Europe. Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the late 1940s and 1950s (Vienna, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2020): 17. 66. James Elkins, Is Art History Global? (New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 9. 67. This text was written within the framework of the research project Long Exposure: The Narratives of Spanish Contemporary Art for ‘Wide Audiences’ (HAR2015-67059-P MINECO, FEDER).

Section 1

Europe After the Rain

2

The Allied Cultural Policies in Germany Between ‘Re-Education’ and the Politicisation of the Arts (1945–1949) Morgane Walter

After the end of the Nazi regime, Germany was divided between the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. At the Potsdam Conference (17 July–2 August 1945), the Allies decided the main rules about the general organisation of the occupation and its goals.1 They all agreed that denazifcation should be permitted by a German reconstruction on a democratic basis and that Germany should fnd a new place amongst pacifc countries. On the 30th of July, the Allied Control Council, the highest authority in occupied Germany, was established in Berlin. The frst order this institution gave can be summed up in the following words: “demilitarisation, denazifcation, decartelisation, and democratisation.”2 These four words would shape all the policies of the Allies for Germany. The main goal of these was to eradicate Nazism from the minds of German people. In fact, the seventh principle of the Potsdam Agreement asserts that “German education shall be so controlled as to completely eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make the successful development of democratic ideas possible.”3 In the fourth order of the Allied Control Council signed on the 13th of May 1946, they expressed for the cultural feld the necessity to “eradicate the nationalist, fascist, military and antidemocratic ideas.”4 In this context, culture was considered a main concern and was used to achieve several objectives, including political ones. Thus, even before their arrival in Germany, the Allies decided to set up a re-education program (Umerziehung) for German people. They knew that dismissing previous Nazis and replacing them with ‘democratic’ Germans would not be enough; there had to be a fundamental change to teach them antifascist principles and practices.5 But the Allies’ understanding of democracy or antifascism differed from one another. These re-education and denazifcation issues defned the relationships and cultural exchanges between German artists and administrative or cultural offcers. This study will analyse the ways the Allies tried to have an impact on the reception of German fne arts and how art was used as a means to spread ideologies. The Allies appealed to all arts to spread their ideals. Although music, literature, and also cinema and theatre were strongly involved in the re-education process, this chapter will focus solely on the fne arts. The emphasis will be set on the period from 1945 to 1949, meaning the time when defeated Germany was under Allied supervision.6 The main thesis of this research is that the politicisation of art led to a specifc interpretation and also a kind of artifcial schematisation of German and European art history, partially carried out until today. It seems that this interpretation made by the Allies depended on the goal each one followed. First, they wanted to set up democracy in Germany and re-integrate the country in the international Western or communist scenes. That

26 Morgane Walter could not be managed only through political or military reinsertion, so they used culture as a political tool. In that case, Western military governments mythologised the defamed German artists during the Nazi period and made them become democratic models, a fact that is mostly visible in the exhibition policies and the corresponding catalogues. The Soviet government also gave a positive image to these artists by presenting them as antifascist martyrs. In this way, Soviets followed a similar but ideologically different objective: while the Western Allies wanted to integrate Germany in the occidental artistic scene as a guarantee for international peace, the Soviets aimed at integrating their zone in the communist bloc. Then, the military governments also wanted to spread their own national art trends or traditions by using a method called “national projection” by Stonard.7 Thus, the Allies tried to fnd traces either of realism or of abstraction in German and European art history to legitimate their own acceptance, and then they showed their national artistic models to spread them better on the German cultural scene. The Allied cultural and artistic policies in Germany is a growing research feld that has been developed especially after the German reunifcation. The majority of the publications focus on one zone; the major exceptions are the essential book written by Ulrike Ziegler, Kulturpolitik im geteilten Deutschland: Kunstausstellungen und Kunstvermittlung von 1945 bis zum Anfang der 60er Jahre in 2006, the publication of John-Paul Stonard, entitled Fault lines. Art in Germany 1945–1955, and the collections of studies gathered by Jérôme Vaillant in La dénazifcation par les vainqueurs. La politique culturelle des occupants en Allemagne.8 Ziegler’s book constitutes the frst global study of the exhibition policies in Germany from 1945 until the 1960s, entering the art mediation into an analysis of the cultural and societal context. Stonard examines the role of artists during the frst post-war decade and the impact of the Allied cultural policies during the military occupation, with the help of relevant archives and sources. Jérôme Vaillant emphasises the Allied re-education program and the way each military government tried to impose its own interpretation of democracy on German people. Several other signifcant contributions to the topic concentrate on one zone. For the most important of them concerning the West, we can cite Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands from Klaus Dietmar Henke (1995), Gabriele Clemens’ Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949 (1997), and for the French zone Corine Defrance’s work, La Politique culturelle de la France sur la rive gauche du Rhin (1994).9 There have been several more publications about the Soviet zone, amongst which we can mention David Pike’s book The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany published in 1993.10 The present contribution will consider all of the four zones, but the French one will be more represented because of its denser cultural program mainly led by political interests. This will be the opportunity to broach also the consequences for the reception of modern art and to dwell on the ideologically determined writing of art history in Germany. This chapter will frst give some keys to understand and highlight the strong use of art as propaganda for both blocs, especially through the exhibition policies. There were not only Allied initiatives but also many German ones under Allied control and support, but this contribution will concentrate on the ones led by the occupying forces. Another important point is that there was not only an East–West cultural opposition but also a more complex phenomenon of rivalry between the Western Allies through national projection, which somehow permits a nuanced and complicated view of the traditional two blocs opposition.

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Exhibition Policies: Didactic and Ideological Goals Tactics and Didactics The Allies considered art one of the best ways to get rid of Nazism and to establish democracy in Germany.11 They sincerely believed that art, as a means to criticise society, could have a positive infuence on German people’s minds. Concurrently there was an important excitement around culture. Indeed, there was a high demand for cultural events: theatres, concert halls, and cinemas were constantly full; people queued for exhibitions and tried to get as many newspapers as they could. Thus, amongst other things, the Allies organised exhibitions in order to inspire a new humanity, which would be completely in agreement with their democratic ideals. The exhibited artists were regarded as upstanding and deserving to be rehabilitated, and their moral position had to be admired. This discourse occurred mostly in exhibitions and catalogue texts, in speeches, but also in the many exhibition reports published in newspapers and journals. Of course, Nazi artists like Arno Breker or Adolf Ziegler were avoided. In fact, in a frst moment, no former Nazi public person was allowed to take part in public life—even if we know that this was not as systematic as the Allies frst wanted. Art was considered as an indicator of the democratisation process. According to the Western Allies, German reception of modern art—especially abstraction and Surrealism—had to show the democratisation progress within people, because the nation was still under the infuence of Nazi propaganda about degenerate art. To assess this progression, the Allies used reports, surveys in some modern art exhibitions, and maybe the many letters sent by readers to newspapers expressing their opinions. This method is of course questionable from several perspectives, but it still could give a vague idea of the evolution of mentalities. The success of Hans Sedlmayr’s book Verlust der Mitte (The Lost Centre),12 published in 1948, demonstrates the extent of the task for the Allies.13 Hans Sedlmayr was a well-known conservative Austrian theoretician who had supported Nazism. His main thesis was about the loss of the human relationship with God, which was especially visible in modern art. To support his theory he used medical terminologies that had been partially used by the Nazis. Actually, despite all the efforts made by the Allies in their promotion of modern art, a part of the German public remained reluctant to it, and conservative arguments still had some echo. The example described by Erich Kästner in “Die Augsburger Diagnose” (The Augsburg Diagnosis), recorded in January 1946, is meaningful.14 The Augsburg art club organised an exhibition in the Schäzler palace in Augsburg, dedicated to contemporary painters coming from the South of Germany. Visitors received an opinion poll (Stimmzettel) with the entrance ticket. They were asked which painting they preferred and if they would like to see some pieces of art in other exhibitions.15 The result was very clear: the youth—meaning schoolchildren and students—were totally reluctant to modern art, whereas the older generation celebrated the expressionist poetry of Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, and Oskar Kokoschka, and seemed to be more open to the discussion. After a twelve-year interruption with modern art, the generation that had lived in the pre-war era and that knew the moderns was more able to appreciate their art and have interest for it than the young people whose experience of art only had gone through the Nazi vision of art. Kästner wrote: “The meeting with modern and especially abstract art produced two different things: frenetic interest and

28 Morgane Walter astonishing intolerance. That is how painting offered itself as a Toleranzthema.”16 This topic of tolerance as an acceptance of modern art is central in his article: to help the new generation to appreciate modern and contemporary art, he asked German people to be more tolerant towards art. According to him, only education could help to reach this necessary acceptance. Other relevant examples were the reactions to the exhibition Rückblick und Vorschau (Review and Preview) at the Gerd Rosen Gallery that closed the frst year of the gallery in 1946 and showed mainly abstract and surrealist contemporary German art by Karl Hartung, Louise Stomps, and Heinz Trökes, among others.17 Ilse Nehemias, an American offcer in Berlin, took an inventory of reactions in front of Picasso’s paintings by writing down what he heard there. Among them were: “This should be forbidden, look at such craziness,” or “What is his name? One should smash his windows. This is outrageous,” or even “What a waste of paper. Here we are short of it, and there it is used for such nonsense,” and fnally “What has become of our wonderful clean German art again? We were so proud, when fnally, we got rid of our ‘Entartete Kunst’ . . . and now they have the nerve to show us dirt again.”18 These quotes are symptomatic of the modern art reception in post-war Germany; comments of this type were regularly published in journals and reports. People could express freely their own opinion after twelve years of Nazism, so they did. Readers sent thousands of letters to journals like Die Neue Zeitung in Berlin. Surveys and opinion polls were given in several exhibitions. For instance, in the catalogue of Meister französischer Malerei der Gegenwart (Masters of Contemporary French Painting), organised in Freiburg by the French military government, some of the comments made by the public and coming from a questionnaire were published.19 The most relevant feature of these opinion polls at exhibitions may be that they were aimed at measuring the democratic progress of the mentality of Germans. The role of this cultural democratic education and mentality evolution was often enhanced in reports and offcial texts, like the “Report on Germany” written by Edith Standen and published in 1948 in the College Art Journal: But the most valuable work now being done is summed up in the word “reeducation”. To “observe, report and advise” are said to be the duties of Military Government; the future of the world may depend on the advice. In the art feld, America has much to offer, from new conceptions of town-planning to the development of the museum as a community asset. Every step taken which tends to re-open the closed German mind, to make the German once more a European, a citizen of the world, is a contribution to world peace. Such activities as the joint German–American exhibitions at the Wiesbaden Collecting Point are potent weapons in the long struggle for the re-building and re-orientation of Germany.20 The strong moral dimension of the ‘duties’ of American Military Government is clear in this fragment, especially for education through culture. The College Art Journal published several reports on Germany in the late 1940s, which show the interest of Americans for the policies they led in Europe. There are plenty of reasons to explain this interest: to show US readers, for example, that the investigations in Germany were led effciently and that the United States had a real political and cultural infuence in Europe that would also lead to an American “contribution to world peace.” Nevertheless, these reports—and so the opinion polls—were rapidly abandoned in the frst half of the 1950s, as West Germany got some independence back. In 1950, the

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French ambassador André François-Poncet sent a letter to Robert Schuman, at the time Foreign Affairs Minister, in which he wrote an assessment about what the Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles (General Direction of Cultural Relations) of the French zone had done. He said: More deeply, Nazism had deformed German youth by imposing mental refexes that defeat could not clear. . . . This demoralized mass, given over to itself, hardly adapting to its living conditions, represented a danger. It was one of the roles of our Cultural Services to work on the orientation and options for this generation with no ideal.21 So the author insists on the denazifcation task which the Cultural Affairs had to deal with, especially for the youth who only knew the Hitlerian education system. For him, one of the goals of the Service was to give courage and ideals to young Germans so that they would not be a danger anymore. They had to become a generation inspired by liberal democracy. Cold War and Artistic Indoctrination During the frst years of the post-war era, the Allies seemed to grant a certain freedom to artists, who could apparently follow their own style without any stylistic obligation towards the occupying state. But 1948 marked a turning point in the relationships among the Allies and between the artistic feld and the occupying powers. This was the year of the two monetary reforms, the Berlin blockade and the airlift and the creation of the parliamentary council in the West and the People’s Congress in the East, which led to the creation of the two German states one year later. The year 1948 was also the beginning of the so-called ‘Formalismus-Debatte,’ the debate about formalism, in the Soviet zone, which would go on until the mid-1950s.22 It began with the article by Alexander Dymschitz, a Soviet military offcer responsible for cultural policy in the Soviet Zone in Germany between 1945 and 1949.23 He was a specialist of German literature and fought for a socialist transformation of Germany. The article, published in November 1948 in the Soviet authorities’ organ Tägliche Rundschau, was entitled “About the formalist direction in German painting. A Stranger’s comments” and was a kind of manifesto against an art that was neither realistic nor socialist.24 The main arguments referred to Marx, Lenin, and Jdanov. He asserted that formalism in German modern painting was characteristic of the decadent bourgeoisie, individualism, and capitalism and that it was a danger to democracy. His arguments were met with great success in East Germany, provoking a debate about formalism that took place mainly in the Tägliche Rundschau.25 This campaign against formalism knew its climax in the beginning of the 1950s, by exhorting artists from all disciplines to follow the model of the USSR. The Soviet Military Government concurrently created a Kulturfonds in order to organise art competitions and grants for artists but also to fund public orders and acquisitions, putting Socialist Realism in the spotlight. From that moment on, art became a means of Stalinist propaganda in the Soviet zone. The Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unifed Party of Germany) toughened itself into Marxism–Leninism. Then, the artistic scene followed the political tensions: art was integrated in the struggle between liberalism and communism, between the Truman and the Jdanov

30

Morgane Walter

doctrines, to fnally become a weapon to win people’s sympathies against the other ‘bloc.’ Artists also realised and complained about the loss of artistic freedom. Karl Hofer, an eminent German artist who also became the director of the new college of arts, the Hochschule für bildende Künste, in Berlin in 1945, expressed his disappointment in a letter to his friend Gerhard Marcks: “And here also the world is not beautiful anymore. Berlin was fourishing like no other city, but now she slowly dies off. What a world of compulsion and horror.”26 Political tensions progressively got the upper hand on aesthetic considerations. Karl Hofer is a good example of that complex situation. After the war, considered then as a classic Modern, he was living in East Berlin when he became the director of the college of arts in Berlin-Wilmersdorf that was located in the British sector. He was the head of the school until his death in 1955. He always claimed an apolitical position; he was against the domination of abstraction in the 1950s and also against Socialist Realism. Consequently, he was considered as suspicious on both sides. Artistically, he was judged as too Formalist or too Socialist Realist. Then, due to his position as director of a college of art under Soviet control located in West Berlin, he was regarded as a kind of traitor—or at least as a spy for the Eastern or the Western side.27 So it was also diffcult not to take a position in this cultural Cold War. Since 1947, East Germany was not trying to hide its intentions anymore by stating an apparent artistic freedom. Exhibitions showing examples of Socialist Realism were organised. The Zweite deutsche Kunstausstellung (the Second German Art Exhibition), which took place in Dresden in 1949, exposed twelve frescoes—the typical Soviet art support—where the themes were most of the time man and work, which were also socialist subjects. Germans could see for instance Metallurgie Henningsdorf (Metalworking Industry Henningsdorf), created by René Graetz, Arno Mohr, and Horst Strempel, or Wilhelm Lachnit’s fresco Arbeit und Kultur (Work and Culture). The SED advocated pieces of art with a socialist content in a realist form. The realist method was supposed to spread the Marxist-Leninist ideology and educate people about politics, moral and aesthetic, in a Marxist-Leninist way. At the Communist Party Congress of 1946, Anton Ackermann held a speech in which he described the cultural policies of the early post-war Soviet zone and defned clearly the expectations towards artists: We see our ideal in an art with a socialist content and a realist form. But we also know that this art only can raise in a socialist society and that it still needs a long time for its development. In the Soviet Union, this artistic movement is having a particularly promising development, and we hoped that our German artists would soon have the opportunity to know it closer.28 The very advantageous material helps for socialist and fgurative artists organised by the Soviet Military Government were also a great part of the Soviet initiatives to implant Socialist Realism. In the issue of the French journal Arts of the 24th of March 1950, Jean-Louis Sebba published an article entitled “Artistic stances in Berlin. Our foreign correspondents are writing us from Germany.” He explained: The Eastern municipality is much more than inspiring. The political climate is maintained by effective attentions: restaurants without tickets and bonded laborer ration cards for the ‘culture and mind workers,’ clubs available for them, and, strong argument in a slump in sale period: the state orders.29

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It is obvious here that the author tried to vehicle a positive image of Soviet cultural policies in France. Actually, there were real benefts for artists who were—or were accepted to be—socially engaged. As a matter of fact, everyone seemed to fnd their own satisfaction in this situation. The frst central cultural congress of the SED took place in May 1948. It represented an important step in the gradual involvement of the Soviet Military Government in the artistic feld. However, the former apparent artistic plurality seemed to be over, swept away by the future monopoly of socialist fgurative art—meaning the soon-to-be Socialist Realism. Artists of the Landesverband der SED (Trade Union of the SED) clearly stated their position: We turn ourselves against a formalist art that—as an expression of the hopelessness of the bourgeois society—looks for a refuge in an aestheticized cultivation of form. . . . We demand from the progressive press, especially from artistic journals (bildende kunst), to highlight the positive messages of the piece of art and its effectiveness to move society, by evaluating and contemplating the artistic creation.30 In this congress, Anton Ackermann also made an important speech about cultural policies in the Soviet zone. Even if he did not use yet the expression “Socialist Realism,” he clearly stated that art had to be socialist and had to create a close relationship with the public, in a stronger way than he did in 1946 at the Communist Party Congress. Art was called to be at the worker’s service and had thus a real political duty in German socialist society. It was expected to show the new man at work, the benefts of hard work, and how he contributed to the construction of the socialist state. On the Western side, the interweaving of politics and art was not as visible in discourses. It was much more the exhibition policies, the press, events organised by the cultural missions, and then in the artists’ words that this phenomenon could appear clearly. Some more global initiatives that the Congress for Cultural Freedom created in 1950 were also the mirror of the American ambition to have a cultural infuence worldwide, as the world discovered in 1967 that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded the institution.31 From 1948 on, as a consequence to this politicisation of art, each bloc appropriated an artistic tendency. So, according to the German art critics and connoisseurs and to the Allies’ cultural offcers, abstraction should be the occidental weapon to fght against communism and Socialist Realism, the response to the enemy of capitalism and imperialism. These interpretations of art and the making of models that Germany had to follow were also closely related to a kind of re-interpretation of art history.

European Art History in the Eyes of the Blocs Looking for Democratic Heroes: Canonisation of the Moderns At the very frst moment after the collapse of the Nazi regime, the Allies had primarily shown artists who had been defamed by the Nazis in exhibitions, with the aim of rehabilitating them. The four winning countries shared this will, even if their fnal goals were different. On the one hand, the Soviets were in a temporary process of re-education to eradicate fascism and then to create a new socialist state, following the Stalinist ideology. On the other hand, the occidental Allies canonised the Moderns in order to infuence future German art, aiming at a cultural infuence abroad and at creating new

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collaborations with West Germany. The frst noteworthy exhibitions that showed these rehabilitation intentions were the Deutsche Kunstausstellung held in Berlin in 1945 and the Erste allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung in Dresden in 1946. One can observe two phases in the early post-war period. During the frst one, the Allies tried to rehabilitate the German Moderns, meaning a majority of artists associated with Expressionism. Then the second one consisted in searching new artistic forms and new attitudes in society. These researches resulted in a complete unity between art and people by means of Socialist Realism in the East and in the promotion of liberal individuals illustrated by abstraction in the West. Defamed artists were considered as spiritual models that young artists should follow. On the 30th of June 1945, Adolf Behne, an architect mostly active as an art and architecture critic and theoretician strongly engaged in the renewal of art in the Soviet Zone of Germany until his death in 1948,32 made a speech at a conference called “Degenerate art—a Hitler’s lie” at the offcial opening of the Volkshochschule in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.33 Referring to degenerate art, he spoke about the “spiritual model of a brave, completely human, non-bourgeois, artistically revolutionary and social painting.”34 The use of the word ‘model’ presupposed a moral dimension of their attitude, at the service of socialist idealism. It is also important to note that this conference took place only a few weeks after the collapse of the Nazi regime, in a heavily destroyed city: that brings to light the extreme rapidity and the determination of the military governments in charge in Berlin. These kinds of conferences were recurring, being often organised by the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany), and they discussed the role and duty of art in the post-war German society. Many critics and theoreticians shared the arguments of Behne, expressing a detachment towards Nazi cultural policies by a re-evaluation of expressionist art as an historical artistic trend that had been important for the development of art history.35 Along the same lines, Hans Belting explained the mythologisation phenomenon on the Western side in these terms: An art that had become a national sacrifce demanded always more the unreserved recognition and was almost insulted by the doubt. . . . Modern art has been canonized even before one had reached an agreement about a model. This verifes the supposed ‘Hour Zero’ in 1945. Abstraction’s victory was easy, because the realisms were compromised since their state use.36 So, according to him, the occidental Allies had canonised the Moderns and implanted abstraction in the future Federal Republic of Germany without any diffculty, because for many fgurative art was still strongly associated with Nazi art. However, abstraction actually only found recognition in the mid-1950s, because there were obstacles like the German public’s reluctance. The acceptance of abstraction, this universal language, so-called by Werner Hartmann at the second documenta,37 with artistic groups like ZEN 49, Junger Westen, and Quadriga, needed time. Its success occurred thanks to several factors such as initiatives of German abstraction defenders, (the most important ones were Will Grohmann, Werner Haftmann, Franz Roh, and Ottomar Domnick), cultural events organised by the Allies, and the will to reintegrate the Western international artistic scene that was dominated by the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School and the abstraction lyrique of the École de Paris at the time. Moreover, the association between fguration and Nazi art was also the result of the occidental Allies’ propaganda. Socialist Realism has sometimes been compared to

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totalitarian art because fascism, Nazism, or Leninism all used fguration as a means of expression in order to deliver a political message imposed by the regime.38 Noteworthy also in Belting’s quotation is the use of the expression “national sacrifce,” showing all the pathos employed in the discourses about modern defamed artists and the fact that no one should dare to put recognition of modern art in doubt, facts that are here carefully criticised. Competition and National Projections According to John-Paul Stonard, we can distinguish two types of national expressions during this period. The frst one is a kind of German national ambition: to operate a renewal of their art, Germans also wanted to rehabilitate the art produced before 1933 and fnd the origins of their national traditions, especially in Expressionism. This happened essentially through private exhibitions, conferences, and publications in art journals, magazines, newspapers, and essays by art historians—the latter would later somehow inform the frst documenta in 1955. The main goal was to annihilate the Nazi discourse and enjoy renewed modern art partially through the rediscovery of defamed masters. But it should also be noted that this research of national traditions was not specifcally German; it was as such more of a European phenomenon. After what was considered as the collapse of European civilisation, Western European countries felt the need to reaffrm some basic principles such as style, tradition, art, or more generally, occident.39 The second type is a national cultural expression, the so-called national projection, also called in French “rayonnement culturel.”40 In fact, even if the frst objective of the Allies was to rehabilitate artists defamed by the Third Reich, they also obviously followed their national interests. This means that each occupying country tried to infuence the new German culture with its own national one. That is the reason why we could see so many Houses of America, British Information Centers, and French Cultural Missions being established in the main cities of the Western trizone after the fusion of the three occidental zones in 1948. These centres were theoretically independent institutions. However, they were also funded mainly by the trizone authorities and were part of the foreign cultural policies planning of each country.41 They all organised events in order to fght against the progress of communism and to support the re-education led by the Allies; the national projection had to fnish convincing German people of the merits of liberal democracy. In the Soviet Zone, there was also the House of Culture of the Soviet Union, which opened in 1947 in Berlin, showing the USSR culture and programming cultural events. I am going to focus now on the exhibition policies of the French zone. These were led mostly by the Direction of Public Education, especially the Fine Arts Section, whose missions were re-education and cultural spreading. The French zone was particularly active in Germany.42 Some data could maybe give a better idea: between 1945 and 1949, the Fine Arts Section of the Direction of Public Education organised around 46 exhibitions in several German cities. Among these 46 exhibitions, 23 presented modern art, including seventeen showing French art—the other exhibitions showed mainly ancient German masters like Albrecht Dürer or Lucas Cranach. This reveals the will of the French Zone to spread modern art and especially French modern artists. There was also a strong desire to show the Germans that France was culturally dominating them. They had to feel the ‘génie français’ (French genius) at work.43 But France also needed to impress the other countries occupying Germany.

34 Morgane Walter Because it was the fourth zone of occupation, and it was economically and politically weaker than the three other occupying forces, it felt a kind of lack of legitimacy. This is also linked to the fact that Paris always thought of itself as the world’s artistic centre and considered that French art production had to serve a kind of cultural mission towards other countries.44 The American authorities recognised the work done by the French; this can be seen in the “Report on Germany” from Edith Standen: The French have accomplished the most; they have circulated fne exhibitions of French art and helped and encouraged every type of cultural activity. But what they show the Germans is ‘La belle France’ alone; even the offcer who organized the frst Baden-Baden exhibition admitted that this show was rather propaganda. (It was called “Les Entretiens entre la France et le pays de Bade” and covered the period between 1600 and 1800 during which the two countries were usually at war).45 This quotation also shows the consciousness of authorities and reporters about this “rayonnement culturel” and the propaganda character of these active exhibition policies. One of the most relevant exhibitions was the Moderne Französische Malerei (French Modern Painting), which showed 130 paintings of around 100 Impressionist painters until 1946. It had circulated in Berlin, Mainz, Dusseldorf, Vienna, and Munich between 1946 and 1947. Nonetheless the avant-gardist tendencies were not represented: the French Military Government chose to show the French classic moderns, which should be connected to the fact that each country had a specifc perception of its art. In France, classic moderns were still considered as the grand French art, whereas the most recent production was neglected. The other main exhibition is the Meister der Französischer Malerei der Gegenwart (Masters of French Painting of the Present), co-organised in 1947 by Maurice Jardot, Kurt Martin, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in Freiburg. Again, the Germans could see pieces by Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse, Chagall, or Gris.46 Then, from 1949 on, one could see more monographic exhibitions. For example, in 1949 there were Léger, Masson, and Rouault exhibitions;47 in 1951 Braque, Matisse, and Maillol; and in 1955 the frst and very successful Picasso exhibition in Germany was organised. These French exhibitions were very esteemed by German artists and the press. Heinz Trökes, a surrealist artist, said it was “like a great and free breath through all the zones.”48 Willi Baumeister, one of the most important painters of German post-war abstraction, explained that it was the very frst time in twelve years he saw occidental works of art, and it was as a revelation to him. The public was also interested in French modern art: there was such a crowd at exhibitions that occupying governments had to set up special trains from many German cities or organised school trips to allow people to see them. The Moderne Französische Malerei counted around 150,000 visitors,49 whereas the frst documenta only had 130,000. These data help understand the importance of these events for the artistic scene and for the German reception of art. In the Munich step, the exhibition was installed in the Haus der Kunst (House of Art), where the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) took place. These rooms and their high symbolic meaning were obviously not chosen by accident. The tensions brought by the Cold War turned the relationships between occidental Allies and Germans into a kind of exchange. The greatest efforts around national

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projection were done in Berlin, where the development of cultural policies was the most perceptible. There were close contacts between the several occupation authorities, and then, from 1947–1948 on, a certain rivalry. As we have seen, the national projection was mainly directed towards the German people—but also the other occupying Military Governments—by showing which national art was dominating. In his letter to Robert Schuman, the French Ambassador recognised the importance of this projection mission: In our effort to reeducate the German youth, by initiating them to a different culture, we met our allies for that matter. The British and the Americans, individually, made huge efforts, spending lavishly, and implementing staff and important means to operate this ‘reorientation.’ Germany rapidly became a battlefeld between rival infuences. Were we going to let us be taken over? It was important that our rayonnement culturel did not lose ground to the other ones.50 Thus, this cultural infuence was a real concern for all the occupation forces, and it included among their targets not only the Germans but also the rest of the occupation forces. Therefore, this was not only about an East/West opposition but also an interWestern Allies competition for cultural superiority. A Different European Art History? A strong tendency in the post-war period was to look at the past in order to fnd solutions for the present. By celebrating old or modern masters and showing them under another angle, some authors proposed new interpretations of their work. The latter had to inspire young German artists to become representatives of either liberal or communist growing societies. The Eastern journal bildende kunst, under the authority of the Soviet Military Government, is a meaningful example. In the frst few years of its publication, the directors Karl Hofer and Oskar Nerlinger assured this journal would be open to every single style or subject, promoting a form of liberalist spirit towards the arts. But the review rapidly followed the Marxist-Leninist ideology; it informed readers about the realistic and social tradition in art history in order to help the contemporary experimentations of artists. If we take a close look at the articles published in this journal, we can see the construction of a realistic tradition in art history, from the Middle Ages to 1945. Bildende kunst reinvented the Socialist Realism masters. Indeed, Goya, for example, was lauded for his criticism of the Spanish society,51 whereas in the article “Courbet, a socialist realist,” this painter was described as revolutionary.52 These artists seem to have been considered ideals for Socialist Realism. Another important fgure was Käthe Kollwitz,53 who was much lauded for her interest in the proletarian world. They all were presented as models to follow for the young German artists’ generation. Furthermore, the exhibition organised in 1947–1948, titled 150 Jahre soziale Strömungen in der bildenden Kunst (150 Years of Social Tendencies in Art), also proposed an evolution of socially engaged realism since Goya. On the Western side, journals used the same method with abstract art. Some artists and defenders of this tendency wanted to show how all the history of art progressively led to abstraction. This is visible in the journal Das Kunstwerk—the Western twin of bildende kunst54—which published a double issue devoted to abstract and

36 Morgane Walter non-fgurative art.55 But the most famous examples are undoubtedly Werner Haftmann’s theory and Willi Baumeister’s book The Unknown in Art published in 1947.56 There was a form of absolutism of abstract art in Baumeister’s theory that Wolf Goeltzer held for dangerous because it could possibly have led to a doctrinal hallmark, which would have been in opposition to the essence of abstraction.57 Therefore, each artistic tendency tried to prove its own legitimacy by fnding traditional models in art history and, in doing so, they succeeded in providing different interpretations of European art history. To conclude, the Allied military governments really involved themselves in the cultural and artistic German life after 1945. Art progressively became a political weapon and had to be necessarily democratic, but democracy didn’t have the same meaning for Western Allies and for the Soviets. Their frst common antifascist policies were replaced from 1948 on by anti-communist and anti-imperialist policies. On the one hand, the Western Allies aimed at showing what they thought to be real freedom, following a liberal vision of artist and society. On the other hand, the Soviet authorities pursued a Stalinist and Marxist-Leninist vision of democracy in order to support the construction of a new socialist East Germany. At the same time—and to achieve these political goals—the Allies put emphasis on exhibition policies. Their frst action was to rehabilitate the German modern artists, in order to present them as martyrs and heroes. This mythologisation was mainly planned to support the Allies’ propaganda about democratic art, but it also permitted these artists to offcially integrate German art history, as they weren’t considered as degenerate anymore. Furthermore, the Allies wanted to spread their own national art and relevant artistic tendencies, which later resulted in the development of abstraction in West Germany and of Socialist Realism in East Germany. This chapter has shown that these cultural policies partly led to a new reading of European art development, because art historians for the frst time included the modern German artists in German art history after they had been totally eradicated during the Nazi period—a fact visible in exhibitions, articles, and essays—and because the several military governments tried to demonstrate that traces of Socialist Realism or of abstraction had already been there in Germany or in Europe for a long time. As a good way to introduce democracy in Germany, art also helped West Germany to reintegrate the international scene. In fact, after the Allies’ departure in 1955, the FRG carried on a relevant cultural international diplomacy. By organising German art exhibitions abroad58 and by legitimating German modern artists in the international art history arena, post-war Germany began to get its place back on the artistic scene abroad. Art was part of a “democratic normalisation” process,59 which was necessary for the West German reintegration in the world in the 1960s.

Notes 1. At that moment, France was not implicated yet in the discussions. 2. René Cheval, “L’Université de Tübingen pendant la période d’occupation,” in La Dénazifcation par les vainqueurs: la politique culturelle des occupants en Allemagne, 1945–1949, ed. Jérôme Vaillant (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981), 53. 3. Potsdam Agreement Protocol of the Proceedings, 1st August, 1945. Source: “A Decade of American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1941–49,” prepared at the request of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations By the Staff of the Committee and the Department of State (Washington, DC: Government Printing Offce, 1950).

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4. Allied Control Council, Order n°4, 13.05.1946. Quoted in Ulrike Ziegler, Kulturpolitik im geteilten Deutschland: Kunstausstellungen und Kunstvermittlung von 1945 bis zum Anfang der 60er Jahre (Francfurt: Europäische Hochschulschriften Series XXVIII: Distributed by Peter Lang, 2006). 5. The question of denazifcation purges is complex and the given numbers are still uncertain. The Allies had to decide what to do with some 8.5 million Germans that had joined the Nazi Party: either to dismiss them or to integrate them in a new democratic society. Between 1945 and 1950, some 400,000 Germans were preventively interned. No common decision was made before January 1946, with the Directive No. 24 that had to standardise the allied measures. Still, there were disparities between each zone in their application: the Americans and the Soviets were the most diligent with this task, whereas the French and the British were more pragmatic facing an important lack of administrative personnel. Today we know that denazifcation could not be systematic and that many former Nazi adherents got their position back after 1945, especially in the intellectual and university spheres. More about this topic in Jérôme Vaillant, ed., La Dénazifcation par les vainqueurs: la politique culturelle des occupants en Allemagne, 1945–1949 (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981); Timothy R. Vogt, Denazifcation in Soviet-occupied Germany: Brandenburg, 1945–1948 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Reinhard Grohnert, Die Entnaziferung in Baden: 1945–1949. Konzeptionen und Praxis der „Epuratio“ am Beispiel eines Landes der französischen Besatzungszone (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1991); Helga Welsch, Revolutionärer Wandel auf Befehl? Entnazifzierungs- und Personalpolitik in Thüringen und Sachsen, 1945–1948 (Munich: Oldenburg, 1989); Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 6. The Allies organised at frst a military occupation of Germany during the frst three years. The tensions between Western and Eastern Allies resulted in the fusion of the three Western zones and sectors in 1948 that ended one year later in the creation of the FRG and then the GDR. From that moment on the commandants of the military governments handed their responsibilities and the supervision of the whole newborn West Germany over to high commissioners. The Western Allies and their occupation administrations fnally left Germany in 1955 according to the Paris Agreement. One year later, East-Germany got its sovereignty back and integrated the Warsaw Pact. 7. John-Paul Stonard, Fault lines: Art in Germany 1945–1955 (London: Ridinghouse, 2007). 8. Ziegler, Kulturpolitik im geteilten Deutschland; Stonard, Fault Lines; Vaillant, ed., La Dénazifcation par les vainqueurs. 9. Klaus Dietmar Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands (Munich: Oldenburg, 1995); Gabriele Clemens, Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997); Corine Defrance, La Politique culturelle de la France sur la rive gauche du Rhin, 1945–1955 (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1994). 10. David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 11. Ziegler, Kulturpolitik im geteilten Deutschland, 139–140. 12. Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte. Die bildende Kunst des 19. Und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (Salzbourg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1948). 13. With more than 180,000 books sold and eight republications until 1965, The Lost Center can be considered as a best-seller in the German-speaking world. 14. Erich Kästner, “Augsburger Diagnose,” in Der Tägliche Kram. Chanson und Prosa 1945– 1948 (Zurich: Atrium Verlag, 1949), 25–31. 15. Erich Kästner was a German poet, author, and screenwriter, well-known for his satirist and socially critical poems. His article, published at frst in Die Neue Zeitung in January 1946, was a report about the exhibition and the results of the opinion polls. To learn more about this topic, see: Heiner Gembris, “Was sagt das Publikum zur Kunst der Avantgarde? Aus dem Gästebuch der Klanginstallation von John Cage auf der documenta,” in Musik und Bildende Kunst, ed. Rudolf-Dieter Kraemer (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, Musikpädagogische Forschung. Band 10, 1990), 90–110. 16. “Die Begegnung mit moderner, insbesondere abstrakter Kunst zeitigte zweierlei: frenetisches Interesse und erstaunliche Intoleranz. So bot sich gerade die Malerei als Toleranzthema

38 Morgane Walter

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

an.” Quoted in Andreas Drouve, Erich Kästner. Moralist mit doppeltem Bogen (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999), 245. The Gerd Rosen Gallery was the frst gallery that opened in Berlin after the war, on the 9th of August 1945. It was well-known for its exhibitions of modern and especially surrealist German artists that built a group called the Rosen circle. NA/OMGUS/ISD/007. Fine Arts/Ilse Nehemias, “Proposal of Features on Modern Art on US-Controlled Radio Stations,” 26/08/1946, quoted in Stonard, Fault Lines, 97–98. “Beurteilungen der Ausstellung,” in Die Meister französischer Malerei der Gegenwart, exhibition catalogue, Friedrichsbau Freiburg (1947), 41–52, 45. Quoted in Stonard, Fault Lines, 99. Edith A. Standen and Franz Brendel, “Report on Germany,” College Art Journal, no. 7 (New York, Spring, 1948): 212–213. “Plus profondément, le nazisme avait déformé la jeunesse allemande, en lui imposant des réfexes mentaux dont la défaite n’avait pas réussi à la débarrasser. [. . .] Cette masse démoralisée, livrée à elle-même, s’adaptant diffcilement à ses conditions de vie, représentait un danger. Ce fut l’un des rôles de nos Services Culturels, que d’agir sur l’orientation et les options de cette génération privée d’idéal.” Quoted in “Letter from the French Ambassador in Germany to Robert Schuman,” undated [probably year 1950], Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Centre des archives diplomatiques de la Courneuve, ZFO/1AC, 2. This debate is also called “Formalismuskampagne” (Campaign about Formalism) by Eckhart Gillen, a specialist of the arts in the GDR. That expression probably describes better this phenomenon that was more than a debate but much more a confictual discussion. See: Eckhart Gillen, “Die Formalismuskampagne 1948–1953,” in Das Kunstkombinat DDR. Zäsuren einer gescheiterten Kunstpolitik (Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2005), 34–40. Alexander Dymschitz (1910–1975) also was an author and university professor in the USSR. In May 1945 he was a press offcer and worked in the cultural redaction of the journal Tägliche Ründschau. From November 1945 until May 1949, when he returned to Leningrad, he was active in the cultural department of the SMAD. Alexander Dymschitz, “Über die formalistische Richtung in der deutschen Malerei. Bemerkungen eines Aussenstehenden,” Tägliche Rundschau, 19 November 1948, 11. See some of the main articles of this debate: Alexander Dymschitz, “Über die formalistische Richtung in der deutschen Malerei. Bemerkungen eines Aussenstehenden”; Herbert Sandberg, “Der Formalismus und die neue Kunst,” Tägliche Rundschau, 17 December 1948; N. Orlow (Wladimir Semjonow), “Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst, Tägliche Rundschau, 21 January 1951. “Und hier ist die Welt auch nicht mehr schön. Berlin war im Aufblühen wie keine andere Stadt, aber nun stirbt es langsam ab. Welch eine Welt des Irreseins und des Grausens.” Karl Hofer, “Brief an Gerhard Marcks,” 19 February 1949, quoted in Andreas Hünecke, Karl Hofer, Malerei hat eine Zukunft: Briefe, Aufsätze, Reden (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1991), 306. Gisela Conermann, Bildende Kunst in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone. Die ersten Schritte bis hin zum sozialistischen Realismus im Spiegel der Zeitschrift „bildende kunst“ von 1947–1949 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995). “Unser Ideal sehen wir in einer Kunst, die ihrem Inhalt nach sozialistisch, ihrer Form nach realistisch ist. Wir wissen aber auch, dass diese Kunst erst in einer sozialistischen Gesellschaft zur Geltung kommen kann und selbst dann noch lange Zeit zu ihrer Entwicklung braucht. In der Sowjetunion macht diese neue Kunstrichtung eine äusserst verheissungsvolle Entwicklung durch, und wir wünschten, dass unsere deutschen Künstler recht bald die Möglichkeit haben, sich mit ihr näher bekanntzumachen.” Quoted in Anton Ackermann, “Unsere Kulturpolitische Sendung,” in Um die Erneuerung der deutschen Kultur (Berlin: Kommunistische Parteitagung, 1946), 35–54, 53. “La municipalité de l’Est fait beaucoup plus que d’inspirer. Le climat politique est entretenu par des attentions effectives: restaurants sans tickets et cartes d’alimentation de travailleurs de force pour les ‘travailleurs de la culture et de l’esprit’, clubs à la disposition de ces mêmes travailleurs et, argument de poids dans une période de mévente: les commandes de l’Etat.” Jean-Louis Sebba, “Les prises de positions artistiques à Berlin. Nos correspondants

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30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

39

de l’Etranger nous écrivent . . . d’Allemagne,” Arts, 24 March 1950, quoted in Martin Schieder and Friedericke Kitschen, Art vivant. Quellen und Kommentare zu den deutschfranzösischen Kunstbeziehungen 1945–1960 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2011), 122. The author refers to the fresco realised by Horst Strempel, Arno Mohr, and René Graetz in 1949, entitled Metallurgie Henningsdorf. It was created for the Maison des Expositions (House of Exhibitions) in Dresden. But the author did not mention the fact that the outline had been refused and destroyed because Horst Strempel was considered too formalist by the art critics and the GDR cultural offcers. “Wir wenden uns gegen eine formalistische Kunst, die als Ausdruck der Ausweglosigkeit der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ihre Zufucht zu ästhetisierender Formkultivierung nimmt. . . . Wir fordern von der fortschrittlichen Presse, insbesondere von den Kunstzeitschriften (‘bildende kunst’), dass sie in der Wertung und Betrachtung des Kunstschaffens die positive Aussage und die gesellschaftsbewegende Wirksamkeit des Kunstwerks mehr in den Vordergrund stellen,” in Connermann, Bildende Kunst in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone, 38. See Sarah Miller Harris, The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War: The Limits of Making Common Cause (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2013). Adolf Behne (1885–1948) was mainly active during the 1920s by promoting Expressionism and taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin until 1933. During the Nazi period he wrote several essays about art history, including his well-known Entartete Kunst (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1947). He also built the reception building of the train station in Düsseldorf. In 1947 he was professor of art history at the National University of Art in Berlin until his death. “Entartete Kunst—eine Hitler-Lüge,” Erhard Frommhold, “Widerspruch und Gemeinsamkeit. Tendenzen der Kunstkritik der DDR,” in Weggefährte, Zeitgenossen: bildende Kunst aus drei Jahrzehnten (Berlin: Zentrum für Kunstausstellungen der DDR, 1979), 395–408, 397. See also Adolf Behne, Entartete Kunst (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1947), 46. “den vorbildlichen Geist einer kühnen, allmenschlich, unbürgerlichen, künstlerischrevolutionären, zum Sozialen hindrängenden Malerei. . . .” Behne, Entartete Kunst, 7. Maike Steinkamp, Das unerwünschte Erbe. Die Rezeption “entarteter” Kunst in Kunstkritik, Ausstellungen und Museen der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und der frühen DDR (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008). “Eine Kunst, die zum staatlichen Opfer geworden war, forderte nur mehr das vorbehaltlose Bekenntnis ein und wurde durch Zweifel nahezu beleidigt. . . . Die moderne Kunst wurde kanonisiert, noch bevor man sich über einen Kanon geeinigt hatte. Das beweist die vermeintliche ‘Stunde Null’ im Jahre 1945. Die Abstraktion hatte einen leichten Sieg, da die Realismen seit dem staatlichen Gebrauch kompromittiert waren.” Hans Belting, “Bilderstreit: ein Streit um die Moderne,” in Bilderstreit—Widerspruch, Einheit und Fragment in der Kunst seit 1960, eds. Siegfried Gohr and Johannes Gachang (Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1989), 18. This text of Hans Belting has been published in the catalogue of the eponymous retrospective exhibition Iconoclasm—appeal, unity and fragment in art since 1960 held by the Museum Ludwig of Cologne in 1989. Werner Haftmann, “Malerei nach 1945,” in documenta II, exhibition catalogue (Kassel: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1959), 17. Conermann, Bildende Kunst in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone. Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “Art History in German-speaking Countries,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, eds. Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 335–353. More about this concept in Schieder and Kitschen, Art vivant; Martin Schieder, “Rayonnement culturel. Restauration et réception de la modernité culturelle française en Allemagne entre la fn de la guerre et Documenta I,” in Verfolgt und umstritten! Remigrierte Künstler im Nachkriegsdeutschland, eds. Michael Grisko and Henrike Walter (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011), 205–230. See Maike Steinkamp, “The Propagandistic Role of Modern Art in Postwar Germany,” in Berlin Divided City 1945–1989, eds. Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake (New York:

40 Morgane Walter

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

Berghahn Books, 2013), 23–33; Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “American Cultural Foreign Policy Towards Germany, 1949–69,” in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, ed. Detlev Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 401–408. Schieder, “Rayonnement culturel,” 205–230. Schieder, “Einleitung. Moderne französische Malerei vom Impressionismus bis zur Gegenwart, 1946. Jean Cassou,” in Schieder and Kitschen, Art vivant, 34–42. Emily Löffer, “La politique culturelle dans les zones d’occupation française et américaine,” in La création artistique en Allemagne occupée (1945–1949). Enjeux esthétiques et politiques, ed. Elise Petit (Sampzon: Editions Delatour France, 2015), 125–144. On French diplomacy towards Germany and the world during the Cold War, see Albert Salon, L’action culturelle de la France dans le monde: analyse critique (Paris: Nathan, 1983); Emmanuelle Picard, “Des usages de l’Allemagne. Politique culturelle française en Allemagne et rapprochement franco-allemand, 1945–1963. Politique publique, trajectoires, discours” (PhD diss., Sciences de l’Homme et Société, Institut d’études politiques de Paris—Sciences Po, 1999), https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00267294/ [Accessed: 01/08/2019]; Annie Guénard, “Réfexions sur une diplomatie culturelle de la France,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, no. 65–66 (2002): 23–27. Standen and Brendel, “Report on Germany,” 211. Stonard, Fault Lines. Stonard, Fault Lines. “wie ein grosser, freier Atemzug durch alle Zonen,” Heinz Trökes, “Moderne Kunst in Deutschland,” Das Kunstwerk, Baden-Baden, no. 8–9 (1946–47). Martin Schieder, Im Blick des anderen. Die deutsch-französischen Kunstbeziehungen 1945–1949 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 58–59. “Dans notre effort pour rééduquer la jeunesse allemande, en l’initiant à une culture différente, nous nous rencontrions, au demeurant, avec nos Alliés. Anglais et Américains, de leur côté, frent un effort gigantesque, dépensant sans compter, mettant en œuvre un personnel et des moyens considérables, en vue d’opérer cette ‘réorientation’. L’Allemagne constitua vite un champ de bataille entre des infuences rivales. Allions-nous nous laisser distancer? Il importait que notre rayonnement culturel ne le cédât en rien à celui des autres occupants.” Quoted in “Letter from the French Ambassador in Germany to Robert Schuman,” undated [probably year 1950], Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Centre des archives diplomatiques de la Courneuve, ZFO/1AC, 3. Ernst Wüsten, “Francisco Goya,” bildende kunst, Zeitschrift für Malerei, Graphik, Plastik und Architektur, Berlin, no. 5 (1948): 6. Heinz Lüdecke, “Courbet, ein sozialer Realist,” in bildende kunst, Zeitschrift für Malerei, Graphik, Plastik und Architektur, Berlin, no. 2 (1948): 2–6. Willi Schrein, “Käthe Kollwitz,” in bildende kunst, Zeitschrift für Malerei, Graphik, Plastik und Architektur, Berlin, no. 1 (1947): 5. Das Kunstwerk and bildende kunst were the two most widely read art journals on each side of Germany. They both frst stated an impartial point of view at the beginning of their publication but fnally gradually defended abstraction or Socialist Realism. Das Kunstwerk. Zeitschrift für Moderne Kunst, Baden-Baden, no. 8–9 (1946–47). Willi Baumeister, Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (Stuttgart: Curt E. Schwab Verlagsgesellschaft m. b. H., 1947 (ed. 1960)). Wolf Goeltzer, Stunde Null. Deutsche Kunst der späten vierziger Jahre (Stuttgart: Stuttgarter Galerieverein, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1998). We can mention the exhibition Peinture et sculpture non fguratives en Allemagne d’aujourd’hui by the Cercle Volney in 1955, or German Art of the Twentieth Century shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1957. These exhibitions were both organised in partnership between the FRG and the hosting land, that is France and the United States. The frst one by the Cercle Volney was organised by the French gallery owner René Drouin and Wilhelm Wessel. The exhibition director of the second one was Andrew Carnduff Ritchie from the MoMa, whereas the scientifc conception was led by Werner Haftmann, Alfred Hentzen, and William S. Lieberman, with a strong sponsorship from the FRG. Stonard, Fault Lines.

3

UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions Project Bringing (French) Art to the World Rachel E. Perry

Soon after its establishment in 1946, UNESCO launched an ambitious transnational cultural initiative that had a profound role in shaping and consolidating the myth of a unifed European cultural heritage in the post-war period. Beginning in 1949 and over the next three decades, UNESCO directed a project to collect, advertise, and exhibit colour reproductions throughout the world, by publishing a Catalogue of Colour Reproductions and organising Travelling Exhibitions of Colour Reproductions.1 Reaching all member states in the United Nations, the Colour Reproductions of Paintings project was presented as “one of Unesco’s essential tasks,”2 embodying the organisation’s central tenet, that the transnational circulation of art, through reproductive media, could ensure peace and understanding. An early UNESCO logo featured a painter at work on an enormous canvas, holding a palette in his hand composed of the continents, literally ‘drawing’ the world together (Fig. 3.1). UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions were meant to function as “an Ambassador in the circles and places where no original material exists.”3 Colour Reproductions were seen as delegates—or portable emissaries—and they were sent out from Paris as long-distance missionaries in exhibitions described as ‘mobile’ and ‘itinerant.’ Looking at UNESCO’s programme in the frst decade of its operation, this chapter will argue that despite their promotion of international cosmopolitanism, the Colour Reproductions catalogues and exhibitions ended up “reasserting the cultural pre-eminence of Western Europe in a period of intense geopolitical transformation.”4 Thanks to the central position of French professionals (André Malraux, René Huyghe, and Jean Cassou) in the project, UNESCO’s mission to bring great art to the world effectively bolstered French state power and consolidated Western European cultural hegemony, excluding those artists working in the peripheries. Precisely at the moment when techniques of mechanical reproduction were profoundly changing access to works of art and making them available in ‘living colour’ across the globe, UNESCO, through its primarily French ICOM appointed experts, was, perhaps unwittingly, controlling which artists and works of art mattered.

A Pioneering Project The Colour Reproductions project was one of the frst projects UNESCO undertook upon its ratifcation in November 1946.5 A priority for the fedgling organisation, it is already detailed in the 1946 Preparatory Commission’s Report on the Programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization.6 At the Second General Conference, a resolution was passed “To draw up, in collaboration

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Figure 3.1 The UNESCO Courier, vol. II, no. 11 (1 January 1950): 1. Source: Photograph by the author.

with experts selected with the assistance of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), a list of available high-quality colour reproductions designed to illustrate the most important phases and movements in art.”7 UNESCO immediately set to work, contacting a long list of publishers and printers and soliciting their assistance in the project. They received 1,419 large and facsimile-size colour reproductions and 729 small colour prints. Although UNESCO detailed the project and its objectives, it delegated its work to an external Committee of Experts, appointed by ICOM. Its members examined and evaluated the samples submitted, establishing criteria for selection based on the fdelity of the colour reproduction, the signifcance of the artist, and the art historical importance of the original painting. For the frst publication, Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949, the committee consisted of Jean Cassou, director of the newly opened Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; René d’Harnoncourt, director of the curatorial departments and Monroe Wheeler, director of exhibitions and publications, both at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Germain Bazin, curator of paintings at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Of all the prints submitted, they selected 423 for the Catalogue. Those rejected were archived at

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UNESCO House in Paris to be maintained as “a permanent reference archive, as no other such archive exists anywhere in the world.”8 The frst Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949 was published in October 1949 (Fig. 3.2). Trilingual (French, English, Spanish), it was introduced by Cassou and listed the works alphabetically by artist, providing a small black-and-white reference illustration of the reproduction, the title of the original painting, its date and medium, provenance, dimensions, the process or techniques used for reproduction, the name of the printer and publisher, and the price of the reproduction in the currency of the country in which it was made (Fig. 3.3). To facilitate purchase, a list of printers and publishers and their contact information was provided in the back of the catalogue. UNESCO coupons, which had been introduced in 1949 as “a sort of international money order” designed to facilitate money transfers for “purchases of cultural material in countries where there may be diffculties in regard to exchange,”9 could be used, but publishers were to be contacted directly. At a time when original masterpieces were not circulated in countries beyond Europe and the United States, UNESCO saw its programme as “pioneering.”10 Spurred by technological advances in colour photography and silk-screen printing, an

Figure 3.2 Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949 (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). Private collection. Source: Photograph by the author.

44 Rachel E. Perry

Figure 3.3 Interior of Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949 (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). Private collection. Source: Photograph by the author.

entire industry of publishers, editors, and galleries devoted to colour reproductions of works of art emerged in the immediate post-war period.11 In post-war Paris, colour reproductions seemed to be everywhere. The French newspaper Le Monde ran an article in February 1950 that opened in exuberant, breathless exclamation: “Colour reproductions! Colour reproductions! They’re everywhere, even in exhibitions.”12 UNESCO’s frst catalogue listed more than 60 international printers specialising in colour reproduction—with an equal number of publishers. Each of these peddled its copyrighted trademark procedures and patents; each promised a more accurate simulation of the ‘real thing.’ Precursors of today’s online commercial ‘fne art publishing companies,’ these ventures benefted from slick advertising campaigns, trained traveling salesmen, and beautifully appointed galleries. The Galerie Braun & Cie, for example, sold its ‘fac-similes’ individually, offering clients a variety of purchasing options and sizes and, for an additional fee, reproductions could be mounted on canvas or framed and ready-to-hang in one’s living room. Advertising its trademarked ‘procédés Braun,’ its catalogue offered reproductions of the same ‘masters’ UNESCO promoted: Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Rouault, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, Maurice Utrillo, and Vincent van Gogh. In their gallery, reproductions were hung on the walls in gilded frames. Braun’s catalogue was introduced by Cassou; entitled Le musée chez soi: Les maîtres de la peinture, it appealed to discriminating

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‘connoisseurs’ and guaranteed the highest standards of verisimilitude. The Galerie Maeght also issued a series called “Éditions du Musée Personnel.” The art critic Jean Bouret wrote of a “growing vogue” for colour reproductions, basing this in large part on Cassou’s support for “the immense effort by UNESCO to provide a complete catalogue of what has been made in the world to date.”14 Coinciding neatly with the rapid economic growth and prosperity of Les trente glorieuses following the end of the First World War in France (1949–1979),15 the Archive of Colour Reproductions initiative must be situated in the larger context of the Reconstruction. UNESCO’s project was intended to prod publishers to increase the production of Colour prints and improve reproduction standards and methods.16 But it was, in no small measure, a response to the massive spoliation of artworks by the Nazis in the not so distant past and by the threat of nuclear war in the future. At the First Interim Conference of ICOM in Mexico City in November 1947, a resolution was passed specifying that “archaeological, artistic, historical and scientifc objects properly classifed as ‘unica’ should be reproduced in some form and placed in safe keeping” and “distributed throughout the world to make sure that, should the originals disappear, the men of tomorrow shall not be deprived of the irreplaceable documents” for “The war showed that the riches which make up the common patrimony of humanity are exposed to destruction.”17 Cassou reiterated this point in the frst Catalogue of 1949, explaining, “All nations have wished to regain possession, explicitly and manifestly, of the treasures of a civilization which had so nearly foundered.”18 Launched in order to promote art appreciation for “the common man,”19 UNESCO’s project was suffused with populist idealism. Driven by the belief that mass media would transcend national borders and foster cross-cultural understanding, it offered colour reproductions for as little as 25 cents to no more than ten dollars at the upper end of the scale. Acting “on behalf of the millions of people who live far from museums and galleries,” the 1950 Catalogue promoted itself as “an especially useful instrument in UNESCO’s programme of democratization.”20 Early articles stressed the project’s social value, its ability to “help bring great art closer to the people.”21 With “Art Treasures to Be Put Within Reach of All,”22 UNESCO would facilitate “The Popularization of Art” (Figs. 3.4 and 3.5).23 With such “intimate and unpretentious exhibitions,” high art would reach the masses: “Every school class cannot have access to great museums and galleries but little museums can be made in every school.”24 Reproductions would be displayed “not only in capital cities but in small towns, village halls, schools and local museums in countries throughout the world.”25 If, as Benedict Anderson has maintained, the conjunction of capitalism and print technology produced print languages that laid the bases for national consciousness, connecting fellow readers in a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that created “imagined communities,” UNESCO saw the reproduction of the visual arts as a way to transcend nationalities and language barriers and create an international, universal culture bringing together the “human family.”26 From its inception, UNESCO fully embraced and endorsed cultural internationalism, proselytising a utopian message of world citizenship.27 As Sarah Brouillette has argued of UNESCO’s book development initiatives, the colour reproductions were conceived of as “ideal objects of cultural and political diplomacy, whose exchange would foster mutual respect and 13

Figure 3.4 “The Popularization of Art through Colour Reproductions,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. II, no. 10 (November 1949): 16. Source: Photograph by the author.

Figure 3.5 “Art Treasures to Be Put Within Reach of All,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. I, no. 8 (September 1948): 6. Source: Photograph by the author.

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understanding and thereby help to secure world peace.” Cassou wrote in his introduction to the frst Catalogue, “Art is a language which all peoples of the world are now learning to speak, and which they are eager to use in understanding one another.”29 René Huyghe, the head curator of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the Louvre, reinforced the point in his 1950 report for ICOM’s Second Biennial Conference in London, where he asserted that unlike literature, “which needs to be translated,” “works of art are . . . the most effective means of making each country realize that mankind is one.”30 Art was “a great, universal language”31 that would “further mutual understanding between the peoples of all countries.”32 28

Art in Transit As the frst Catalogue went to press in 1949, UNESCO organised its frst Travelling Exhibition of Colour Reproductions.33 Consisting of 50 colour reproductions handpicked by the Committee of Experts, the exhibition covered “From Impressionism to Today.” UNESCO’s journal, the Courier, advertised the exhibition in August 1949 with a photograph of a serious, well-dressed young man standing in front of a framed reproduction of Cézanne’s The Boy with Red Vest. Pen in hand, captivated by the “masterpiece” in front of him, he cross-references the work with its listing in the catalogue (Figs. 3.6 and 3.7).

Figure 3.6 UNESCO Travelling Print Exhibition (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). Source: Photograph by the author.

48 Rachel E. Perry

Figure 3.7 “Colour Reproduction, Unesco’s First Travelling Exhibition,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. II, no. 7 (August 1949): 12. Source: Photograph by the author.

Carefully staged, the illustration indicates that his encounter with—and initiation into—modern art is doubly mediated: by the catalogue he holds in his hand and by the colour reproduction hanging on the wall. In addition to Cézanne, the exhibition showcased Edgar Degas’s La femme aux crysanthèmes (1865), Édouard Manet’s Dans un bateau (1879), Renoir’s Le déjeuner des canotiers (1881), van Gogh’s Tournesols (Sunfowers) (1888), Picasso’s L’enfant au pigeon (Child with Dove) (1901), Marie Laurencin’s Dans le parc (1924), Braque’s Anémones (1925), Marc Chagall’s Mystère matinal (1948), and works by Monet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Matisse, and Fernard Léger, among others. Shown initially at UNESCO House in Paris, it was then dispatched to member states. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition explained the project and provided an introduction by Huyghe on the history of modern art. Each work was listed by the name of the artist and the title and date of the original work. Biographical notes on the artists as well as a list of printers’ and publishers’ contact information were provided in the back of the

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catalogue. Although individual reproductions were to be purchased directly from the publishers, educational and cultural institutions could purchase unframed duplicates of the exhibition—“un jeu complet” (an entire set)—by special arrangement directly through UNESCO at reduced rates. UNESCO bore the cost of transporting the exhibitions from Paris to the frst receiving country; thereafter, transport from country to country was paid for by member states. Valued at roughly 1,000 dollars, the frst exhibition weighed almost 1,800 pounds (800 kilos); it was packed in four cases and required 164 feet (50 metres) of hanging space. The reproductions were sent framed, accompanied by wall panels, and, as Peter Bellew, head of the Arts and Letters Division at UNESCO, indicated, “absolutely ready for hanging”; the whole show was “specially packed so that it may be easily dismantled and assembled for exhibition in art galleries and educational institutions.”34 The exhibitions were held in factories, shops, recreation rooms, libraries, and town halls (and with department stores and trains discussed as possible venues). Mounted on neutral walls with a uniformly spaced hang, even when installed in temporary exhibition spaces, the Travelling Exhibitions replicated the conditions of the museum, creating a “museum effect.” Although the 1949 Catalogue specifed that “colour reproductions can never take the place of the original,” their display in the Travelling Exhibitions attempted to do just that: camoufage their status as reproductions. One of the signifcant criteria UNESCO adhered to was that the reproductions should be “en grandeur nature,” that is, with dimensions the same as or as close as possible to the original. UNESCO articles regularly elided (or deliberately obscured) the difference between facsimile and original, elevating the colour reproduction from its role as a substitute or “intermediary” (which is how Cassou described it) into a work of art in its own right. The Courier headlines promised “Great Paintings for Everyone.”35 While these titles boast universal, democratic access, they are also patent misrepresentation (or barefaced false advertising), for “paintings” they weren’t. Contra Walter Benjamin’s argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the aura was not evacuated from these reproductions but rather reinforced.36 And the public came, as hoped, in great numbers. It is hard to quantify the reach of these exhibitions, but the UNESCO catalogues were consistently “sold out in a short time” (and the costs of its publications covered).37 When the exhibition was frst shown at UNESCO House in Paris in 1949, it was “met with outstanding success, such a success indeed that it has been necessary to increase the number of Travelling Exhibitions from fve to eleven.”38 It would appear that the so-called cultural outposts were, in fact, hungry for these objects; they welcomed them, advertised them, celebrated them. One way to gauge the popularity of these exhibitions is through the local reception. Highly publicised events, the openings of the Travelling Exhibitions were greeted with a furry of coverage. Each country was responsible for promoting and publicising the programme locally.39 This frst exhibition was sent to Brazil, Australia, India, Mexico, Haiti, the United Kingdom (for colonial territories in Africa and the Far East), Persia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Norway, among many other countries.40 UNESCO archives contain countless newspaper articles, letters of congratulation and appreciation, records of comments inscribed in the guest books, and photographs of overdressed heads of state and government offcials posing stiffy in front of the reproductions as press ops for diplomatic and public relations (Fig. 3.8).41

50 Rachel E. Perry

Figure 3.8 Formal Opening of UNESCO Travelling Exhibition of Colour Reproductions Prior to 1860 in Manila, Philippines, 20 March 1952. Dr. Eduardo Quisumbing, Director of the National Museum, Mrs. Lopez, wife of Vice-President, and Mr. William Ellia, UN Technical Assistance Representative beside Fragonard’s The Love Letter. Source: UNESCO archives.

In other words, for those who could not afford to travel to the big museums to see works in situ, the works—or, more precisely, their substitutes—would travel. UNESCO would bring the art to the world through the diffusion of print media—in hopes that they would, in turn, spur tourism. Commercial transoceanic air travel was just beginning in the late 1940s, and international tourism was instrumentally embraced by the French government as a central element of cultural policy. In 1948, the Commissariat Général du Tourisme referred to tourism as “the highest French industry.”42 Fuelled by the Marshall Plan, leisure travel was heavily promoted between 1947 and 1952 in France. The Salon du Tourisme was inaugurated in 1950, directed in particular at “Monsieur et Madame Amérique,” prototypical American tourists to be exposed to the “grandeur of the French civilization.”43 In a speech at ICOM in 1950, Huyghe stressed that traveling exhibitions “would not be the competitors of the museums, but would act as an introduction to them and whet the public appetite.”44 Cassou likewise framed UNESCO’s project in these terms, viewing reproductions as both “preparation for the experiences and revelations which museums and foreign travel hold in store” (as he put it: “seeing them before they feast their eyes on the originals”) and as souvenirs of their visits (“the need for providing reminders of the masterpieces”).45

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With this in mind, it is not surprising that museums in Paris jumped on board, selling colour reproductions in their gift shops. The artist Jean Fautrier began making colour reproductions of paintings in 1949, marketing them under the label Reproductions Aeply. His reproduction of Dufy’s Bouquet d’anémones was being sold for 7,000 francs (roughly, twenty dollars) in the gift shop of the Louvre.46 The Archives des Musées Nationaux contain numerous documents from the Commercial Services department concerning the purchase and sale of colour reproductions in the post-war period. Close to six months after the opening of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Cassou appealed directly to Georges Salles, the director of the Musées de France (1945– 1957), bemoaning the lack of colour reproductions for sale in the museum shop, which, he argued, deprived the museum of additional revenue and much needed publicity.47 This situation had changed signifcantly by the mid-1950s, when Cassou effectively patted himself on the back, noting the wide reach of reproductions of (specifcally) French masterpieces throughout France and the world: “I’ve seen in the small cafés of the French provinces Manet’s Bon Bock, Cézanne’s Card Players replacing the publicity posters of this or that beer or liquor, in schools and country lodging, Rouault’s Old King, Bonnard’s Flowers, in hotels and universities, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley.”48 By 1955, with post-war consumerism in full swing, the unbridled, populist idealism of the initial charter gave way to commercialism as reproductions

Figure 3.9 Jean Leymarie, “Masterpieces You Can Now Buy,” The UNESCO Courier, vol. VIII, no. 7 (1955): 21. Photograph by the author.

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were packaged as luxury commodities. The Courier’s headlines now read: “Masterpieces You Can Now Buy.” (Fig. 3.9)49

Made in Paris UNESCO is perhaps the last place one would expect to fnd state power exerting itself, but from its very beginnings the French used UNESCO to extend their cultural infuence and “advance specifc components of its cultural policy” worldwide.50 Their frst priority was to secure the location of UNESCO headquarters in Paris; they lobbied hard to ensure that the seat of the organisation would be in France. This move was a strategic way to assert Paris as the world cultural capital. The second French initiative centered on linguistic politics. The French consistently pressed to guarantee a prominent position for the French language within UNESCO, adamantly rejecting the use of Esperanto and other “artifcial languages” as a universal second tongue, even opposing additional working languages within UNESCO. Although UNESCO was by defnition a nonpartisan, international organisation, its Colour Reproductions project was dominated by French professionals in its early years, and they played a seminal role in inspiring, managing, and promoting the programme. The advisory committees and panels of experts responsible for establishing the criteria of selection and evaluating the quality of the reproductions and their art historical importance were composed not of disinterested academic scholars but rather, without exception, museum directors of national collections, and particularly French institutions: Cassou; Huyghe; Jean Leymarie, curator at the Museum of Grenoble (1950–1955); and Bazin.51 These invited experts served as gatekeepers, evaluating and then selecting the very few ‘masterpieces’ that would travel internationally as emissaries or be printed and distributed worldwide in one of UNESCO’s catalogues. Foremost among them was the French novelist, art historian, resistance hero (and later statesman) André Malraux. At the opening session of UNESCO’s frst General Conference, held at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1946 (20 November–10 December), Malraux delivered a lecture entitled “Man and Artistic Culture” in which he introduced the idea of the ‘Imaginary Museum’ or ‘Museum Without Walls’—over a year before his eponymous book was published (Fig. 3.10). And, with the present century something is beginning to take shape in our minds, a successor to the museums we know; what might be called that “Imaginary Museum.” It is an assemblage of all that—outside museums—reproductions and albums have to show us. For, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the plastic arts invented their own printing press . . . our Imaginary Museum, worldwide in its scope, will confront us, for the frst time, with the plastic inheritance of all mankind.52 Malraux would be seen as the project’s spiritual father; in one way or another, almost every preface and article on the Colour Reproductions paid tribute to him and his concept of the “Museum Without Walls.”53 For instance, in his introduction to the frst Catalogue, Cassou alluded to Malraux when he referred to the catalogue as “a sort of ideal museum,” allowing reproductions to “fnd their way into factories, into public buildings and private dwellings, in town and in country, and into the home.”54 It is little known, but shortly after the war, as General Charles de Gaulle’s minister

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Figure 3.10 André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire, 1953 [1950]. Source: © Maurice Jarnoux, image provided by Paris Match/Scoop/Hachette.

for information (from November 1945 through January 1946), Malraux initiated a “project of small Louvres for the provinces”: manufacturing more than 100 facsimile colour reproductions of French masterpieces to distribute throughout the country.55 So, too, the decision to set the dividing line between the two catalogues at the year 1860, with Manet, can be traced back to Malraux’s speech and the narrative and historiography of modern art he espoused. These French fgures’ involvement gave the programme a stamp of authority and legitimacy. In return, UNESCO’s project promoted a certain telling of the “story of art” that placed French artists and collections at its very centre playing into a concerted national campaign in the immediate post-war period to rebrand Paris the capital of the arts and restore its cultural supremacy after the stain of the occupation. As the art world was slowly becoming de-centered for the frst time in centuries, France anxiously tried to hold on to its former position as its epicenter. Under the pressures of the Cold War and decolonisation, Fourth Republic (1946–1958) art historians adhered to and affrmed national characteristics and schools in a bid to recover French cultural sovereignty and position France as the birthplace of modern art. Cassou was central to the project. By 1949, when the catalogue went to press, Cassou was a card-holding civil servant who, as director of the newly opened Musée

54 Rachel E. Perry d’Art Moderne (in 1947), was committed to promoting French art and national prestige internationally. Cassou thus held dual allegiances to both UNESCO and the patrimoine (French cultural heritage). He saw this not as a confict of interests but rather a mutually benefcial convergence of interests.56 In May 1946, Cassou published an essay for the Galerie Charpentier’s Cent chef d’oeuvres des peintures de l’École de Paris entitled “Le Rayonnement de la France” (The Infuence of France).57 Referring to Paris as the “new Florence,” Cassou challenged Harold Rosenberg’s premature eulogy for “The Fall of Paris” in 1940, countering his claims that “the laboratory of the twentieth century” had been closed.58 Huyghe adopted Cassou’s term verbatim in his introduction to the catalogue for the frst Travelling Print Exhibition of 1949 when he argued, “Centered mainly in France and in Paris, which one might properly call its capital, modern art has radiated [rayonné] over the whole world.”59 In his essay for the frst Catalogue, Cassou argued that art serves both universal interests as well as national interests: “Art is one of these values—both national art, with its national message, and universal art with its human message.”60 Cassou’s involvement with the Colour Reproductions project was divided between the utopian idealism of international universality and sectarian, national interests. As Natalie Adamson has pointed out, the school of Paris was “called upon to fulfll nationalist dreams of a cultural renaissance that could be set against other national schools,” while it was also “expected to embody the ideal of a universal art for a newly globalised and radically modernized world.”61 Although publicly Cassou asserted, “Our only purpose . . . is to assist in spreading a knowledge of the visual arts,”62 in private correspondence and non-UNESCO publications, French curators, critics, and museum directors frequently referred to colour reproductions as a diplomatic weapon in protecting and advancing French art. In a letter to the director of Cultural Relations in 1949, Huyghe asserted that colour reproductions would be “of the greatest use for the dissemination of French art.”63 A year later, at ICOM’s Second Biennial Conference, he proclaimed, “From the national point of view . . . the most famous and perfect examples of the art of a country shown throughout the world will increase the infuence and prestige of the country in which that art has been developed.”64 Articles in the French press refected this opinion. In 1953, one critic claimed that “in the feld of education and of our foreign propaganda [publicity abroad], these [colour] reproductions could make a valuable contribution to art and further the dissemination of the most valuable works of our painters.”65 But it was Malraux who publicly articulated this position, in a little-known text on the Reproductions Aeply for his friend Fautrier. Promoting their exhibition at the Galerie Billiet-Caputo in 1950, Malraux proclaimed hyperbolically, “For the moment, these still precious objects are, to my knowledge, the most successful reproductions in the world.”66 He went on to argue, however, that as “the future printing press of the plastic arts,” colour reproductions could enable France to advertise its wealth of original works of art and thereby maintain its continued historical importance. With the Reproductions Aeply, “France could fnally open museums of reproductions that I had hoped to create and that this century will inevitably give birth to; foreign universities could fnally receive a compelling picture of our painting.”67 Malraux’s agenda, then, was to broadcast France’s artistic prominence to the world during these anxious early years of the Cold War. The new techniques of colour reproduction could be used as instruments in the promotion of French culture. In this sense,

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UNESCO’s programme is an important precursor to the cultural policy instituted in the late 1950s when Charles de Gaulle, as newly elected president of the Fifth Republic, created a Ministry of Culture. Headed by Malraux (1959–1969), its mission was “to make accessible to the greatest possible number of Frenchmen the great works of humanity, and particularly those of France.”68 Rather than viewing 1959 as a “turning point” in French cultural reformation and colonisation, perhaps it is more accurate to see it as the culmination of policies and projects begun in the immediate post-war period with programmes such as UNESCO’s that were intended to reinforce the French claim to cultural leadership in art by expanding “France’s historic mission as controlling trustee of European art heritage to become the imagined trustee of the world’s cultural treasures.”69

Missionary Position In its own eyes, Western humanism is the love of humanity, but to others it is merely the custom and institution of a group of men, their password, and sometimes their battle cry. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 194770

Throughout its tenure, UNESCO insisted on its function as a “clearinghouse”71—an impartial middleman that the 1950 Catalogue prior to 1860 touted as “unhampered by prejudice or the burden of any tradition.”72 It presented itself as merely an intermediary, connecting the public with publishers. In Huyghe’s introduction to the frst Travelling Exhibition, he stressed its neutrality: “Unesco expresses no preference for any particular artist, school or trend, but merely aims at making more widely known the work of artists who have established their permanent place in the history of art.”73 Yet despite its calls for a universal culture that would transcend nationalities and foster what Lionello Venturi called “a world-wide fellowship,”74 none of the Colour Reproductions catalogues features non-Western works of art. It is not merely that the project was inherently Eurocentric—which it was—but that it displayed an uneven emphasis on ‘French’ art and artists. In his introduction to the Catalogue of 1952, Venturi listed the most popular artists represented. Renoir came in frst with a whopping 54 works; then van Gogh with 43; Cézanne with 35, and Picasso with 33. Venturi explained these results by claiming that the market was driving the selection process, writing: Publishers of reproductions are neither art critics nor art historians, but they must have a fair for what the public wants. The reproductions chosen will therefore give a rough idea of the relative popularity of the painters. . . . We must therefore conclude that both the public and the publishers of reproductions are not mistaken about the greatest modern painters.75 Venturi contends, in other words, that public taste was shaping the archive. In truth, UNESCO’s experts were not selecting masterpieces and then soliciting printers to reproduce them; rather, the printers submitted examples they had already reproduced.76 But these were then fltered through a subjective selection process administered by UNESCO representatives. Venturi, then, was occluding—disingenuously—his

56 Rachel E. Perry and the other experts’ role in the project, not to mention the fact that the printers and publishers listed were all centered in England, France, Germany, and the United States. Three years later, Leymarie struck a more balanced view when he noted the “general agreement on a small and signifcant selection of modern masters,” but he admitted that this consensus was “striking evidence both of the enlightened [!] judgment of the experts and of the spontaneous preferences of the public,”77 as if taste is ever disinterested or disconnected from politics. This chauvinism is pronounced in the Catalogues. The Baroness Hilla von Rebay said as much in a scathing letter sent in 1950 on Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) letterhead to UNESCO accusing them of bias. In response to their solicitation of colour reproductions, she had submitted 35 prints, among them a reproduction of her own painting Animation and The Holy One by Rudolf Bauer. All had been rejected and returned in poor condition, with the exception of a silkscreen of Wassily Kandinsky’s Extended. Rebay criticised the jury’s qualifcations, declaring “we know very well the commercial French attitude of such juries”: Even the print of Kandinsky, “Extended,” would have been ignored had he not become a Frenchman and had we not made him famous. . . . Your great experts would also have been afraid to choose his print. . . . Since non-objective, creative, absolute masterpieces do not express repetitions of sensations, but the experiences of the soul, they are obviously beyond French mainly commercial interests.78 Nowhere is such bias more manifest than in the Travelling Exhibitions. Whereas the frst Catalogue included 423 reproductions, the frst Travelling Exhibition pared this down to a mere 50. Gone were the lesser-known artists (Cuno Amiet, Jan Bauch), the folk or outsider artists (Camille Bombois, Edward Hicks), the Americans (Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent, George Bellows, Arthur Dove, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer), the politically compromised (Kees van Dongen, André Derain), the Germanic (Ferdinand Hodler). Of those selected, only ten were not “French” artists: Matthew Smith, Gabriel Orozco, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Diego Rivera, John Marin, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Oskar Kokoschka. (Although not French-born, Chagall, Juan Gris, Picasso, van Gogh, Joan Miró, and Amedeo Modigliani had been fully absorbed into the school of Paris by this date.) Artists outside of France and the United States are glaringly—egregiously—underrepresented.79 With the exception of Marc, Klee, and Kokoschka, the Travelling Exhibitions excluded Dada, Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus. Ecumenical in its scope (of its target audiences), the canon it espoused was, nevertheless, narrow: a classic example of what Piotr Piotrowski has called “vertical art history.”80 Indeed, in its early years, UNESCO’s project was a one-way ticket: a Eurocentric, civilising mission to bring culture to the rest of the world, exporting it centrifugally out from what Malraux would have called the cradle of civilisation to its peripheral outposts. The distribution list indicates that the Catalogues and Travelling Exhibitions reached all member states (among others, Afghanistan, New Zealand, Korea, China, Costa Rica, South Africa, Turkey) and those without a national commission (Canada, Czechoslovakia, Liberia, Israel, Egypt, Monaco, Pakistan, San Salvador, Saudi Arabia); even countries that were not member states in 1949 (such as Sweden and Chile) received samples.81 In all, more than 420 catalogues were sent out to

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more than 60 National Commissions and governments (Fig. 3.11). In 1954, Bellew proudly acknowledged, The catalogues have proved very popular in countries far away from the main art centers of the world. Publishers inform us that they have received demands from places as far distant as Greenland, Central Africa, Australia, Latin America, etc. where previously they had little or no sale for their reproductions. Thus Unesco is helping spread knowledge and understanding of the history of art.82 The 1957 Catalogue substantiated their popularity and geographic reach, with J. B. Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 1945 to 1963, attesting in his introduction, “We have found them in the ‘loge’ of a Paris concierge, in shops in Ouro Preto, in native huts in Guiana and on the work table of a painter in Jerusalem.”83 Despite its global purview, UNESCO’s project should not be confused with global art. (It was only in 1954 that UNESCO established the World Art Series and only in 1957 that it brought it to press.)84 As Hans Belting has written of Malraux’s Imaginary Museum, UNESCO’s Archives of Colour Reproductions project was “a European idea with a European meaning.”85 Although conceived of as objects of cultural exchange, there was no reciprocity: they ultimately refected European and, particularly, French interests. This precise charge had been levied against Malraux in 1951 when Jeanne Modigliani accused him of espousing “an aesthetic of imperialism.”86 He had, after all, declared as early as 1936 that “a heritage is not transmitted, it must be conquered,”87 a position rephrased in his 1946 UNESCO lecture “Man and Artistic Culture,” in which he declared the need “to make of this inheritance not a bequest but a conquest.”88 This is cultural imperialism cloaked as cultural diplomacy or, as Jacques Derrida phrased it, “ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism.”89

Figure 3.11 Map of Global Distribution of Catalogues of Colour Reproductions in 1949. Source: Created by the author.

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Like all archives, UNESCO’s was shaped according to selective social needs and interests. It ultimately reinforced an existing canon and an authorised teleology of art history culminating in abstract art and centered in Paris.90 This was the view Malraux promulgated in his lecture at UNESCO in 1946 when he demanded: “What is this new order based on if not on what we call modern art—our art?”91 Although ICOM stipulated that “UNESCO’s laudable experiment of publishing such catalogues” should “be drawn up on the most broadly international lines,” it also mandated, in an extremely elitist way, that it “give each school a place commensurate with its importance in civilization.”92 So too, the Travelling Exhibitions stated that they were “Confned to artists who have made signifcant contributions to world art since 1860.”93 In both cases, the experts evaluated the works on the basis of highly subjective criteria, determining both “the signifcance of the artist and the importance of the original painting.”94 Moreover, to have launched the project with ‘modern’ art from 1860 to the present, in both the Catalogue and the Travelling Exhibitions, is not negligible. UNESCO would later supplement and introduce other periods (frst and foremost, Paintings prior to 1860, which came out in 1950 and had no discernible French bias, featuring works of the Northern and Southern Renaissance and of the Baroque era95). But, as the Australian art historian Bernard Smith noted of UNESCO’s project, “The decision to begin thus by promoting the fow of reproductions of ‘modern’ masters throughout the world is signifcant,” for it indicates the “institutionalization of the modern movement.”96 Certainly, one way of looking at this is as a missed opportunity. One cannot help but speculate how dramatically the canon could have been transformed through the reproductive media. The irony here is that UNESCO’s charter insisted that the transnational circulation of culture would offer an antidote to war and a weapon against nationalisms. This is not the way we tend to think of how canons get constituted and then consolidated; yet, as Michael Camille has maintained, canon formation has everything to do with reproduction.97 Already in 1953, the American journal Art Education noted that the Catalogues were being used “not only as a source for securing prints” but also “as reference books for students and in the establishment of print rooms in museums and universities.”98 Repeated reproduction and “mere exposure,” James Cutting has asserted, is crucial in according prestige, value, and cultural capital.99 This is precisely what a UNESCO public opinion poll on modern art determined in 1971. Only eight years before the programme was offcially terminated in 1979, the Courier published a special issue entitled “The General Public Judges Modern Art: Findings of an Inquiry” which concluded that in the arts “we tend to love the things which are most familiar. Exposure means familiarity and familiarity, in this case, breeds the reverse of contempt.”100 UNESCO’s work was done; the project had made modern art synonymous with French art. The same year UNESCO closed the programme, Pierre Bourdieu published his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste in which he demonstrated that no judgment of taste is disinterested. UNESCO’s dissemination of colour reproductions had successfully reinforced the cultural hegemony of French modern art, demonstrating that it was not merely ‘taste’ that determined the popularity of some works of art over others, but power and politics. Today, we cannot imagine a world in which art is not presented in living colour. Colour reproductions of works of art are, to use Paul Valéry’s phrase, ubiquitous:101 in our digital age, they are widely available and in increasingly accurate nuances, ready

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to be downloaded from the Internet at the push of a button. UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions project is notable for its longevity and its breadth and also for its prescience. In 1949, Cassou wrote cautiously of a “still developing industry.”102 Only three years later, in 1952, Venturi opened his introduction by noting the remarkable advances in the industry: “The technique of colour reproduction has improved so considerably in recent years.”103 By 1955, Leymarie declared “the universal popularity of colour reproductions”: “We are returning to a civilization full of colour.”104 While clearly a trendsetter in 1949, UNESCO’s programme had run its course by the 1970s.105 By 1979, when the programme was offcially terminated, the speed of technological advances had pushed the Archives of Colour Reproductions into obsolescence.106 A comprehensive history of colour reproduction has yet to be written,107 but it is clear that UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions project played a crucial role in profoundly transforming the education, appreciation, and consumption of art globally; however, it was also decisive in reinforcing a particular French modernist canon internationally. Colour reproductions served to increase the cultural capital of those countries that held the originals.108 If, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the discipline of art history is a battlefeld “between individuals or institutions who are competing for the same stake”109 then UNESCO’s Colour Reproductions programme suggests that it is not only texts or taxonomies of art that play a role in the battlefeld of representation but also the distribution, circulation, and consumption of its reproductions.110

Notes 1. UNESCO’s archives contain the catalogues, documents about the project, card index of reproductions, original black-and-white photographs, as well as press clippings, correspondence fles, and minutes of meetings about the project. UNESCO Archives, Archive Group AG 13—Archives of Colour Reproductions of Paintings, and AG 8—Secretariat Records, Central Registry Collection, 7A 334. 2. Jean Cassou, “Introduction,” in Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949 (Paris: UNESCO, 1949), 16. 3. Leigh Ashton, “Introduction,” in International Directory of the Photographic Archives of Works of Art, a UNESCO Publication (Paris: Dunod, 1950), ix. 4. Douglas Smith argues this of André Malraux in his article “Redrawing the Hexagon,” 151. 5. The United Nations was established on 24 October 1945. Less than a month later, a United Nations conference was convened in London (1–16 November) in order to found an educational and cultural arm. On 16 November 1945, the constitution of UNESCO was signed by 37 governments. It came into force on 4 November 1946. 6. UNESCO, Preparatory Commission, Report on the Programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization, 15 September 1946, C/2. 7. UNESCO, second General Conference, Mexico, November–December 1947. See Resolutions Adopted by the General Conference during Its Second Session, Mexico, November– December 1947 (Paris: UNESCO, 1948), 22, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0011/ 001145/114591e.pdf. 8. “Foreword,” in Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Painting from 1860 to 1949 (Paris: UNESCO, 1949), 30. Hereafter the catalogues are cited in text by date. 9. Each member country maintained a Coupon Sales Offce where coupons could be purchased in that country’s currency. See “Bons d’Entraide de Unesco,” Le Courrier 5, nos. 8–9 (August–September 1952): 19. 10. “Foreword,” 29. 11. The Swiss editor and publisher Albert Skira was an early innovator in colour reproduction. In addition to the periodicals Minotaure (1933–39) and Labyrinthe (1944–1946), he published André Malraux’s La psychologie de l’art in three volumes (1947–1949), but he was also responsible for a large number of publications in which colour would increasingly play

60 Rachel E. Perry an important role: the series “Les grands siècles de la peinture”; “Peinture, couleur, histoire”; “Le goût de notre temps”; and “Art, idées, histoire.” As early as 1935 he introduced “Les trésors de la peinture française” in an advertisement in the pages of Minotaure 5 (1935): There was a pressing interest in reuniting in one place all the masterpieces of French painting. One might think that it would be impossible to do this other than in an ideal museum or in an exhibition. We accomplished this in a book, a book which does not simply give reproductions in black-and-white, but which renders the most crucial feature of these works: THEIR COLOUR. What are the colours of our most beautiful works? These two crucial concerns: the reunion of masterpieces and their reproduction in colour, have presided over the establishment of the series of works which we now publish under the title: THE TREASURES OF FRENCH PAINTING. (emphasis mine), quoted in Chara Kolokytha, “The Art Press and Visual Culture in Paris during the Great Depression: Cahiers d’Art, Minotaure, and Verve,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 29, no. 3 (2013): 212.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

Whereas Skira incorporated reproductions in reduced format into his journals and illustrated albums, UNESCO intended theirs to be selected and purchased individually and to be used and exhibited as works of art. René Jean, “Les reproductions de tableaux,” Le Monde, 23 February 1950, unpaginated. Le musée chez soi was Braun’s catalogue of all the reproductions they offered, organised into different “Collections”: “Les maîtres de la peinture,” “Palettes, 2 “Morceaux choisis,” “Plastique,” “Galerie des maîtres,” and “Couleurs de maîtres.” The rear of the catalogue included a separate “Catalogue de fac-similés d’éditeurs étrangers” for which Braun was the exclusive distributor in France. J. B. [Jean Bouret], “Que faut-il penser des reproductions en couleurs?,” Arts, 20 January 1950, unpaginated. The term was coined by the French demographer Jean Fourastié in his book Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la revolution invisible de 1946 à 1975, which was published in 1979, the year UNESCO ended the programme. Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la revolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). The Committee [of Experts named by the International Council of Museums] was of the opinion that the publication and wide distribution of these catalogues would encourage publishers to attain higher standards of fdelity in copying works of art of cultural and educational importance. “Foreword,” 29.

17. ICOM, First Interim Conference, Mexico City, 8 November 1947, Resolution 5, http:// icom.museum/the-governance/general-assembly/resolutions-adopted-byicoms-generalassemblies-1946-to-date/mexico-city-1947/ [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. UNESCO and ICOM signed an agreement in 1947 establishing the ways and means of cooperation between the two organisations. 18. Cassou, “Introduction,” 15. On postwar efforts to salvage and protect monuments of art and architecture from various destructive scenarios, see the book by Lucia Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 19. UNESCO, Preparatory Commission, Report on the Programme, 71. 20. Horst Gerson, “Introduction,” in Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Paintings prior to 1860 (Paris: UNESCO, 1950), 13–14. Gerson was deputy-director of the National Bureau for the Documentation of Art History, The Hague. Colour reproductions of art were already widely used in the 19th century when frms such as Goupil and Braun began reproducing and marketing works of art to an emergent middle class. But unlike the purely commercial nature of these earlier efforts, UNESCO’s initiative was a national and international effort. Goupil was a Paris-based gallery and print publisher founded in 1829 by Adolph

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Goupil, which, in addition to selling paintings by artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, also produced and sold fne-art reproductions. Goupil’s factory outside Paris employed skilled craftsmen to produce engraved, etched, photographic, and even sculptural copies of paintings in vast quantities. Between 1881 and 1890, Theo van Gogh was manager of Goupil & Cie’s branch on the Boulevard Montmartre. See Robert Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction: Nineteenth-Century Prints after Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jozef Israëls and Ary Scheffer, trans. Michelle Hendriks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007) and Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000). 21. This was the caption on the cover of the Courier 3, no. 8 (September 1950), which featured a reproduction of Honoré Daumier’s Print Collector in order to advertise the second catalogue. The caption indicated UNESCO’s desire To help bring great art closer to the people, in the troubled days of mid-1950—days which still await the judgment of history—Unesco has completed and published a catalogue of the fnest reproductions available of paintings which cover the fve-century span up to 1860. 22. “Art Treasures to Be Put Within Reach of All,” Courier 1, no. 8 (September 1948): 6. 23. “The Popularization of Art through Colour Reproductions,” Courier 2, no. 7 (November 1949): 16. 24. UNESCO, Preparatory Commission, Report on the Programme, 82. 25. “A Path to Great Enjoyment,” Courier, no. 11 (1954): 3–4, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0007/000700/070091eo.pdf [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. 26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7. Early UNESCO texts referred to the “human family” and “family of man.” See “The Creative Arts,” in Report on the Programme of the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, Preparatory Commission, 15 September 1946, 124: “In the human family, each country and region has its own characteristics and its own distinct values, and each makes its distinctive contribution to the common treasure of culture.” Such references share much with the impetus of the controversial Family of Man exhibition organised by Edward Steichen a decade later in 1955. 27. Historians have also referred to this as “oneworldism.” See Glenda Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley,” Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (2010): 393–418, and Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 28. Sarah Brouillette, “UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World,” Representations 127, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 34. Brouillette focuses on UNESCO’s role within the global history of the book, examining the book-related programmes it sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s that supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. 29. Cassou, “Introduction,” 15. 30. René Huyghe, “The Coordination of International Art Exhibitions,” in ICOM, Second Biennial Conference, London, July 1950, 2. UNESCO/ICOM/BI/Conf.2/17, http:// unesdoc. unesco.org/images/0000/000012/001213eb.pdf [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. 31. Jean Leymarie, “Introduction,” in Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Paintings 1860– 1955 (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), 10. 32. Gerson, “Introduction,” 13–14. 33. During this period, ICOM devoted a series of publications to traveling and circulating exhibitions. Its quarterly journal Museum devoted an entire issue to “Museums and Circulating Exhibitions,” in 1950. Three years later, Élodie Courter Osborn wrote a general Manual of Travelling Exhibitions in the UNESCO series “Museums and Monuments.” 34. Peter Bellew, Arts and Letters Division, to Mr. Cortesao, soliciting his assistance in order to “stimulate interest” in the Travelling Exhibitions in Latin America. UNESCO Archives ALC memo 176, 21 June 1949. 35. “Great Paintings for Everyone,” Courier 6, no. 7 (July 1953): 12–13. 36. In L’album de l’art, Georges Didi-Huberman has recently claimed as much for André Malraux’s auratisation of reproduction in Le musée imaginaire. Georges Didi-Huberman,

62 Rachel E. Perry L’album de l’art à l’époque du “musée imaginaire” (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2013). Hal Foster argues: Where for Benjamin mechanical reproduction shatters tradition and liquidates aura, for Malraux it provides the means to reassemble the broken bits of tradition into one metatradition of global styles, a new Museum without Walls whose subject is the Family of Man. Hal Foster, “Archives of Modern Art,” October, no. 99 (Winter 2002): 81–95. 37. Horst Gerson, “Colour Reproductions,” Burlington Magazine 105, no. 724 (July 1963): 326–327. 38. Letter from Bellew, 27 June 1949, UNESCO Archives AG 8, 7A 334, Part 2. 39. Thompson, of the Ministry of Education for the United Kingdom, wrote to Bellew on August 23, 1949: At the meeting for the Co-operative Body for the Arts, which took place on the 17th of August, a great deal of interest was displayed in the UNESCO portfolios of colour reproductions. . . . The main subject of discussion was the question of publicity. I take it that you will be sending out review copies to the appropriate journals? We can also put out a press release in this country. . . . I certainly think we should work up some publicity for this enterprise. . . . We should also send out a circular to Government Departments and Educational Institutes. . . . One small point: is the edition going to be large enough to match the demand which we would probably be able to arouse? UNESCO Archives AG 13. 40. See the memo of 28 November 1949, UNESCO Archives AG 8, 7A 334, I/IX/1949. 41. Salti and Khouri examine one such exhibition held at the UNESCO Palace in Beirut in February 1957, which showcased 664 framed colour reproductions. Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri, “Beirut’s Musée Imaginaire: The Promise of Modernity in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Speak, Memory: On Archives and Other Strategies of (Re)Activation of Cultural Memory, ed. Laura Carderera (2011), www.tenstakonsthall.se/site/wp-content/ uploads/2012/01/Speak_Memory_Laura-Carderera_ed.pdf [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. 42. Commissariat Général du Tourisme, “Étude sur le tourisme en France 1946 à 1948,” quoted in Brian A. McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 140–167. On American travel in France after the Second World War, see also Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Both studies demonstrate how, as part of the Marshall Plan, both the United States and French governments actively cultivated and promoted leisure travel to advance their foreign policy agendas. 43. McKenzie, Remaking France, 123–124. 44. Huyghe, The Coordination of International Art Exhibitions. 45. Cassou, “Introduction,” 16. 46. Dr. Bursaux to Miriam Prévot, 7 December 1953, Archives Galerie de France, IMEC, GLF 290.1 Aeply 4/5, 3/5. On Artco, see Julie Verlaine, “Une histoire de la société ArtCo: Le commerce des reproductions d’art après la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” Vingtième Siècle, no. 108 (October–December 2010): 141–151, and Rachel E. Perry, “Jean Fautrier’s Original Multiples,” in Jean Fautrier 1898–1964, eds. Curtis L. Carter and Karen K. Butler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 71–85. 47. Jean Cassou to Georges Salles, director of the Musées de France, November 10, 1947, Archives Réunion des Musées Nationaux, CC.1,15.e, Services commérciaux. 48. Jean Cassou, “Pour un musée chez soi,” in Le musée chez soi (Mulhouse: Les Éditions Braun & Co. Undated [1958]), 4. 49. Jean Leymarie, “Masterpieces You Can Now Buy,” Courier 8, no. 7 (July–August 1955): 21. The French translation of Leymarie’s title makes Malraux’s infuence apparent: “Vous pouvez acheter le musée de vos rêves.” 50. William R. Pendergast, “UNESCO and French Cultural Relations 1945–1970,” International Organization 30, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 465.

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51. Whereas the authors of the introductions to the catalogues of Paintings prior to 1860 were evenly distributed by nationality, the catalogues devoted to modern art were, almost exclusively (with the exception of Lionello Venturi), handed over to the French. 52. André Malraux, “Man and Artistic Culture” (1946), published in UNESCO’s Refections on Our Age, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Allan Wingate, 1947), 88–89. 53. Lionello Venturi wrote in his introduction to the Catalogue 1860 to 1952 (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 13: “Every educated person now has in his head the imaginary museum referred to by André Malraux.” Jean Leymarie concluded his “Introduction,” 14: “Every age creates, out of reproductions, its own fll of ‘imaginary museums’” arguing that “each new edition of the catalogue marks an appreciable advance on the previous edition and represents a closer approximation to the ideal catalogue. . . . If a catalogue such as this could be developed to its limits, we should have the ‘imaginary museum’ of Malraux in which each one of us hangs his own selection of pictures” (Leymarie, “Introduction,” 11–12). Writing of UNESCO’s project in 1947 in an editorial, the Burlington Magazine announced that “the pre-fabricated museum is already in production.” “UNESCO and the Future of Museums,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, no. 527 (1947): 29–30. 54. Cassou, “Introduction,” 16. 55. Serge Chomier, L’objet de musée (Dijon: Museum of Dijon, 2010), 3, www.dijon.fr/appext/ mvb/tout-garder-tout-jeter-et-reinventer/objet%20de%20musée.pdf [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. This project is also referred to in Herman Lebovics, Mona Lisa’s Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 79. Alain Jouffroy reminded his readers of Malraux’s postwar project in Alain Jouffroy, “Pour 1.250 francs on peut se procurer les chefs-d’oeuvre de la peinture,” Arts (23 February 1955). The distribution had only just begun when de Gaulle left power in the fall of 1946. 56. On Cassou’s mission, see Gay R. McDonald, “The Launching of American Art in Postwar France: Jean Cassou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne,” American Art 13, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 41–61. Cassou had a colour reproduction of a painting by Maurice Vlaminck made by Fautrier’s Reproductions Aeply hanging in his offce at the museum. Jean Cassou to Charles Gautier, c/o Galerie de France, of 25 February 1952, IMEC, GLF 290.1 Aeply 1/5. 57. Julie Verlaine calls this exhibition a “Parisian Self-celebration” in her book Les galeries d’art contemporain à Paris: Une histoire culturelle du marché de l’art, 1944–1970 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013), 69–71. 58. Harold Rosenberg, “The Fall of Paris,” originally published in Partisan Review in 1940 and reprinted in The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo Press, 1962), 209–220. 59. René Huyghe, “Introduction,” in UNESCO Travelling Print Exhibition (Paris: UNESCO, 1949), 10. 60. Cassou, “Introduction,” 17. 61. Natalie Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964 (London: Ashgate, 2009), 105. 62. Cassou, “Introduction,” 17. 63. René Huyghe to Monsieur Foxe, director-general of Cultural Relations, on Musées Nationaux letterhead on 7 December 1949. IMEC, GLF 288.1 Aeply 8/8. 64. Huyghe, The Coordination of International Art Exhibitions, 11–12. 65. Jean de Morgiou, “Les vedettes de l’art contemporain réunies au château St-Barnabé,” Le Méridional-La France, 7 August 1953 (emphasis added). 66. André Malraux, promotional brochure for Reproductions Aeply, 1950, private collection. Malraux gifted Fautrier with the manuscript of his book The Psychology of Art. 67. André Malraux, promotional brochure for Reproductions Aeply, 1950, private collection (emphasis added). 68. Decree of the Ministry of Culture, France, 24 July 1959, on the mission and organisation of the ministry, quoted in Urfalino, L’invention de la politique culturelle, 33 (emphasis added). 69. This is Lebovics’s argument regarding André Malraux’s policies in his book Mona Lisa’s Escort, 80. 70. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 182, quoted and translated in James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 145.

64 Rachel E. Perry 71. “The Organization also serves as a clearinghouse—for the dissemination and sharing of information and knowledge.” UNESCO, “UNESCO Past and Present,” 2010, www. unesco.org/archives/new2010/en/history_of_unesco.html [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. 72. Gerson, “Introduction,” 3. 73. Huyghe, “Introduction,” 3. 74. Lionello Venturi, “Introduction,” in Catalogue 1860–1952 (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 12. 75. Venturi, “Introduction,” 15–16. 76. For the frst Travelling Exhibition, there were six American printers, three French, three German, and three British. In volume, the American printers dominated, with the New York Graphic Society and Twin Editions each showing eleven reproductions and the Museum of Modern Art fve; the French frm Braun & Cie had four. 77. Leymarie, “Introduction,” 13. 78. Hilla von Rebay to UNESCO Archives, 20 February 1950, 01/11/1950, 7A 334, Part 5, emphasis added. UNESCO responded that all of the works Rebay sent (with the exception of the Kandinsky) were of “small format” and thus were not even placed before the selection jury. 79. In 1966, Ernst Scheyer likewise noted certain imbalances in UNESCO’s archive, pointing out that van Gogh and Picasso were overrepresented and American paintings were underrepresented. Ernst Scheyer, “Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Paintings, 1860– 1965,” Art Quarterly, nos. 3–4 (1966): 323. 80. Piotr Piotrowski, “Towards a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde,” in Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, eds. Sasha Bru et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 49–58. 81. UNESCO Archives, Memo 7015, AG 8, 7A 334, Part 4, I/XI/1949. 82. Bellew to S. V. Arnaldo, 29 April 1954. UNESCO Archives, AG 8, 7A 334, 1/1/54. 83. J. B. Sandberg, “Introduction,” in Catalogue of Colour Reproductions of Paintings 1860– 1957 (Paris: UNESCO, 1957), 13. 84. In 1954, UNESCO launched the “World Art Series,” a joint publishing venture with the New York Graphic Society, which extended the project to masterpieces of non-Western art from around the world. The Courier devoted an entire issue to this initiative in 1954, outlining its objective to “help make the art of each nation better known and appreciated by its own people and by the peoples of other lands, and through this greater appreciation and knowledge to encourage international understanding and respect for other nations and their cultures.” “A Path to Great Enjoyment,” 3, http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0007/000700/070091eo.pdf [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. The series would grow to encompass paintings from ancient Egyptian tombs and temples, Aboriginal paintings from Australia, medieval frescoes from Yugoslavia, Russian icons, Persian miniatures from Iran, Romanesque paintings from Spain, paintings from the Ajanta Caves in India, medieval painting in Norway, as well as volumes on Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Ceylon, and Japan. Each portfolio, published in fve languages and often, in the language of the country of origin, a sixth, contained 32 high-fdelity, extra-large colour plates (15 by 11 in.) plus several black-and-white illustrations in the text. The price was $16.50, and colour plates from any book could be purchased individually for two dollars each. In 1956, four more albums would be planned “to maintain the balance between East and West”: early mosaics in Israel, paintings in Pagan, Burma, English medieval frescoes, and 12th-century Italian frescoes. UNESCO Archives, Rapporteur’s report, UNESCO House, 17–19 October 1956. 85. Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 66. See also Belting’s “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, eds. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfldern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), www.xzine.org/rhaa/2012/11/29/contemporaryart-as-global-art-a-critical-estimate/ [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. Global art and world art are sometimes used synonymously. But world art is an old idea complementary to modernism, already developed in André Malraux’s postwar book on universal art without museum walls, because or although it was mostly to be found in Western museums. It continues to signify art from all ages, the heritage of mankind.

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86. Jeanne Modigliani, daughter of the painter and a member of the Communist Party, strongly attacked Malraux’s Voix du silence for its imperialism in her article “S’il y avait une esthétique de l’impérialisme,” La Nouvelle Critique 4, no. 31 (December 1951): 31–41. This critique was also leveled at Malraux by Chris Marker in his flm Les statues meurent aussi of 1953. 87. André Malraux, “The Cultural Heritage,” transcript of his speech at the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, London, New Republic 88 (21 October 1936): 315–316. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the position articulated by Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History that “cultural treasures” are part of “the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate,” for “there is no document of civilization which is not a document of barbarism.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. 88. Malraux, “Man and Artistic Culture,” 91. 89. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 120. 90. UNESCO was certainly not single-handedly responsible for canon formation—far from it— but it participated in a process of canon maintenance, thanks to the work of a small group of scholars, curators, and publishers. Prior infuences on the promotion of French art internationally can be traced to a number of factors, notably, the role of museum acquisitions and private collectors such as Louisine Havemeyer, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Chester Dale, and Albert Barnes in the United States. As James Cutting notes in “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” by 1950 a third of all Impressionist works were in American collections. A large number of the works chosen by UNESCO belonged to museum collections (and especially those in the United States). Scholars in the United States, then, would have only seconded the force of the French art establishment behind the UNESCO project. Moreover, the ease of obtaining reproduction rights favors any museum, again, maintaining the canon. James Cutting, “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 79–94. 91. Malraux, “Man and Artistic Culture,” 62 (emphasis added). 92. The Coordination of International Art Exhibitions, ICOM, http://icom.museum/thegovernance/general-assembly/resolutions-adopted-by-icoms-general-assemblies-1946-todate/london-1950/ [Accessed: 07/07/2019]. 93. Huyghe, “Introduction,” 3 (emphasis added). 94. Huyghe, “Introduction,” 3. 95. This second volume, of 1950, had 418 reproductions of 170 artists and was introduced by Gerson. 96. Bernard Smith, A Pavane for Another Time (Sydney: Macmillan, 2002), 376. 97. Michael Camille, “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters,” in “Rethinking the Canon,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (1996): 198–201. As Gordon Fyfe has observed, reproductions are “an important aspect of the formation of cultural capital in the visual arts for they are one of the means by which it is spread and differentiated.” Gordon Fyfe, “Reproductions, Cultural Capital and Museums: Aspects of the Culture of Copies,” Museum and Society 2, no. 1 (March 2004): 48. When Pierre Bourdieu surveyed whether museum visitors have prior knowledge of works displayed and whether such knowledge is obtained from seeing originals or reproductions, his data determined that “the middle class is disproportionately dependent on reproductions.” Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 150, quoted in Fyfe, “Reproductions, Cultural Capital and Museums,” 63. 98. Richard H. Heindel, “UNESCO’S Catalogue 1952,” Art Education, no. 3 (1953): 18. 99. Cutting, “Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon,” 79–94. 100. William Withrow, director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, quoted in “The General Public Judges Modern Art: Findings of an Inquiry,” Courier 24, no. 3 (March 1971): 5. 101. Paul Valéry’s predictions of ubiquity were already posited in 1926: “We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.” Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” quoted in Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217.

66 Rachel E. Perry 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109. 110.

Cassou, “Introduction,” 17. Venturi, “Introduction,” 12. Leymarie, “Introduction,” 12–13. Struggling to keep pace, in 1960 UNESCO initiated the Art Slides programme, which was advertised as “veritable miniature museums” in plastic boxes. Responding to “the greater number of projectors now in use,” UNESCO’s “moderately priced, high quality inexpensive colour slides” offered an additional way of extending its efforts to reach a wider public and were packaged with an explanatory booklet “geared towards the non-specialist.” “Museums in Plastic Boxes: UNESCO Colour Slides Bring Art into the Home,” Courier, no. 3 (March 1960): 23–25. On the subject of colour slides in the discipline, see Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 414–434. After the programme’s demise, the remaining reproductions were “archived” by the Culture Sector. Most reproductions never made it back to headquarters in Paris after their world tour. A memo of 24 May 1951, concerning the conditions of transfer of the Travelling Exhibitions to member states, noted the damage that collections (reproductions, frames, packing cases, and so on) suffered in transit and recommended that the Executive Board adopt a resolution authorising the director-general to “sell collections which have completed their tour of a group of Member States,” at a reduced rate, “with the proceeds applied to the purchase of new reproductions and fresh exhibitions.” UNESCO Archives, item 7.2.4.1 of the agenda, 26/EX/12. Some of the colour reproductions featured in UNESCO’s frst catalogue still occasionally turn up online and in auction houses. A reproduction of Braque’s painting Anémones (currently in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva) that was listed in the UNESCO catalogue for $16 in 1950 is today on sale for $400. So, too, a print of Chagall’s Mystère matinal of 1948 was recently listed at auction for $400 to $800 as a “vintage poster.” In 1999, John Gage remarked that the history of “colour-reproduction . . . is only just beginning to be written.” John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 65. One has only to think of the massive public relations campaign spearheaded by Malraux, the “travelling salesman of French culture,” to bring the Louvre’s most revered masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, to the United States. See Lebovics, Mona Lisa’s Escort, 176. Pierre Bourdieu, Questions de sociologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984), 197. My deepest thanks to Alexandre Coutelle, head of archives at UNESCO, and his assistant Adèle Torrance for their help with my research. I am also indebted to Yves ChevreflsDesbiolles at the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), who facilitated access to the archives of the Galerie de France; Flavie Durand-Ruel at Durand-Ruel & Co.; Elisabeth Rey, secrétaire de documentation at the Archives des Musées Nationaux; and Dominique Fautrier for sharing Janine Aeply’s archives with me. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the French are mine. An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Immutable Mobiles: UNESCO’s Archives of Colour Reproductions,” Art Bulletin, vol. 99, no. 2 (July 2017): 166–185.

4

Curatorial Experiments at the National Gallery After the Second World War Reframing History and the Pursuit of Aesthetic Experience Ana Baeza Ruiz

Introduction The Two World Wars provoked a major disruption across museums in Britain and the rest of Europe, given the unprecedented level of destruction, which had caused the evacuation of collections and the closure of many museums.1 It also saw the ensuing emergence of diplomatic ties to ensure the protection and preservation of works of art and other historical artefacts through bodies such as the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (IIC, 1922–1946) after the First World War and through UNESCO and ICOM (International Council of Museums) from 1946 onwards, when both of them were founded.2 In the aftermath of the Second World War, museum professionals refected on how the recent events would impact their work and they reviewed their collections in the light of present needs.3 Grace Morley, a well-known museologist and the frst leader of the Museums Division of UNESCO, noted that the period had “challenged professional museum people to examine their traditional conceptions and to adapt their thinking to a wide range of possibilities.”4 Reconstruction seemed to harbour a tabula rasa to reorient the museum and its display strategies according to new methods. In Britain, the post-war Director of the National Gallery in London, Philip Hendy (1900–1980), anticipated that a change of attitude was inevitable in so far as the diversifcation of museum functions had made it imperative to provide up-to-date equipment for their growing staff, libraries of books and photography, photographic studios, scientifc laboratories, studios for cleaning and restoration, spaces for stocking wares, and new amenities for visitors, such as shops and restaurants.5 By the mid-1950s, the National Gallery would have founded its frst inhouse Conservation Department and signifcantly expanded its Scientifc and Publications Department, alongside which modern comfortable furnishings and air conditioning were installed, improving its general provision of visitor amenities and turning the Gallery into a hospitable environment. In the midst of this zeal to renovate the museum, the curatorial logics that underpinned the reconstruction of the National Gallery in the immediate post-war years (1946–1951) also sought to reconfgure, if only temporarily, the traditional hang of the collection and develop avowedly experimental and popularising displays. Specifcally, Philip Hendy reversed display taxonomies inherited from the 19th century that had been based on national or regional divisions of its holdings of paintings. His new curatorial proposal, which became known for his ‘daring juxtapositions’ of

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paintings, sought to open up the museum to wider publics by replacing this earlier pedagogical vision of history with an aesthetic ideal that would, in his view, make the collection more accessible to visitors. This chapter considers this curatorial rethinking specifcally during the years of 1946–1951, prior to the actual work of rebuilding, and it explores its relationship to discourses about cultural reconstruction in Britain in the post-confict era. The historical landscape of museums in Britain during the frst half of the 20th century, and specifcally of museums post-1945, remains relatively under-examined, and it is only recently that scholars have given this period the critical attention it deserves. In her book Museums in the Second World War, Catherine Pearson redresses the common assumption that during and after the Second World War museums put a break to the modernising efforts pioneered in the 1930s, proposing instead that this was a period in which museums implemented innovations and were “popular with the public, successfully engaged with audiences and were valued for their educational services.”6 Others, such as Andrew McClellan and Halona Norton-Westbrook, have similarly identifed a repositioning of the museum towards new public service ideals.7 There is however less empirical evidence to support the dynamics that these authors allude to, and the present case-study precisely demonstrates how after the war curators endeavoured to defne a new basis for the public viewership of paintings in line with their commitment to reform the museum as a public service. The research into previously untapped archives also shows that this reassessment of traditional curatorial practice placed a pan-European emphasis on the collection, but that this process was at one and the same time characterised by a mixed public response both by museum visitors and the press.

Wartime Damage and Post-War Experiment In January 1946, Philip Hendy became the new Director of the National Gallery to succeed Kenneth Clark, whose wartime directorship had been heralded as a beacon of hope against the war’s slumbering “numbness.”8 It is well known that under Clark the Gallery hosted musical concerts daily, holding also temporary exhibitions about contemporary art, war-time pictures and ‘non-art’ subjects about post-war planning, as well as the so-called Picture of the Month displays from 1942 onwards, which featured a small group of Old Master paintings brought back specially from Wales, where the collection was stored for the duration of the war.9 Hendy was in favour of these popularising wartime efforts and wanted to retain what some had described as the National Gallery’s “unique position in popular esteem as a centre of cultural life.”10 However, he was also charged with the task of rebuilding the Gallery, which had been severely damaged by nine bombs and shrapnel and with overseeing the reaccommodation of the collection, which had been safely stored in Wales during the war. Inscribed in red in the plan are the bombs that hit the Gallery, and its subsequent rebuilding took nearly twenty years. This was exemplary of the situation in London’s major national museums, many of which were still undergoing reconstruction work on out-of-access areas for many years after their reopening to the public in the mid-to-late 1940s.11 As Hendy reported to the Board of Trustees at the National Gallery, the task of reconstruction would take years to complete, provided that “the building is open at all the seams. Ceilings and walls are consequently coated with grime and foors resemble outdoor pavements.”12

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Ironically, these precarious conditions lent a greater experimentalism to Hendy’s post-war adaptation of the displays, precisely because, as he noted, “all the proposals were merely in the nature of experiments.”13 The resulting temporary rehang replaced the taxonomies inherited from the 19th-century museum based on national divisions with what became popularly known as ‘daring juxtapositions’ combining pictures of similar periods but different regional and national contexts.14 The new displays thus celebrated a viewership of paintings that distanced itself from tropes of nationalism associated with the war and preceding eras, drawing attention instead to masterpieces as sensuous works of art and to the aesthetic stimuli that present-day visitors would experience. This was not an entirely novel proposal, given that some years earlier Clark had advocated that with paintings “the important thing is our direct response to them. We do not value pictures as documents. We do not want to know about them; we want to know them, and explanations may too often interfere with our direct responses” [his italics].15 However, Hendy was the frst to explicitly break with the Gallery’s curatorial tradition and enlist visitors in a modernising agenda that sought to reform the public’s visual engagement with the collection. Little evidence of Hendy’s intellectual roots survives, but it is clear from his writings and speeches that he brought together a range of tendencies. His curatorial endeavours refected an intersection of ideas that stemmed as much from the post-war climate after the Second World War as from theories propagated in Europe and the United States since the 1930s about aesthetics and the role of art galleries. In this respect, Hendy’s career was decidedly international: by his late twenties he had undertaken research and curatorial work in the United States, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1927– 1930) and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1930–1933), to later participate in the frst international museum conference “Muséographie” (1934) and in ICOM’s postwar activities, an organisation of which he became President in 1959. Importantly, as Curator of Paintings in Boston, Hendy must have come into contact with the ideas of Benjamin Ives Gilman, Secretary of the Museum between 1893 and 1925, a museum pioneer known for implementing improvements in the displays (lighting, heating, seating, and signage) as well as for adopting a more simplifed style of museum presentation that soon became widespread in museums in the United States and Europe.16 Moreover, Hendy was involved with the museum community in Britain and abroad, taking active part in discussions about the social role of museums as a contributor to the journals Museum and The Museums Journal, both important professional spheres for the review of established paradigms of museum practice. As a member of these organisations, he anticipated the reorientation of the museum towards “the democratisation of culture,” which alluded to the capacity for museums to effect social change and which, especially after 1945, promoted them “as a mechanism for the re-civilisation of a society which had demonstrated how close to the surface lay barbarism.”17 Hendy’s displays refected such internationalist ideas and positioned the museum as a useful instrument in society. Even before taking up his role at the National Gallery, while he was director of Leeds City Art Gallery and Temple Newsam, Hendy had consistently advocated the modernisation of the museum and its public presentation to ensure its relevance to contemporary visitors. In his writings and public appearances, Hendy made clear that art could serve as a self-improving means of instruction, and he placed the aesthetic apprehension of the visitor at the heart of his curatorial programme, adopting a policy of “aesthetic-stimulation” that prized the immediate aesthetic response of the viewer over other approaches to curation.

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Important advocates of this position included the editor of The Burlington Magazine, Albert Charles Sewter, and the Deputy Director of the Walker Art Gallery, Charles Carter.18 For Sewter, the art gallery would be improved if it arranged objects for the ordinary visitor, who came “to look at pictures (simply),” while Carter argued that an aesthetic emphasis on the formal study of objects could enable visitors to “see the past through the eyes of the present, and to look at the work with the direct and unhampered vision.”19 Hendy’s interventions at the National Gallery were infuenced by these new models of visuality that sought to adapt display to the visitor while formulating reformist museological agendas.

‘Daring Juxtapositions’ at the National Gallery Faced with the pressing task of reconstruction of the Gallery, whose west wing had sustained considerable damage, Hendy pushed for “restoring a reasonable proportion of the whole to the highest possible standard” rather than fully reopening it to the public.20 It was preferable, he observed, “to stimulate the public by the fnest possible presentation than to offer it at once the whole collection shown under the sordid conditions of the present.”21 The National Gallery, Hendy argued, would offer a counterbalance to London’s “battered” cityscape, so much so that “redecoration [was] needed at least as much for its psychological effect as for a background to the pictures.”22 This fell in line with approaches to display in museums since the 1930s that favoured high standards of presentation as a foil to a culture that was becoming dominated, according to some museum commentators, by a “sense of quantity” and an urge “to simplify things.”23 At the National Gallery, this demand for high standards led to the closure of just under half of the galleries and the immediate reduction of the number of paintings on display to a mere 250, a fgure that was later increased to 400 with the reopening of two more galleries, though this still represented only a ffth of a collection of nearly 2,000 paintings.24 Before the war, Hendy noted, approximately 850 paintings had been on show and visitors could access the remainder upon request in the Reference Section, but this had ceased to be possible after the war “due to congested conditions of storage.”25 In order to ensure that the public would see as many paintings as possible, it was proposed to make regular changes in the hang. This provided an opportunity for curatorial experimentation, and Hendy further believed that the new method of display might bring public opinion to support the Gallery in asking for further space in the future so as to quickly recover “the whole building back into use . . . but at a higher level of maintenance.”26 Hendy thus took advantage of wartime destruction to formulate a museum of the future that, owing to its larger size, would comfortably accommodate the growing national collection of paintings and its increasingly complex needs with new facilities and equipment for both staff and visitors. In the absence of photographic evidence, it is the minutes of board meetings, correspondence, the director’s writings, reports, and letters from visitors in the National Gallery Archive that provide an invaluable source for ‘visualising’ the experimental rehang of 1946. In one director’s report of 1946, Hendy noted that after the closure of most of the west wing, the centre of the Gallery was shifted from Room I (formerly the central axis of the Gallery) to the Dome on the east side.27 Because of its large size and church-like features, the Dome housed large Italian altarpieces, but its four radiating galleries were no longer flled, as custom had it, with “Renaissance pictures.”28

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Rather, the director informed the trustees that these four rooms (IV, VIII, XI, XVI) now included “the best of the smaller 15th century pictures of four groups: Florentine, Venetian, Flemish and German.”29 Thus, although such groupings remained distinct in their respective schools, they had been placed in adjacent rooms such that visitors would transition between paintings of different geographical origins. In the neighbouring long Gallery X this mixture included Venetian 16th-century pictures and “a few deriving from them,” namely works by El Greco, Rubens, and Poussin.30 If this arrangement principle pinpointed possible formal infuences of style and technique, Gallery VII (formerly the Venetian Room) grouped pictures by altogether different criteria, those requiring the strongest light and richest background—Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish pictures of the 17th century.31 By this time, this gallery had been restored to its former elegance and grandeur, which had been imparted by Edward M. Barry’s original Victorian design in the 1870s.32 Summarising his intentions in the Director’s Report, Hendy fnally stated that while the “traditional grouping of schools” had been largely maintained in the galleries, a good many exceptions have been made, partly for the sake of a more harmonious and stimulating ensemble and partly for the sake of historical truth, to show that the spirit of the time is usually more important than national boundaries, and that ideas can transcend both.33 Almost as soon as the subject of the Gallery’s rehang was aired in these internal documents, it became topical in the press, making evident the Gallery’s desire to foster public interest. Newspapers became one important conduit through which the Gallery could both inform and garner support for its agenda, and reactions to its new hang ranged from positive appraisals to scepticism. The Manchester Daily Dispatch reported that “Mr Hendy has decided to break away from the tradition of hanging pictures strictly by schools. Instead, pictures will be grouped to show the trend in the art in different parts of Europe.”34 The conception underlying these changes was to show, as The Museums Journal put it, “how much artists of the same period had in common.”35 In this respect, The Times informed its readers that “one can now see bacchanals by Titian and Poussin side by side, the early Velázquez beside Caravaggio, the late Velázquez beside de Hoogh.”36 The paintings hereby referred to must have been Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (NG35) and Poussin’s A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term (NG62), and their pairing would have shown visitors how paintings similar in theme had received different treatment by a 16th-century Venetian painter and a 17th-century French artist who had closely studied Venetian art of this period. Similar such examples were noted in other printed media, but the review in The Guardian was less positive and reported how Holbein’s The Ambassadors (NG1314) resembled policemen in fancy costume who pretended not to notice Bronzino’s highly sensual Venus and Cupid hanging beside them (NG651), and it further pointed out both paintings looking prosaic opposite the rhythmic battle scene by Uccello (NG583).37 This paper was thus critical of the fact that visitors would fnd, in the same room, works by a German portraitist, a Florentine painter of the 16th century, and a 15th-century Italian painter working in the Late Gothic tradition. The Guardian’s comment that there was an “incongruity of style” in the new haphazard hang implied a preference for the national schools against the Gallery’s change of approach. However, the description of The Ambassadors as policemen in fancy costume equally

72 Ana Baeza Ruiz suggested a way of looking that was unquestionably contemporary and that to some extent evoked the cross-temporal dynamic of the ‘daring juxtapositions.’ Writing about the histories of display at the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith has pinpointed the “duality” of Hendy’s concern “for the look of paintings on the one hand, infuenced by his modernist aesthetic; and, on the other hand, by the intellectual logic of following the zeitgeist rather than a layout dominated by national schools.”38 This resonates with Hendy’s own statement to produce a hang that was “harmonious and stimulating” as well as refective of “the spirit of the time.”39 However, this broad characterisation of Hendy as a modernist does not explain the rationale for his museological programme, whether we think of his choice to focus on temporal periodisation over place (Zeitgeist) or of his attention to formal associations of facture and style (modernist aestheticism). Thus, even though Hendy was well acquainted with Britain’s modernist circles, it is necessary to give further consideration to the roots of his thinking in relation to the discourses permeating art museums in the frst half of the 20th century. As will be discussed in the following two sections, the national school displays proved inadequate to Hendy because they represented a backlash to attitudes associated with the 19th century and the rise of nationalism, something which jarred with the global cosmopolitanism advocated by intellectuals and public offcials like himself after the Second World War. Second, Hendy’s inclination towards modernist aesthetics was not purely art historiographical but was intimately connected with a modern conceptualisation of the museum as an increasingly democratised and accessible public space. To Hendy, the model of the school arrangement was ill-suited to a lay audience unfamiliar with the histories of style. Contrariwise, the aesthetic curatorial paradigm he proposed—and which many museums had already adopted since the 1930s—was premised on the capacity of art to communicate directly through sensory means.

Time, Place, and the Hanging of Pictures At the National Gallery, the arrangement of paintings by school had remained unchallenged since it was adopted by its frst director Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865) in the mid-19th century.40 This had originally involved a departure from 18th-century modes of decorative presentation associated with the cultured amateur and led to the implementation of a historiographical hang by chronology and school that aimed to fulfl the museum’s educational function as a “civilising and socialising force,” in the words of the historian Christopher Whitehead.41 As revealed by archival documents, immediately after the Second World War the wartime director Kenneth Clark had not anticipated “any drastic rearrangement of the pictures” in his plans for post-war reconstruction.42 With Clark gone in 1946, Hendy’s ‘daring juxtapositions’ reconfgured the Gallery’s conventions of display for the frst time and pointed towards a reorientation of the museum’s activity. The 19th-century taxonomic style of display had favoured a historical principle whereby each painting could be seen as part of a discrete series, but for Hendy, there had also been pragmatic reasons for this “almost universal practice of national ‘school’ hang.”43 In employing this system, he argued, galleries were segmented “into watertight compartments, and, when . . . so divided, a new acquisition can be introduced into one part with less danger of causing disturbance to the whole.”44 Hendy elaborated this point, suggesting how it was “the easy, lazy way to arrange an art gallery;

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for once it is arranged that way, there is very little change you can make.” Pictures of great size, Hendy explained, tended to become “fxed” and so “attract round them the smaller fry of the same nationality.”46 Despite the convenience of this method, Hendy observed that the alternative hang of combining paintings from different locations could be more useful in the contemporary context.47 On repeated occasions, Hendy invoked the Zeitgeist principle to suggest that period had always had greater signifcance than place, by which he implied that many of the paintings in the collection had been produced before the formation of their corresponding nation-states.48 In one instance, Hendy argued that artists such as Rogier van der Weyden from Brussels or Giovanni Bellini from Venice had more in common, in belonging to the 15th century, than van der Weyden and his later compatriot Peter Paul Rubens, from the 17th century, who despite being of the same country belonged to completely different periods and thus had had no direct exchange at all.49 For Hendy then, the traditional method of hanging pictures strictly according to schools suffered from historical inaccuracies because it emphasised national boundaries as if these had always existed.50 Hendy’s thinking refected a preoccupation with the spirit of the age as it was expressed in the cultural artefacts of each period, a concern that was shared by contemporaries writing and working in Britain across the disciplines of art history and architecture. For example, the writer Sigfried Giedion had posited that with architecture “[h]owever much a period may try to disguise itself, its real nature will still show through in its architecture.”51 Cultural spokespeople like Nikolaus Pevsner rehearsed similar views, and these were indebted to Hegelian conceptions of art history and to the work of Heinrich Wölffin. However, Hendy differed from these traditions to the extent that he rejected the principle of nationality as a feature of this Zeitgeist. There was a political undesirability in employing the national school arrangement, he argued, provided that its focus placed an emphasis on the divisions that had “kept men apart.”52 Defending this position in 1949 in a letter to the general secretary of the Fabian Society, Andrew Filson, Hendy stated that “[t]here is an almost political aspect which I should have thought a good Fabian would be the frst to appreciate. Art is one of the things which has always fowed over nationalist boundaries.”53 In his internationalist convictions, Hendy was closely aligned with the infuential writer and critic Herbert Read, for whom art was the only “international language” which might engage and redirect aggressive impulses towards a common peace.54 Hendy implicated that artistic exchange was untrammelled by national divisions and that Eastlake’s school divisions had been wrongly dictated either by scholarly convention or curatorial pragmatism. As he saw it, history would be better understood if the major national collections were less nationalistic in their arrangement.55 They should instead encourage the view that artists of different origins had mutually infuenced one another and that what they shared in common had been more important, for even “in the most unsettled times artists have always moved about Europe with the greatest freedom.”56 The pan-European displays he pioneered in London pinpointed precisely this interconnectedness of artistic production and individual creative freedom, and as a result they unifed such painters under the auspices of a common pictorial language. In relation to discourses in museography, Hendy’s position was refective of a shift of direction in debates about the museum domestically and worldwide, and it closely resembled the internationalist language employed by organisations like the Museums Association, UNESCO, and ICOM during the same period in publications such as 45

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the Museums Association’s monthly The Museums Journal and ICOM’s quarterly Museum. In 1946, UNESCO’s constitution had highlighted its purpose to “collaborate in the work of advancing the mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples, through all means of mass communication” and to “recommend such international agreements as may be necessary to promote the free fow of ideas by word and image.”57 UNESCO’s branch for museums, ICOM, also identifed with this cause and the 1950 editorial of ICOM News encouraged museums to cease as far as possible, to arrange their exhibitions in separate sections devoted to their major ‘national’ and ‘foreign’ schools, but instead set the works of different countries produced in successive periods side by side, thus breaking down a number of artifcial divisions.58 Around the same time, UNESCO’s Museums and Monuments Division called museums to contribute to peace through international collaboration in education, science, and culture.59 A conscientious objector during the war, Hendy refected his unease over the spread of nationalism during the Second World War, and he singled out the Festival of Britain 1951 as the “acme” of this nationalist impetus, fearing that Britain might again slip into a period of isolationism after the war.60 The Festival had pledged to celebrate Britain’s “unity in diversity” by showing visitors “the discoveries, the men, and the works of art which have made it a great nation,” as noted by the design historian Becky Conekin.61 In a reversal of this trope, the juxtapositions at the Gallery were a statement of unity across rather than within national boundaries, and they exercised a “rhetoric of universal humanism” that became popular among some museums after the war with the view to “restoring” world civilisation.62 Arguably, Hendy saw his scheme as part and parcel of that mission and vested the museum with the potential to become an instrument for tolerance. Art, he believed, had the potential to foster “unanimity of all the truly civilised people in the world” and by this virtue to counteract the “harmful aspects” of nationalism.63 In strikingly similar prose, the UNESCO publication Art Museums in Need announced that museums had “universal appeal” and that they pointed to “the higher unity of art which knows no frontiers and expresses the aspirations of all men toward a fner civilization.”64 Andrew McClellan and other historians have argued how during the post-war period in Europe and the USA, museums—and art galleries in particular—were commonly cast as humanitarian instruments capable of mitigating the brutal consequences of world confict, as spheres for the constitution of democratic citizenries.65 In the years that followed, various exhibitions and publications rehearsed images of human universality,66 perhaps most famously René d’Harnoncourt’s Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (November 1948–January 1949, MoMA), which encouraged a vision of a “like-minded and related global humanity” by presenting artefacts from different parts of the world in unusual combinations, as Mary-Anne Staniszewski has shown.67 In 1955, Edward Steichen’s popular The Family of Man (January–May 1955, MoMA), presented photographs portraying individuals from different parts of the world to mirror “the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”68 In the French-speaking context, André Malraux’s book Museum Without Walls offered a transportable museum in print that reproduced photographs of artefacts of various kinds (from sculpture to painting) and of diverse geographical origins so

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they could be seen sequentially on the page. As a result, Malraux pinpointed “crosscultural affnities” between these different objects, based on their formal equivalences of shape and scale.70 In an unpublished manuscript for the review of Malraux’s book, Hendy praised Malraux for being “quite untrammelled by any predetermined theory of aesthetics. He has understood far too well the interminable metamorphoses of art.”71 And he continued, “it is true to say that a new idea of art has arisen in our times. . . . And it is because this idea is not based on any aesthetic preconception that for the frst time it covers the whole world.”72 Such was the kind of international artistic community, if not global then at least European, that Hendy had established in relation to the Gallery’s national collection of paintings, one that focused on commonality and contiguity of artistic production over differences of origin. 69

Producing Aesthetic Experience in the Modern Museum From a different perspective, when Hendy advanced his ‘daring juxtapositions’ he was also thinking about the necessary qualities of the modern museum and the public’s reception of art. Since the 1930s, he had been well placed in discussions about museum display and architecture that developed in conferences and specialist journals, both as a speaker and writer, and his revision of the Gallery’s curatorial methods was informed by this rethinking of the museum.73 Through scale photographs Hendy was able to try out different “paper rehangs,” and he cherished the resulting “charm” of these unexpected contrasts.74 They materialised the spirit of “change and the stimulus” that had led other museum curators to reconsider their display strategies and make their exhibits more appealing to visitors.75 At stake in his re-evaluation of the art museum was the subjective experience of the visitor, a topic that became hugely important in The Museums Journal in the frst decades of the 20th century, with one editorial beckoning museums to fnd imaginative ways of luring visitors into their premises and going as far as saying that “every museum, large or small, needs some kind of shop-window in which the display can be changed.”76 In Germany, the use of ornament and pattern-making in gallery displays had borrowed tactics from department stores, seeking to encourage an affective empathy between viewers and the collections.77 The awareness of visitor perception and its relationship to display manifested differently in some Italian museums after the war, where the restoration of the Correr Museum (Venice) and the Palazzo Bianco (Genoa) led to a presentation of works of art that would subvert visitor expectations.78 Here, the architects Carlo Scarpa and Franco Albini, respectively, replaced original architectural features with whitewashed walls and they suspended paintings from rods, often unframed.79 In Britain, the post-war director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Leigh Ashton, rearranged the collection so as to excite curiosity of prospective audiences, combining “objects, each brilliant of its kind, borrowed from all departments and shown in groups based on period or style or place.”80 Hendy praised how this more eclectic approach at the Victoria and Albert Museum had “cut boldly across the departmentalism of a century,” which had previously been based on a classifcation of the collections by material alone.81 Hendy’s own scheme ft with these desires to make the museum an enticing environment that could instil a sense of surprise and wonder. In his view, visitors unfamiliar with the histories of style would fnd it easier to contemplate works of art than to acquire historical knowledge about them, and he was concerned to make these

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displays accessible. The public, he maintained, might “fnd such juxtapositions more helpful than those dictated by museum custom and the histories of art.”82 Viewers were thus expected to experience painting subjectively, each according to their personal capacity—but also—and with the passing of time, according to the changing perception of each generation.83 If during the 19th century encyclopaedic approaches in art galleries had been based on the telling of stories about art, technique, and history, Hendy rather focused on the visual properties of the paintings, and it was “only the very best” masterpieces that made their way into the temporary displays at the expense of paintings that were deemed of lesser signifcance.84 Rather than being guided by received knowledge about technique, authorship, or iconography, the museum would provide the conditions necessary for visitors to engage in an individual act of observation. In this way, the ‘daring juxtapositions’ had their roots in the “doctrine of high aestheticism” that came to inform museum practice in the opening decades of the 20th century and which saw the build-up of collections of ‘originals’ and of ‘the best’ art at the expense of reproductions or casts, the reduction of the number of works of art on display, the single-row hang in lieu of dense arrangements, and the emergence of two-tiered exhibition layouts for general and specialist visitors.85 Thus, while Hendy had emphasised the spirit of the age, the displays at the Gallery effectively privileged what was a predominantly aesthetic experience of heightened intensity.86 Like Gilman in Boston before him, Hendy intended to engage the beholder in this direct sensory experience—or as it was often called at the time, “appreciation.”87 This was linked to debates about the didactic role of visual education as a mode of progressive pedagogy during the post-war years, during which time numerous articles in The Museums Journal signalled to the “aesthetic side of visual methods,” the “Age of the Eye,” “learning by images” or the “re-education of the eye” to suggest the broad democratic reach of visual tools for educational ends.88 Only a few years after Hendy’s rehang, the National Gallery would launch the School’s Scheme (1949–1956), a Britain-wide initiative that sought to impress this visual education on pupils in subscribing schools by circulating coloured reproductions of paintings from the collection with an explanatory text containing historical information about them.89 However, it is not the case that the museum profession was in total agreement about the preference of this method of display over more interpretive models. In 1946, the president of the Museums Association Douglas A. Allan pointed out some of its drawbacks, asking colleagues “Does your public, as a whole, know why you exhibit things?”90 As Allan argued, it was not enough “to show a lovely thing,” and the museum should combine enjoyment with understanding, for example through the use of more narrative labels that experimented with different ways of attracting the public. Although we do not have information about the specific labels used at the National Gallery in 1946, since the early 1950s the dominant label type was beautifully printed in black and gold and the information reduced to the minimum—the name of the artist or attribution, the title (if any), the date, and the name of the donor and date of presentation—lending greater emphasis to an unmediated visual encounter.91 As such, it is likely that the post-war labels were succinct and factual rather than interpretive, a feature that cultural spokespeople such as Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read had recommended for art museums.92 The underlying idea was that labels that were too descriptive would distract visitors from the pictures themselves.

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Evidence suggests however that some members of the public found this reinterpretation of the displays disorienting, uninformative, or discouraging, as is clear from letters written by several visitors. One of these correspondents was Miss J. Bailey, who introduced herself as an “uninstructed member of the public” and noted that despite her life-long familiarity with the Gallery, the abandonment of the old arrangement by schools meant she could not understand the current principle of display.93 Miss Bailey reported having found it very diffcult to fnd her way because of the lack of a common criterion, given that some rooms displayed paintings heterogeneously whilst others contained paintings of the same school.94 “My perplexity,” she wrote, “is possibly shared by the great majority of those visiting it [the Gallery] at present,” and she demanded some explanation of the system on which the rooms were arranged, for example with a brief notice per room explaining its contents.95 Beatrice Burton-Brown, a headmistress and a student of painting, might have agreed with Miss Bailey, for she wrote in a letter that it had become increasingly diffcult to teach anything about the pictures when they were so “disarranged.”96 In yet another letter, Kate Thorpe, who was an art lecturer at Borthwick Training College, expressed that the “constantly changing arrangement of the rooms” could be, if unavoidable, at least “minimised if printed sheets were available showing current distribution of pictures.”97 For other visitors with less pedagogical concerns, the rehang of the collection represented a superb improvement. Commander J. H. Bowen thus observed that the new rooms were models “of what a picture gallery should be” and that the pictures had taken on a “new life there,” though he also asked for more explanatory panels and labels to provide information about the paintings and their location in the Gallery.98 Another correspondent, Howard Bliss, commented that the new positioning of the paintings had made “old friends tremendously exciting” and that the corridor rooms radiating from the Dome were “a sheer joy” [his underlining].99 Of the thirteen letters from visitors about the rehang that survive in the archive of the National Gallery, six were positive appraisals of the rearrangement, while seven included complaints about the placement of pictures, the legibility of their labels, or the lack of information about their display principles. Interestingly, the majority of the positive reviews were all produced by men, while it was mostly women who expressed concerns about different aspects of the rehang. These commentaries put into relief a possible gendered dimension to these responses that could be further explored in future research, and they show that the reception to new visually harmonising re-arrangement was divided: for some it had made the collection less accessible, while others cherished the excitement of these unfamiliar juxtapositions. Either way, Hendy’s approach had been over-reliant on the capacity of artworks to transparently communicate meaning and on visitors’ ability or interest in contemplating works of art as aesthetic objects. Even Alan Lawrence, a member of the public who was exultant about the Gallery’s rehang to the extent of calling it a “real triumph,” made the observation that he had possibly “not quite grasped the ‘theme’” of Room XII, where Ingres’ Madame Moitissier (NG4821) was hung, and he speculated that the painting must have been included for certain intellectual affnities with the other works.100 What Lawrence hinted at was that the juxtapositions were underpinned by a certain conceptual framework but that this was not immediately clear to the visitor, even to regular museum-goers like himself. Thus, although Hendy wanted to value the position of the present-day viewer, his curatorial programme did less to

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empower visitors to interpret the pictures at their own will than propound an autonomous experience of the works of art which members of the public did not necessarily understand or perhaps did not feel capacitated to generate by themselves.

Conclusion The post-war developments at the National Gallery exemplifed the aim to renew and modernise the museum as a public service that could assist the constitution of democratic citizenries in the aftermath of the Second World War. This passed through the review of its museological features, and as a result, the Gallery rehearsed discourses which centred on the aesthetic experience of museum-visiting and sought to reform the public’s modes of perception. The unconventional rehang was, at the same time, informed by the expediency of the post-war political situation, which targeted internationalist ideas about art as a universal medium. These changes were to be short-lived, however, and by the early 1950s the Gallery would have restored the “fairly logical arrangement” of the national school.101 Among the visitors, some wrote to congratulate Hendy on the re-opening of the new rooms, expressing their enjoyment at the sight of “old friends” but also how these could now be seen under improved conditions.102 However, it was clear that the longer-term imperatives of reconstruction had led to the rehabilitation of the National Gallery as a collection of pictures bound by “national” categories. Hendy himself had understood that it would not be easy to keep abreast with the “new character, dynamic and popular” that the Gallery had enjoyed in wartime and at the same time restore the Gallery to “its true function of representing the deepest and fnest in the European tradition of painting.”103 There was confict, he had implied, between the agenda to make the Gallery attractive and extensive to larger constituencies and the re-establishment of its original function as a national collection of paintings that had traditionally operated under more exclusive principles. The convergence of different museological strands in the late 1940s and 1950s demonstrates that the post-war art museum emerged as a polyvalent space informed by competing values, as it sought to differentiate itself from 19th-century representational modes whilst simultaneously building on the legacy of earlier curatorial examples. Guided by this ethos to refgure the Gallery, Hendy cast the 19th century as something “negative” and “undemocratic,” while the present was seen as being inherently “transformative” and potentially emancipatory.104 This was informed by a liberal form of progressivism that identifed the modernising processes of the museum—its focus on change and on the provision of new amenities—with the democratic impulse to be more open and accessible. Yet, even at his most radical, Hendy’s juxtapositions were not free of instruction or convention. Rather, the reshaping of the art museum as this locus of aesthetic experience itself produced “distinctive forms of tutelage” which primed visitors to follow certain practices of “guided freedom” and thus to become subject to “the direction of distinctive kinds of [curatorial] authority,” as Tony Bennett has argued with regards to the art museum.105 It was clear from the statements of confusion and desperation of some visitors that Hendy’s curatorial authority, though seemingly displaced, still enacted a pedagogical view that bore its effects on the personal capacities of the visitor to look at the work of art as an aesthetic object. It can be suggested that such transformative energies were less a response to the specifc material needs of visitors than of those envisioned—and arguably produced—by museums professionals like Hendy. Arguably then museums may have put themselves

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at the service of the public through more wide-ranging means of display, but they had simultaneously become—via the implementation of such new curatorial regimes— increasingly regulative of the activity that could take place within them.

Notes 1. Grace Morley, “Museums and UNESCO,” Museum 2, no. 2 (1949): 13. 2. The IIC was associated with the transnational organisation League of Nations, founded in 1920 with the aim to foster international understanding through the promotion of educational, scientifc, and cultural exchanges. See Daniel Laqua, “Transnational Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations, and the Problem of Order,” Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 223–247. As part of UNESCO’s task to deal with the protection, preservation, and restoration of monuments, in 1949 the “Museums and Monuments Division” was established, and in 1956 ICCROM was founded to improve methods in the conservation of cultural heritage. 3. Trenchard Cox, “The Provincial Museum,” The Museums Journal 49, no. 2 (1949): 32. 4. Morley, “Museums and UNESCO,” 13. 5. Philip Hendy, “Picture Galleries,” Museum 2:2 (1949): 44. 6. Catherine Pearson, Museums in the Second World War: Curators, Culture and Change, ed. Suzanne Keene (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 5. 7. Halona Norton-Westbrook, “The Pendulum Swing: Curatorial Theory Past and Present,” in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Practice, Vol. 2, ed. Conal McCarthy (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 346; Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 8. Suzanne Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime (London: National Gallery, 2008), 40. 9. Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime, 35–37, 93, 95–97. 10. Cox, “The Provincial Museum,” 32–33. 11. Nicola Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe: The Destruction of Historic Monuments during the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 176. 12. London, National Gallery Archive, NGA3/2/1/2. 13. London, National Gallery Archive, NGA3/2/1/2. See also Board Minutes 31 January 1946, London, National Gallery, NG1/12. 14. The term ‘daring juxtapositions’ has been taken from an editorial in The Burlington Magazine whose author was critical of the attempts at the National Gallery to group pictures according to a different paradigm. Hendy also referred to his mixed displays as “juxtapositions.” See “Italian Museums and the National Gallery,” The Burlington Magazine 92, no. 572 (1950): 307. 15. Sir Kenneth Clark, “Ideal Picture Galleries,” The Museums Journal 45, no. 8 (1945): 133. 16. McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 169. 17. F. Matarasso quoted in Rhiannon Mason, “Confict and Complement: An Exploration of the Discourses Informing the Concept of the Socially Inclusive Museum in Contemporary Britain,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 10, no. 1 (2004): 57. 18. See Charles Carter, “Policy of the Provincial Art Gallery,” The Museums Journal 33, no. 2 (1933): 44–48; and Albert Sewter, “A Policy for Provincial Art Galleries,” The Museums Journal 39, no. 2 (1939): 60–63. 19. Sewter, “A Policy for Provincial Art Galleries,” 61; Carter, “Policy of the Provincial Art Gallery,” 45–47. 20. London, National Gallery Archive, NGA3/2/1/2. 21. London, National Gallery Archive, NGA3/2/1/2. 22. Philip Hendy, “Art—The National Gallery,” Britain To-day (October 1946): 33, London, National Gallery Archive, NG24/1946/3. 23. Salvador de Madariaga, “Museums and Education,” The Museums Journal 45, no. 8 (1945): 136. See also McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 127. 24. Note that these are only approximate fgures. See Philip Hendy, “Renewed Service to the Public after War Damage,” The Times, 13 April 1946. See also London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18.

80 Ana Baeza Ruiz 25. These are only approximate fgures, see Hendy, “Renewed Service to the Public after War Damage,” and also London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/17. 26. London, National Gallery Archive, NGA3/2/1/2. 27. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18. 28. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18. 29. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18. 30. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18. 31. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18. 32. For the Barry Rooms see Jonathan Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery (London: Pallas Athene, 2006), 84–85. 33. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18. 34. Manchester Daily Dispatch, 14 August 1946, London, National Gallery Archive, NG24/1946/11. 35. “National Gallery: Further Reopening,” The Museums Journal 46, no. 8 (1946): 154, London, National Gallery Archive, NG24/1946/11. 36. The Times, 10 August 1946, London, National Gallery Archive, NG24/1946/11. 37. “National Gallery: Pictures Old and New,” The Guardian, 6 September 1946, London, National Gallery Archive, NG24/1946/11. The dates for these artists are: Holbein (1497– 1543); Bronzino (1503–1547); and Uccello (1397–1475). 38. Charles Saumarez Smith, The National Gallery: A Short History (London: Frances Lincoln, 2009), 134. 39. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/18. 40. For a discussion of Eastlake’s directorship at the National Gallery see Susanna AveryQuash and Julie Sheldon, Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World (National Gallery Company Limited, 2011); and Charlotte Klonk, “Mounting Vision: Charles Eastlake and the National Gallery of London,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 2 (2000): 331–347; and Christopher Whitehead, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth-century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005). 41. Whitehead, The Public Art Museum, 5–6, 7–8. Tzortzi notes that the decorative hang lasted until the end of the 18th century, see Kali Tzortzi, Museum Space: Where Architecture Meets Museology (Farnham; Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 45. 42. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/17. 43. Hendy, “Art—The National Gallery,” 33. Bennett discusses the resemblance between such art historical displays and the scientifc/anthropological principle of the series. See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 44–45. 44. Hendy, “Art—The National Gallery,” 33. 45. London, National Gallery, NG16/105/4. 46. The National Gallery, 1938–1954 (London: National Gallery, Balding and Mansell, 1955), 39; Hendy, “Art—The National Gallery,” 33. 47. Philip Hendy, Spanish Painting (London: Avalon Press & Central Institute of Art & Design, 1946), 5. 48. Philip Hendy, “Changes at the National Gallery,” Britain To-day (August 1950): 27, London, National Gallery Archive, NG24/1950/9. 49. Philip Hendy, “Changes at the National Gallery.” 50. Hendy, “Renewed Service to the Public after War Damage.” 51. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 19. 52. Hendy, “Art—The National Gallery,” 33. 53. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 54. See Herbert Read, “The Problem of Internationalism in Art: Address to the International Council of Art” (lecture, Washington, 9 May 1960), Leeds, University of Leeds, Special Collections, BC MS 20c HERBERT READ BOX 1A, 9ff, TS; Herbert Read, “Art and Aggression,” Leeds, University of Leeds, Special Collections, BC MS 20c HERBERT READ BOX 1A, 7ff, TS, and Herbert Read, “The Arts and Peace: Aesthetics: Enemy of Violence?,” Saturday Review, 24 December 1960, Leeds, University of Leeds, Special Collections, BC MS 20c HERBERT READ BOX 1A, 12ff, TS.

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55. Hendy, Spanish Painting, 5. 56. Hendy, “Art—The National Gallery,” 33. 57. Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (London, 16 November 1945, with the constitution coming into force on 4 November 1946), 3. An updated version of this constitution is available online: http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0022/002269/226924e.pdf [Accessed: 24/12/2017]. 58. ICOM News, editorial, July 1950. ICOM News was the news bulletin published by ICOM six times a year. See “Museums and Monuments Division,” United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (Paris, 3 October 1950), 4, UNESCO/MUS/2. 59. “Museums and Monuments Division,” 5, UNESCO/MUS/2. 60. Philip Hendy, “Untitled” (speech, Architectural Association, London, 1953), London, National Gallery Archive, NGA3/4/3/6. 61. The Festival of Britain (Festival of Britain Offce, 1951), 9. Becky E. Conekin, ‘The Autobiography of a Nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 153, 131. 62. McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 40; Philip Hendy, “The Art Gallery and the Community” (speech, Museums Association, Oxford, 1952), London, National Gallery Archive, NGA/3/4/3/6. 63. Philip Hendy, “Exhibition at Grantham,” Grantham Journal, 10 May 1940, Leeds, Temple Newsam Archive, ‘Press Cuttings’. 64. Jean Leymarie, Art Museums in Need (Paris and New York: UNESCO, 1949), 15. 65. McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 32–33. 66. McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 39. 67. Mary-Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998), 124. This included the comparison of a plate from Persia with a painting by Henri Matisse, see Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 128. 68. McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 39; The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 4. 69. See André Malraux, The Voices of Silence (I. Museum Without Walls, 13–128), trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954). The original French edition, Les Voix du Silence, was published in 1951. 70. See Michelle Henning, “With and Without Walls: Photographic Reproduction and the Art Museum,” in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Media, Vol. 3, ed. Michelle Henning (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 591–592; Rosalind Krauss, “Postmodernism’s Museum Without Walls,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 241–245. 71. Philip Hendy, “Review of The Voices of Silence” (book review, for Spectator, March 1954, unknown whether published or unpublished), London, National Gallery NGA3/4/2/16. 72. Philip Hendy, “Review of The Voices of Silence.” 73. Tzortzi, Museum Space, 23. 74. Hendy, “Renewed Service to the Public after War Damage.” 75. Hendy, “Renewed Service to the Public after War Damage.” 76. “Museums and the Press,” editorial, The Museums Journal 33, no. 10 (1934): 347. 77. See Charlotte Klonk, “Patterns of Attention: From Shop Windows to Gallery Rooms in Early-Twentieth-Century Berlin,” Art History 28, no. 4 (September 2005): 468–496. 78. Tzortzi, Museum Space, 56–57. 79. McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 139–140; Tzortzi, Museum Space, 55–57. See also Kay Bea Jones, Suspending Modernity: The Architecture of Franco Albini (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 143–184. 80. Frank Lambert, “Presidential Address”, delivered at the Museums Association Annual Conference, Cardiff, 13th July 1948. The Museums Journal 48:5 (1948): 93. 81. Philip Hendy, “Art—English Medieval Workmanship,” Britain To-day, September 1945: 31, London, National Gallery Archive, NGA3/4/1/4. 82. Hendy, “Changes at the National Gallery,” 27. 83. Hendy, “Review of The Voices of Silence.”

82 Ana Baeza Ruiz 84. Hendy, “Art—The National Gallery,” 33. 85. McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, 30–31; Tzortzi, Museum Space, 50–51; Suzanne MacLeod, Museum Architecture: A New Biography (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 101–108. 86. Krauss makes a similar point in Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 4 (Autumn 1990): 7. 87. Benjamin Ives Gilman, Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (Cambridge: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1923), 80–81, and 89–102. 88. See Paul Rotha, “The Film and other Visual Techniques in Education,” The Museums Journal 46, no. 8 (1946): 141–145; Jacquetta Hawkes, “Museums and General Education,” The Museums Journal 46, no. 8 (1946): 161–166; James Laver, “The Place of the Visual Arts in Education,” The Museums Journal 47, no. 12 (1948): 229–232; Douglas A. Allan, “Visual Education,” The Museums Journal 48, no. 10 (1949): 202–209. 89. The National Gallery, 1938–54, 52. It is likely that other state-owned institutions also participated in the scheme such as hospitals, prisons, the RAF, and other local education authorities. 90. Douglas A. Allan, “Museums—Mutatis Mutandis,” Presidential Address, delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Museums Association, Brighton, 16 July 1946, The Museums Journal 46, no. 5 (1946): 83. 91. London, National Gallery, NG16/129/1. 92. Herbert Read, “The Museum of the Future,” The Museums Journal 38, no. 1 (1939): 567; and Clark “Ideal Picture Galleries,” 133. 93. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 94. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 95. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 96. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 97. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 98. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 99. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 100. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/105/4. 101. London, National Gallery Archive, NG25/22; and NG26/23/3. 102. London, National Gallery Archive, NG16/16/104/5. 103. Hendy, “Renewed Service to the Public after War Damage.” 104. For the use of democratisation in heritage discourses see Cecilia Rodéhn, “The Performance of Academic Discourse on Democratizing Museums,” in Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage, eds. Kathryn Samuels and Trinidad Rico (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 98–99. 105. Tony Bennett, “Guided Freedom: Aesthetics, Tutelage, and the Interpretation of Art,” Tate Papers, 15 (Spring 2011), www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/15/ guided-freedom-aesthetics-tutelage-and-the-interpretation-of-art [Accessed: 15/05/2017].

5

The Venice Biennale at its Turning Points 1948 and the Aftermath of 1968 Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Vittoria Martini

By virtue of its longevity, the Venice Biennale constitutes an exceptional case study within the landscape of exhibitions histories. Founded in 1895 by the city of Venice, the Biennale was conceived alongside the wave of Great Universal Exhibitions, presenting works of contemporary artists, selected by an international committee according to their countries of provenance.1 It is located at the Giardini di Castello—the most modern area of the city, built according to the will of Napoleon—and since 1907 is where various nations built their own pavilions to represent the art of their countries during each edition of the Biennale.2 Through its history, the Venetian institution has undergone various transformations. After its foundation, the most signifcant of those was related to the Italian Fascist Government that in 1938 claimed complete control of both the Biennale’s structure and its contents, culminating in the creation of the Ente Autonomo La Biennale in the same year. Until 1930 the Biennale was presided over by the mayor and was economically dependent on the city of Venice. The ascent of Benito Mussolini and the establishment of the fascist government corresponded to a policy of centralising all cultural institutions within the hands of the state.3 The various reforms that the fascist government had enacted between 1928 and 1932 took defnitive form in 1938 with the law n.1517 that established the “New system of the International Biennial Exhibition of Art of Venice.”4 This is the law that remained in force until the reforms of 1973. After the war had ended and the fascist regime fell in 1943, the slow updating of fascist law by the new government of the Italian republic resulted in a paradoxical situation. The Venice Biennale was to exist for almost twenty years in a state of institutional precarity, struggling to revise its 1930s structure and regulations to the democratic republican order, in place since 1946. Finally, after the protests of 1968, pressures to structurally transform the Biennale’s fascist statute led to a new relationship between culture and politics through a socially and politically engaged cultural institution. By looking at the response to the fascist past of post–Second World War Italian politics through two key transformations of what is called the Visual Arts Department of the Venice Biennale, this chapter aims to cast a new light on two distinct moments in the history of the institution, still overlooked despite the impact and infuence they had within the history of the Biennale and it exhibition formats. In the frst moment of 1948, the Biennale turned itself into what could be called— after Francis Haskell’s eponymous book on the history of Old Masters exhibitions— an ephemeral museum, by adopting the art historical discipline and its supposed

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objectiveness in an attempt to detach itself from its recent fascist past and the present tensions of the Cold War.5 This is a moment where the newly born Italian Republic Democracy looked for ways to distinguish itself from the fascist pre-war use of culture as propaganda and the exploitation attempts led by the two main parties of the time, Christian Democracy Party (DC) and the Communist Party (PCI). The second moment originated in 1968 by adopting the opposite strategy and pushed the Biennale to embrace the political tensions of the 1970s, resulting in the Italian Parliament providing the Biennale with a new legislation and a series of politically engaged activities impacting its programmes and formats. It is in 1968 that a fully fedged political system built on democratic premises was able to take advantage of the institution, doing so through its reorganisation in order to tackle the new wave of fascism emerging at the time. The 1948 edition, led by a team of Italian art historians whose approach infuenced the Biennale for at least the following two decades, marked the return of the International Biennale Exhibition of Art as one had not been organised since 1943 due to the war and its aftermath. As later explained, in 1948, it adopted the theoretical dimensions of the museum, positioning itself under the umbrella of art historical disciplines, thanks to the participation of the most prominent Italian art historians in its organisational committee. This move, made by Giovanni Ponti (1896–1961), the Biennale Commissario Straordinario (special commissioner), aimed to formalise the political neutrality regained by the institution after the fascist dictatorship, as well as to ensure the same neutrality within the new Cold War context. The formation of the committee was a statement that the institution was no longer a propaganda tool led by a general secretary directly connected to the cultural policy of the central government as it was during the 1930s—but rather a scientifc gathering able to provide an objective assessment on the arts, as later discussed. This careful division between the spheres of politics and art later found the Biennale—eventually and unwillingly—coming to terms with the 1968 protests in a violent manner. The crises of 1968 led to the institution’s reforms of 1973, ones that would infuence the Biennales from 1974 to 1978. It will be argued later in the text that the intervention centred on the structure of the institution from the Italian Parliament’s three major political parties was decisive: the DC, the Socialist Party (PSI), and the PCI took control of the different sectors of the Biennale, with the visual arts under the hegemony of the PSI.6 After 1968, the Biennale adopted a thematic, politically engaged approach. This aimed to combine the Biennale’s different festivals with each other, a move in which the Art Biennale abandoned its strictly media-based organisation. This degree of experimentation would, eventually, begin to be tamed at the beginning of the 1980s. Because of the entanglement with politics within the structure of the institution, the Venice Biennale offers a blueprint through which to reconstruct the infuence of politics on culture in Italy after 1945.

1948—The Museological Turn of the Venice Biennale7 The Venice Biennale’s Post–Second World War ‘Museum Dimension’ In 1956, Rodolfo Pallucchini (then Professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Padova) resigned as General Secretary of the Venice Biennale, a position he had

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held for ten years. Generally addressed by art historians as the “Biennali di Pallucchini” (Pallucchini’s Biennales), the fve editions organised under his aegis (every two years from 1948 until 1956) witnessed an increasing lack of control in their organisational processes, especially when it came to the selection of Italian artists participating in the exhibitions.8 Pallucchini was appointed general secretary in 1947 by the Commissione, a scientifc committee formed by talented artists and art historians, including Pallucchini, invited that year by Giovanni Ponti to reshape the institution.9 Ponti, MP for the Christian democratic party and previously Mayor of Venice from 1945–1946, because of the urgency to resume the art exhibition of the Biennale, could count on a relative freedom in reorganising the institution. However, this initial impulse given in 1948 receded through the years as the Italian Parliament procrastinated over the reform of the Biennale. The delay in fact further destabilised the institution whose board was supposedly still regulated by the 1938 law.10 The new republican government did not have some of the fascist organs that by law had the right to have representatives within the Biennale’s board. Suppressed and impossible to substitute with any corresponding republican organs were the guilds and Popular Culture ministries, the Fascist National Party, and the Fascist National Confederation of Professionals and Artists, and this contributed to creating vacant positions within the board of the Venice Biennale, undermining the authority of its decisions. After Pallucchini’s resignation in 1956 due to the chronic institutional instability, another crisis in the management of the Biennale compelled the city of Venice, together with other institutions, to organise in 1957 a conference in order to write suggestions for structural reform, an event open to artists, critics, art historians, and museum directors. It was during his speech on this occasion that art historian Sergio Bettini declared: “the main failure [of the Biennales] of which I was speaking about, for me resides in the fact that these exhibitions have been kept and are still kept within the ‘museum dimension.’ ”11 Bettini does not defne the meaning of this expression, but from this it can be inferred how in the case of the Biennale a museological approach enters the exhibition realm, in an opposite move to what was happening in Italy at the time: interwar exhibition culture penetrating post-war Italian museums in their refurbishment and in their new displays. It is not incidental that Bettini refers to an institution organising perennial exhibitions such as the Biennale by juxtaposing it with the museum. At the time in Italy, museums and exhibitions were one of the most present topics of discussion among architects, art historians, and museum directors.12 Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan summarises the almost decade-long debate in a 1955 Casabella-Continuità article. On one hand, he points out museums should beneft from a refned exhibition culture that had developed since the 1930s, thanks to compelling installation designs conceived by architects—being able to present any kind of research in an engaging manner. On the other, he implies that architects, in conceiving the display for a museum, should always be a step behind art historians, following their instructions. For Argan, museums—in the case of fne arts—and the art historical discipline are intertwined. One justifes and supports the other in a mutual relationship that cannot be jeopardised by agendas of other subjects, such as that of architecture. Museums make visible the art historians’ research through exhibitions. They also turn the knowledge acquired by studying a collection into a useful tool, one for ensuring its preservation. The discipline of art history, on the other hand, allows museums to be updated with the most recent art historical research and to fulfl their mission in studying, preserving, and circulating their public heritage.13

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Bearing in mind that the phenomenon of interwar exhibition culture ventured into the post-war museums through the architects involved in their refurbishment (such as Franco Albini, Carlo Scarpa, the architectural group BBPR), it could be argued that an opposite movement occurred in the 1948 Biennale and those following until 1968.14 Museum culture penetrated an institution dedicated to perennial exhibitions, a cultural appropriation that Bettini does not fail to highlight during the 1957 conference. Bettini’s comment could sound ambiguous at frst, considering the lack of a permanent collection within the Biennale. Nevertheless, it can be argued that it is in the close relationship between the institution and the art historical discipline, as understood by Argan, that the key lies to understanding the museological turn of the Biennale as discussed in this chapter. The 1948 Venice Biennale: Structure and Programme In 1947, Giovanni Ponti as the Commissario straordinario of the Venice Biennale called the frst post-war meeting of the commission to organise the art exhibition for the following year. Ponti and the newly appointed committee had to face a world devastated by the consequences of war and affected by the escalation of Cold War tensions. However, the impending issue for them was in addressing the damage to the reputation of the Biennale, having represented the Axis Powers’ international relationships during the Second World War.15 Furthermore, the Italian context was still politically unstable after the transition to the republican order that began the year before, and for this reason it was closely monitored by both the United States and the USSR. Besides, the Biennale’s organisers had to consider diffculties of all kinds when dealing with shipments and loans of works of art since the devastation of war continued to make communication slow and diffcult.16 Ponti invited to the committee ten internationally acknowledged artists, art historians, and critics. There were fve artists: Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, Marino Marini, Giorgio Morandi, and Pio Semeghini. Alongside them were the four art historians: Roberto Longhi, renowned Professor of history of medieval and modern art at the University of Bologna; Rodolfo Pallucchini; Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Professor of art history at University of Pisa: and Lionello Venturi, Professor of history of modern art at the University of Rome. Venturi had been the only professor of art history who had refused, in 1932, to swear an oath to the fascist party, therefore losing his position. These nine were joined by the Venetian critic Nino Barbantini who had been actively engaged with the life of the artistic community of the lagoon since the 1910s. The committee elected Pallucchini as the general secretary of the Biennale after having offered the position to Barbantini, though being far too old, as a symbolic and reparative gesture in lieu of being ostracised from the Biennale by the fascists. Pallucchini’s nomination came after a series of notable contributions that he provided to the art historical exhibition culture of the time, often working closely with Ponti—both were in Venice at the time.17 Alongside his solid art historical background, Pallucchini also became famous for his diplomatic skills in exhibition making. In 1948, together with Ponti and the rest of the committee, he managed to produce an edition of the Biennale remarkable for the calibre of the artists, while simultaneously avoiding diplomatic accidents in what was one of the most politically charged years of Italian history after the Second World War.18 Together with the other nine men of the committee, Pallucchini sketched the programme for the 24th edition of the Biennale, pushing his own visions as well as making

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sure that quantity never superseded quality when inviting artists to contribute. Differing in their approaches and interests, the members of the committee ensured, through a series of heated debates, that the Biennale was of an extraordinarily high quality. This was thanks to the prominent artists involved, the quality of the projects presented, and the attention to detail—such as some of the displays commissioned to Italian architect Carlo Scarpa.19 The committee had to propose the organisation of monographic exhibitions of mid-career and established artists and to select Italian artists participating by invitation for the Biennale. Furthermore, in order to be more inclusive, the committee gave a further chance to Italian artists to be included in the fnal exhibition by submitting their works to a jury, a process different from committee selection. Overall, the number of Italian artists admitted by the committee was 407 while those admitted by jury was 224. This totalled 631, and it was subsequently diffcult to maintain a high standard of quality, as Pallucchini wished. Among the relevant retrospectives and solo artist exhibitions, the 1948 edition presented: Tre Pittori Italiani dal 1910 al 1920 (Three Italian Painters from 1910 to 1920), dedicated to Carlo Carrà, Giorgio De Chirico, and Giorgio Morandi; Arturo Martini (an homage to the Venetian artist who died in 1947); Filippo De Pisis, a group show dedicated to the Impressionism movement; and solo shows of avantgarde artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, and Paul Klee. The committee welcomed contributions from other countries in their national pavilions so that they were able to update the Biennale with the languages of the avantgardes. France presented works by Georges Braque and Georges Rouault; Austria introduced Egon Schiele and Fritz Wotruba; the United Kingdom, J.M.W. Turner and Henry Moore; while Germany exhibited a group of artists considered as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and was hosted in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini. The collection of Peggy Guggenheim, presented in the Greek Pavilion, left vacant for circumstances relating to its civil war, provided a further account of the most recent European and American avant-gardes. Pallucchini claimed to act as a mere instrument of the committee’s decisions, but it is undeniable that his art historical and organisational skills indelibly marked the history of the Venetian institution up until 1956. In his 1948 catalogue introduction, Pallucchini details important elements in approaching the frst post–Second World War Biennale.20 Two key fgures inspired him: Nino Barbantini and Riccardo Selvatico, the late Mayor of Venice who had conceived and initiated the Biennale. Since the second decade of the 20th century, Barbantini had issued a series of critiques of the Biennale for its predilection towards academic art and retardataire artists, as opposed to supporting French modern art. It was Pallucchini’s particular narrative to extend these critiques to the whole history of the Biennale, eventually including those fascist editions from 1928 to 1934, which instead pay more attention to the avant-gardes. Furthermore, in his 1948 catalogue entry Pallucchini took a retrospective look at the very frst Biennale, opening in 1895 and organised by Riccardo Selvatico, the thenmayor of the city of Venice and Professor at the local Fine Art Academy. Pallucchini did so by quoting Selvatico when referring to the roots for which the Biennale had to look in relaunching itself. Pallucchini stated that it should attract the Venice publics who were unable to travel abroad and who were eager to encounter works of art by renowned international artists. It should also give everyone the opportunity to update his or her own knowledge on the current aesthetic as well as widen the public’s consciousness of young Italian artists.

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By producing a link to the 1895 edition, Pallucchini avoided the embarrassment of tackling the recent fascist heritage of the institution. That nowhere in the text did he directly mention the dictatorship did not go unnoticed. With the omission, he—together with Ponti and the whole committee—failed to reckon with its consequences on the life of the institution. Moreover, dealing with the legacy of fascism for many Italians after the war meant dealing with their compliance towards the dictatorship. A Flashback to the 1930s: Antonio Maraini’s Fascistisation of the Venice Biennale (1928–1942) Since 1936, the Biennale had proposed an ideological version of Italian art to its national and international visitors. This had the evident aim of training a spotlight upon the Fascist Empire and then purporting to teach its values to Italian and international publics. The intervention of the artist Antonio Maraini was essential in the transformation of the Biennale into an Ente Autonomo (Autonomous Entity) through a Royal Decree made in 1938.21 Maraini was leader of the Sindacato Nazionale Fascista di Belle Arti (Fascist Artists’ Union), General Secretary of the Biennale between 1928 and 1942, and acquainted with Benito Mussolini. This move ensured that the central government in Rome would have direct control over the institution, once managed by the City of Venice. It was partially through this that during the 1930s the Biennale found itself at the top of the Fascist State’s pyramidal system of visual arts promotion. In this way, the Biennale increasingly came to align itself with the political needs of Mussolini’s government, especially in the second half of the 1930s when the institution came to represent the international map of Italian alliances. Maraini’s aim was to put Italian art at the centre of international attention, and he did so by promoting a renaissance of arts, one obviously supported by fascism. In his last four exhibitions as General Secretary, he admitted only artists whose works were easily understood by the general public and that would endorse fascist values: themes such as maternity, labour, family, and a fgurative approach in painting and sculpture. Maraini sought to silence those Italian critics (such as the Novecento group promoter Margherita Sarfatti and the distinguished Venetian critic Nino Barbantini) who were previously involved in the selection committees of the Venice Biennale (from 1928 to 1934) by expelling them. These critics opposed his fattening approach of presenting art that either illustrated fascist values or avoided the representation of a wider spectrum of Italian art at the Biennale: for example, Sarfatti supported artists from the Novecento group of which she was the most outspoken critic. This was a radical move by Maraini, considering that Mussolini’s attitude towards contemporary art since 1923 was to leave each artist to express him/herself according to his/her own style.22 Maraini’s governance on the one hand contradicted this principle, radicalising the role of the Biennale as a propaganda tool for the regime. On the other hand, he contradicted the same history of the Biennale, the foundational idea that it would promote the plurality of artistic expressions (despite its limitations in understanding the importance of the avant-gardes). Both to its national and international audiences the Biennale now clearly looked to have a bias towards the regime. In 1948, by providing a frst sketch of an international avant-gardist canon having its own roots in the Italian art history, the Biennale intervened in what can be considered the offspring of the approach adopted by Ponti—of having art historians sitting

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on the organisation committee. This perspective turned the whole Biennale into what can be defned as an ephemeral museum of contemporary art.23 The Museological Turn Between the Politics of Culture and the Policing Culture With the collapse of the regime, the creation of a special commissioner became the way through which central government postponed the Biennale’s reorganisation. While a series of law proposals in Parliament tried to align the Biennale to the new democratic state, the direct control of the institution—through a special commissioner—allowed the DC party to control the institution and avoid it becoming a battleground for conficting ideologies that were on the rise at the start of the Cold War. In a country divided between supporters of the DC party (Catholic and mainly centre-right) and the PCI, the political tensions affected the debate between realism and abstraction in art. Therefore, this Biennale was a response both to its own recent past as well as to that more largely of Italy. Because of these historical conditions, the arts sector of the Biennale had the urgent need to reinvent its format according to more scientifc and objective parameters. The discipline of art history provided the context for this task. Before, either artists (such as Maraini) or critics (such as Sarfatti or Barbantini) were in charge of the selection of the Biennale’s programme. Quality, pluralism, and a more objective assessment of the innovative trends that had recently happened in many forms of modern art production—missing in the Biennale’s editions from 1936 to 1942—became the basis of the institution’s new course. As art historian Alessandro Del Puppo highlights, by looking at Pallucchini’s personal library, after 1945 he adopted a formalist perspective on the reading of art, as many other Italian art historians of his generation did. This approach postulated an individual’s ethical choice, in which the work of art—rather than a political approach—would be the centre of attention.24 Comparing notes and marks on his books before and after the war, Del Puppo stresses how Pallucchini then adopted a formalistic reading of the works of art, as infuenced by pure visibility theory. He used this to detoxify the politicised and ideologised readings of art imposed on his generation by fascism. Art history also provided Pallucchini with a perspective through which to read the relationship between artists from different generations and to apply this to the Biennale. Preference was given to presenting modern artists and movements that had been overlooked by the previous editions of the Biennale. The idea was that it would become the institution par excellence on modern art education both for the general public and for Italian artists. The Biennale, with its authority, would become a dispositive to reinforce the art-historical canon of modern art. However, the committee members’ divergence of opinions in regard to the ultimate mission of the Biennale should be noted. A case in point is the tension between Longhi and Venturi. While the latter’s vision seems to stress how the main aim of the Biennale was to update the taste of Italian artists through the international exhibition, the former seems to believe in the Biennale being able to reclaim the infuence of the Italian art historical tradition within the international canon. This is one of the reasons why the Impressionists became the cornerstone of the 1948 Biennale as well as its bone of contention for months afterwards, as was revealed from the correspondence between Pallucchini and

90 Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Vittoria Martini Longhi.25 Longhi—who proposed the Impressionists exhibition—argued for limiting the selection only to those painters who actually took part in the historical Impressionist group, with the inclusion of Cézanne as the only exception.26 Venturi, instead, insisted on having works by Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, for the interest, according to him, of stirring a younger generation of artists. Therefore, Longhi and Venturi represented two different understandings of the Biennale.27 Longhi aimed for an exhibition able to clarify aesthetic positions and rectify the history of a movement, one that could be re-read through the flter of the Italian art historical tradition. In the end, fearing that not enough masterpieces could be loaned out to Venice, Pallucchini decided to include artists that were not strictly Impressionists within the exhibition, communicating his decision in a letter to Longhi sent while traveling by train around Europe to secure the works of art he needed for the Biennale.28 Another reason for which Longhi wanted to keep the Impressionist exhibition as historical as possible was his fear of providing fuel to the supporters of abstraction in Italy, at the time headed by Venturi. In 1948, political tensions in Italy were refected heavily within artistic debate, with the PCI supporting realism as opposed to abstraction, a stance that felt more related to capitalism and the United States. The extension beyond what was strictly and originally conceived of as Impressionist meant to endorse the shift from realism to abstraction that had happened with Post-Impressionists. This wariness of Longhi is demonstrated by his concern that the Peggy Guggenheim Collection would not be located in a place that was too central but in the more peripheral Greek Pavilion.29 Rather than taking a side with the cultural politics of one of the two main parties (DC and PCI), the Biennale developed an art historical programme using quality as its principal backbone. This was reiterated by Pallucchini at the end of his catalogue entry, when he explains how abstraction and realism are the two poles around which the debate was then unravelling. In order to decide on what order to display the works by the 631 Italian artists, Pallucchini claims: “In the display, I complied with the historical criterion, the only one free from polemic, in this way the public, from room to room, is led to follow the unravelling of the Italian contemporary art’s taste, from [Gregorio] Scilitian’s realism to the various abstractions.”30 Therefore, history became the adopted strategy in 1948 for the Biennale to avoid any politicisation, in response both to the past and the present. The countereffect of such a decision was the taming of the political reading of the arts and a priority given to a longue durée approach to history. It is not by chance that Pallucchini’s Biennales, rather than focusing on the arts of the last two years, take more the dimensions of the museum by looking back to the 19th century. Through the following years, the exceptional autonomy granted to the 1948 edition fades away, with the republic getting more power to organise its structures as well as attempting to infltrate every potential space of infuence. The instability of the Biennale, due to the procrastination in its reform process, put a stress on its mission of quality, but the museum dimension that had been experimented with for the frst time in 1948 seemed to be able to guarantee some degree of stability.

The Aftermath of 1968—the Thematic Turn31 Reasons for the Protest In 1968 the Venice Biennale embodied all the contradictions that were being targeted by the protests of that year and became the symbol of the cultural struggle for a

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democratic reform of all Italian public institutions of culture still governed by statutes decided by the fascist regime in the ’30s. In addition, as British art critic Lawrence Alloway had pointed out in his critical reading of the Biennale published in 1968, the paradigm of the survey exhibition was already on the wane.32 As early as 1956, in the introduction to the catalogue of that year’s Biennale, Rodolfo Pallucchini declared that its historical-informative mission had been accomplished, and a new stage should begin. For Pallucchini, however, the cultural renewal had to go hand-in-hand with the normative reform.33 In 1968 the Venice Biennale had been challenged for its structural backwardness and disconnection from the life of the city in which it was located. The Biennale was the main cultural activity of Venice, representing it globally. The connection between the Biennale, Venice, and tourism had been the very basis of the launch of the institution in 1895. Then fascism made this unique synergy between its elements hyper-productive and in doing so it became the most refned engine of the tourist exploitation of the city. In 1968 Venice was a city in a profound functional crisis. Its interests were focused towards tourism and environmental exploitation, while the city was depopulating, preferring the mainland.34 The students made the binomial ‘Bienniale-tourism’ the main slogan of their protest, and its use was part of a more general strategy of dissent against the city council management and exploitation of Venice. The protest against the Biennale and its president, the Mayor of Venice, the Christian democrat Giovanni Favaretto Fisca, had an immense echo on the international press present in Venice for the vernissage of the exhibition. The goal of the protest was to attract the public opinion on the ‘Venice issue’ that had defnitively worsened with the food of 1966. The catastrophic event heightened the debate over the claim of the specifcity of Venice, and it was generally thought to be time for the general rethinking of the future of the city.35 The political and civil battle for the protection of the city gave rise to a peculiar system of alliances that triggered widespread and spontaneous participation. On these premises, between 1968 and 1973, Venice became a laboratory for experimenting with a new model of cultural production.36 If the protests against the Venice Biennale exploded during the inauguration of the International Art Exhibition in June, as Pier Paolo Pasolini noticed, it was then in the context of the Biennale Cinema that the flm authors brought the contestation from a cultural to a political level.37 The Venice Biennale became a symbol for the cultural battle for the democratic reform of public institutions. As Pasolini, one of the protagonists of the Lido Cinema Palace occupation in September 1968, immediately realised, the protest against the Venice Biennale was not going to stop until it effected real change in Italian institutions. Reforms were no longer enough, as Pasolini wrote to the Italian prime minister, the Christian democrat Giovanni Leone: I dare say that the ANAC [National Association of Filmmakers] will not accept the ‘reform’ of the Venetian institution—just as the students will not accept the reform of the University. Once you have developed an awareness of your own ‘democratic’ rights, you cannot forget it.38 Pasolini stressed the fact that protesters were advocating for a real enforcement of already existing rights in a democratic country such as Italy, not merely temporary reforms but a true “transformation of the system.”39 Yet in an Italy marked by

92 Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Vittoria Martini emergencies, the Biennale was soon scored off the government’s list of priorities. In December 1969, the massacre at Piazza Fontana in Milan marked the beginning of what is known as the ‘strategy of tension.’ This was a “forced exacerbation of social confict aimed at shifting public opinion, as a precondition for shifting the political balance, to the right,”40 all in a country that had the biggest Communist Party in Western Europe. Italy faced a period of terrorist attacks, fascist-squad aggressions, and illegitimate use of state bodies, while a succession of very short-lived governments with a Christian Democracy majority caused great instability in the country. The events that took place in Italy between 1967 and 1968 changed society deeply and within a very short time. Experiences that used to be unthinkable were now being experimented with by independent associations and groups that, in the wake of the students’ and workers’ protest movement, had started to gather and be acted upon on all social levels. The 1973 Reform of the Biennale In the summer of 1971, three years on from the Lido events, the ANAC organised the Giornate del cinema italiano (Italian Cinema Days), conceived as a counter-attraction to the offcial Biennale Cinema, directed by Luigi Chiarini, an illustrious supporter of Mussolini’s government.41 The Giornate del cinema consisted of ten days of screenings and debates with the auteurs but happened without offcial ceremony or backing, taking place through the campi and cinema theatres of Venice. This experience showed that it was possible to manage culture independently, and that if you did away with offcial ceremonies and authorities, cultural events could have a huge appeal to the younger public that until then had been excluded or at least had not been taken into account by the Biennale organisers. The Giornate del cinema were an early model for a successful interaction with sociocultural reality: an occasion for research and debate, discussion and cultural production based on a participatory, non-authoritarian management of culture. The second edition of the Giornate del cinema occupied the Italian media and cultural scene entirely because, due to the serial lack of approval of the new statute for the Biennale by the Parliament, neither the Cinema Biennale nor the Theatre Biennale could be organised in 1973. It was exactly in the wake of the media sensation caused by the Giornate del cinema in 1973 that the senate decided to resume parliamentary debate on the reform of the Venice Biennale. On 26 July 1973, after over two decades of debate, the president of the Italian republic issued the reform law no. 438 titled “Nuovo ordinamento dell’Ente La Biennale di Venezia” (New Organisation of the Venice Biennale Institution). The new law was a “clean break with the past” and “rebuilt”42 the Biennale, changing its nature. From a seasonal festival, it became a “permanent institution for culture and activities,” which “by ensuring total freedom of thought and expressive forms,” had the task of promoting “international events relating to documentation, knowledge, criticism, research and experimentation in the arts feld,”43 thus affrming the Biennale’s openness to new trends in art and to the hybridisation of disciplines. The Biennale, which for 20 years had been the mainstay of fascist cultural propaganda, was symbolically turned into a “democratically organized” cultural institution.44 As a matter of fact, watching over the respect for plurality was the Steering Committee, which included “senior fgures in the world of culture and art”: nineteen members who represented local authorities, the government, the trade union federations, and

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the staff, who had to ensure that the Biennale promoted “full freedom of thought and expressive forms.”45 The task of the Steering Committee was also to elect the president and to issue the Piano quadriennale di massima delle attività e delle manifestazioni (1974–1977) (General Four-year Plan of Activities and Events). However, as was the case in all Italian public bodies, even the appointment of the members of the board of directors was the result of negotiation among political parties.46 The Christian democratic government led by Mariano Rumor, under which all this was happening, was a four-party system that relied on the support of the socialists and the republicans, in what was described as “organic centre-left.” This condition of governmental instability was mirrored in the allotment of the members of the board of directors, who were chosen by the cultural committees of the most infuential parties in the government: Christian Democracy, the Italian Communist Party, and the Italian Socialist Party, the latter a minority that had, however, been the most active protagonist in all the parliamentary bills for Biennale reform law. The board of directors appointed Carlo Ripa di Meana as its president. In his youth, Ripa di Meana had been a Communist Party activist but had become disillusioned with it after a long stay in Prague at the end of the 1950s. He then entered the independent group of the Socialist Party, working on cultural policy. The candidacy of Ripa di Meana was the result of an agreement among DC, PCI, and PSI. Ripa di Meana saw the reformed Biennale as the embodiment of the idea of newness in continuity with the past, a position that mirrored the one adopted by the new PSI headed by Bettino Craxi. The PSI was opposed to the radical break with tradition advocated by the communists of Enrico Berlinguer. Craxi was a close friend of Ripa di Meana since the Prague years; then in 1973 he became National Vice Secretary of PSI, in charge of foreign affairs.47 The new law gave the Biennale a legal framework, but it was the Piano quadriennale that was meant to fll it with content and to defne its spirit, making it operative. Given the ideological diversity of the members of the board of directors, Ripa di Meana immediately expressed his hope that they would behave as “theoreticians with a political conscience,” so that “democratic compromises” might be arrived at in order to implement the Biennale programmes.48 Approved unanimously on 12 July 1974, the text for the Piano quadriennale began by stating that the will of the reformed Biennale was to immerse itself in the “real, current” world and to look for a “different relationship with society.”49 The goal was to turn the “passive, paying spectator” into an “active protagonist,” also through “decentralisation”—that is, by moving events away from the traditional venue of the Biennale and disseminating them within the urban space. According to the four-year plan, the “new” Biennale had to have a “social utility,” in that it should be a public service, a living source of culture that, acting on the demands of the 1968 protest and on the experience of the Giornate del cinema italiano, would work towards “rescuing the city.”50 1974–1976: The Thematic Biennale Established by the reform, the shift from a seasonal event to a permanent structure meant that the Biennale’s activities were programmed on a four-year basis, presenting a complete break with its workings as compared with the past. Adopting a working method that defned yearly programmes and activities on the basis of “major project themes,”51 the four-year plan stated as its purpose that it would dialectically interact

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with the cultural reality in order to infuence the actual situation of contemporary art-making. The Biennale therefore took on a “project-based role,” abandoning “any false ambitions for a fnished cultural product” in favour of “proposals” that could encourage debate.52 The Piano quadriennale had identifed three sectors of activity, and the president had to appoint the three directors who, according to the law, had to be “Italian citizens who are particularly competent in their own sector.”53 Ripa di Meana certainly appointed the directors on the basis of their professional skills—but also strategically— for the purpose of maintaining the status quo within the board of directors. While the president was a socialist, Luca Ronconi and Vittorio Gregotti, respectively in charge of the Theatre and Music and the Visual Arts and Architecture sections, came from the communist area, and Giacomo Gambetti, in charge of Cinema and Television, was a Christian democrat. Again, in order to guarantee plural representation and to prevent a vertical division of power, as was usual in Italian public institutions, the president decided to appoint, next to the three directors, fve expert committees.54 With this, the democratisation of the Biennale was accomplished and would lead to a four-year period marked by long debates and exhausting compromise on the programmes and themes to be addressed, which often had repercussions on the national political debate. For its post-reform début, the Biennale set itself the goal of faithfully applying the four year plan, which refected the great social and political tension that marked the period in which it was written.55 As a symbol of the cultural struggle for a democratic reform of public institutions, an undivided board of directors decided to give the Biennale a “clear anti-Fascist profle in its relationships with foreign countries”: an ethical, cultural, and political choice that remained the leading principle in the following four years of activity.56 The decisive antifascist position, if on the one hand was a way to erase all residue of the fascist history of the Biennale, on the other it was a statement with respect to the events taking place in Italy. “La Biennale per una cultura democratica e antifascista” (The Biennale for a Democratic, Antifascist Culture) was the title-manifesto chosen for the 1974 edition. In May 1974 there was the extreme right terrorist attack in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia and in August a bomb that exploded on the train Italicus. In response, the ’74 Biennale made a statement that made clear the institution’s politically engaged position.57 The events took place from October to November, and the programme was flled with conferences, theatre shows, concerts, flm revues, and exhibitions. The idea was to bring the issue of a democratic, antifascist culture to international attention, and the coup in Chile provided the most recent case of the repression of democratic culture. Within the general programme, one thematic strand was concerned with “Libertà al Cile” (Freedom for Chile) and was designed as a series of multi-disciplinary events aimed at informing, raising awareness, and encouraging the public to engage in a democratic debate about a case that had international relevance. While the 1974 programme revealed the new mission of the Biennale as being a politically engaged “public service institution,” the 1975 programme laid the methodological foundation for the kind of research and experimentation required by the reform. “Un laboratorio internazionale” (An International Laboratory) was the title of that year’s activities, which started on 30 May and ended seven months later, on 20 December. As in the previous year, the programming of the various sectors developed in parallel, at several locations across the city and consistently with the main theme.

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The ’74 and ’75 events were ‘methodological samples’ of the work the Biennale had set out to do, but only the 1976 edition would show whether the new law—and the project structure introduced by the Piano quadriennale—could actually work out. The 1976 Biennale was the frst offcial post-reform edition and it saw the return, after four years, of the renewed Visual Arts and Architecture Biennale to the historical venue of the Giardini and of the nations to their respective pavilions. The concept for the ’76 edition was proposed and spelt out by Gregotti and by the Visual Arts and Architecture Committee, during a conference with the participating nations.58 “Ambiente, partecipazione e strutture culturali” (Environment, Participation and Cultural Structures) was the broad-ranging, yet detailed, title that was to inform all of the events in the Visual Arts and Architecture section—as well as the international contributions—forming a common platform for interaction and discussion. The ’76 edition of the Biennale occupied the city with eight shows under one title, which was not only an umbrella title but an ‘operating concept,’ comprehensive and detailed enough to form the basis for different and specifc variants. At the very heart of the central pavilion was the exhibition Ambiente/Arte. Dal futurismo alla body art, curated by Germano Celant and promoted by Gregotti as the “backbone” of the whole ’76 edition. According to Gregotti, this central concept show would provide the public with a “general interpretive framework.”59 Celant not only managed to fulfl this task but also visualised, through the exhibition, the spirit of the new Biennale. For his development of the ‘environment’ theme, Celant began by analysing the exhibition setting, i.e. the historic central pavilion, where the original space had remained hidden by the display structures that had followed each other over time. According to Celant, an exhibition on the history of the relationship between the environment and art should have developed in a conscious, real setting, so frst of all he did away with any accessory structures in order to highlight the single, central pavilion structure in its extreme instability.60 Ambiente/Arte broke all ties with the exhibiting tradition that had been peculiar to the Biennale. Developing chronologically, from 1912 to 1976, Celant rebuilt the historical environments so that the spectator could enter the history of art not through objects but through spaces that revealed their histories. Celant wanted to reconstruct the lost relationship between object and spectator through the spatial experience, even as he says to be “sensory,” recreating the movement in that space and activating the exhibition space. At the centre of the show was the point of view of the curator, who led the public as an active and integral part of the experience of the exhibiting space, a public that had to be steeped in art history not by looking at objects but by experiencing spaces. The thematic 1976 edition was a sensational public success, proving that the project-based exhibition format allowed the Biennale to take on a defnite identity within the international landscape. The Biennale Between Political Engagement and Political Interests Continuing its democratic, antifascist engagement, in 1976, the presidency of the Biennale decided to pay homage to Spain. The year after the death of General Franco, the large show Spagna. Avanguardia artistica e realtà sociale. 1936–1976 (Spain. Artistic Avant-garde and Social Reality. 1936–1976), mounted in the Central Pavilion, celebrated the start of the Spanish transition to a democratic government. The Biennale’s interest in Chile and Spain refected its engaged approach not just to

96 Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Vittoria Martini art but also to culture and politics, which is what the reformers had in mind. The editions had been everything but politically neutral, nevertheless they had been met with unanimous praise from the board of directors and support from the main Italian political parties. Something different happened, however, with the 1977 edition, devoted to “Dissenso culturale in Unione Sovietica e nei paesi dell’Europa orientale” (Cultural Dissent in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern European Countries), which President Ripa di Meana had launched without consulting with the board of directors. Enrico Berlinguer’s PCI had just won a sensational victory in the 1976 elections, becoming practically the only ally of Aldo Moro’s Christian democracy. In order to protect Italian democracy from the risk of a possible authoritarian regression and from the strategy of tension that had bloodied the country since 1969, Berlinguer proposed to Moro a proftable government collaboration: the so-called ‘compromesso storico’ (historical compromise). However, in that very year, 1976, Bettino Craxi was elected secretary of the PSI. He was determined to thwart the compromise policy that, in his view, would marginalise his party and ultimately close the road to a left-wing alternative to the government. Craxi’s main goal was twofold: to change the electoral target and then to aggressively confront the PCI with left-wing issues, in order to upset its internal balance and destroy its credibility through a process of delegitimisation. After 30 years of balance between the two major Italian parties, the DC and the PCI, the PSI was rocking the boat. Craxi was young, ambitious, kept pace with the latest issues, was a brilliant communicator, and in the dull, fossilised political scene of Italy, he surrounded himself with forty year olds. Craxi saw that culture was a key element in political communication and that the Biennale, thanks to the political line it had adopted for some years, was a primary outpost in the broader strategy for renewing his party. For Craxi, the Biennale was the ideal place from which to launch his offensive against the PCI on the cultural front. The archive documents leave no doubt about the fact that the so-called ‘Biennale del dissenso’ (Biennale of dissent) had a pre-eminently internal relevance. Its openness towards Eastern European dissidents was consistent with the democratic, antifascist line adopted by the Biennale, but the fact that Ripa di Meana had helped the socialists capitalise on it had disrupted for good the already unstable balance within the Steering Committee. In what became a diplomatic case of international proportions, Gregotti and Ronconi were the frst to resign, in line with the PCI’s position, followed by the board members whose cultural ideals, formerly the glue that had bound together four years of common work, were crushed by the harshness of realpolitik. The ‘Biennale del dissenso’ marked the end of the frst post-reform four-year period and, seen from today’s perspective, also the end of 1968 utopias and the beginning of a new political season. Between 1974 and 1977 the new statute had introduced a model of cultural production and consumption that centred on the political role of art. In the issues it addressed—but above all in its hyper-democratised institutional organisation—the Biennale at that time seemed to become the laboratory for a new way in Italian politics, a new form of participatory democracy, and, later, the testing ground for the PSI’s new course. The political climate had changed radically over the course of a decade. Italy, which only some time earlier had been regarded as “one of the most politicised societies, or even the most politicised society among the Western countries,” now seemed to express a massive rejection of politics.61 The year 1977 marked the defnitive interruption of the long relationship between youth movements and

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the Communist Party and brought the end of the utopias that had emerged ten years earlier from the protest. It was precisely on this change that Craxi’s strategy acted. He was the frst to realise that the “anthropological mutation” theorised by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1974 was underway, and he capitalised on it because the politicians who represented his party were at the forefront of that mutation.62 It was in 1978 that the four-year mandate of the president expired. Due to the delay of government appointments, Ripa di Meana took responsibility for the Biennale in announcing the general theme for the upcoming edition: “From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature”—one that was suffciently broad and specifc so as to follow the formula originally tested in 1976. In the meantime, Italian politics was going through a time of crisis, emphasised by the terrorist attacks and kidnappings of the extra-parliamentary left movements such as Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). The years between 1978 and 1983 were among the most turbulent within Italian political history, and in 1979 Giuseppe Galasso was appointed President of the Venice Biennale. Galasso, a moderate and a member of the republican party, was placed at the top of the institution by the DC Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga as well as by the Minister of the newly established Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Giovanni Spadolini (republican party), so granting a more conservative management. It was Galasso who designed a new structure for the Biennale, where the sectors of activities were again made separate. For what concerned the Figurative Arts sector, the reformed Biennale of the 1970s—thematic at its core— was mingled with its pre-’68 formula that was museological in its approach. The goal of the Italian Government was to drop—as fast as possible—the inconvenient period from 1974–1977 into oblivion and to then bring the Biennale back to a more traditional format where experimentalism was granted—but only within each discipline. The Biennales of the 1980s returned to the traditional venue of Giardini and re-launched historical surveys. From a participatory event open to many publics, the Biennale eventually became a ‘site of contemplation’ and ‘meditation.’63 In this way, the institution aligned itself with the so-called period of ‘rifusso’ (ebbing), the celebration of private life and withdrawal from the public sphere that characterised Craxi’s cultural policies of the 1980s.64

Notes 1. More specifcally, since Venice had been in the former Habsburg empire area, the Viennese secessions had been the model for the Biennale, cfr. Maria Mimita Lamberti, “I mutamenti del mercato e le ricerche degli artisti,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, parte seconda, Il Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 111. 2. For a detailed history of the Biennale’s location cfr. Vittoria Martini, “A Brief History of I Giardini,” in A Brief History of I Giardini, in Muntadas. On Translation: I Giardini, 12 June–6 November, Spanish Pavilion, 51. Venice Biennal (Barcelona: Actar, 2005), 205–233 and Vittoria Martini, “The Space of the Exhibition: The Multi-Cellular Structure of the Venice Biennale,” in Pavilions. Art in Architecture, eds. Robert Ireland and Federica Martini (Brussels: ECAV–La Muette, 2013). 3. For a deeper reading of the Fascist Biennale, refer to Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture & Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Massimo de Sabbata, Tra diplomazia e arte: le Biennali di Antonio Maraini (Udien: Forum, 2006). 4. The fascist propagandists decided to replace the old-fashioned denomination of the “International Art Exhibition” with just the “Biennale di Venezia.” From 1934 it was the “Biennale di Venezia. Esposizione Internazionale d’arte.”

98 Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Vittoria Martini 5. Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Painting and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 6. The Biennale Cinema was under the control of DC and the Biennale Theatre under the control of PCI. 7. This section has been written by Stefano Collicelli Cagol. 8. The escalating tensions between Rodolfo Pallucchini with the artists’ union and the Communist Party have been analysed in Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64: Italy and the Idea of Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 9. As with many other Italian institutions after the war, the Venice Biennale had to cope with its recent fascist past and adjust itself to the new organisation of the Italian State that was no longer a monarchy but a parliamentary democracy. 10. According to the Royal Decree-Law 21 July 1938, n.1517, section 7, the board is composed of the Podestà di Venezia (Venetian Mayor), a member of the Fascist National Party, the Presidente della Provincia di Venezia (President of Venetian Province), the Presidente della Confederazione nazionale fascista dei professionisti e degli artisti (President of the Fascist National Confederation of Professionists and Artists), and representatives of the following fascist ministers: Educazione Nazionale (National Education), Corporazioni (Guilds), and Cultura Popolare (Popular Culture). 11. Sergio Bettini’s intervention in “Comune di Venezia e Provincie di Venezia,” in Atti del Convegno di studio sulla Biennale (Venice: Comune di Venezia, Provincia di Venezia, 1957), 25. Translation by the author. 12. On the relationships between museums and exhibitions see Anna Chiara Cimoli, Musei Effmeri. Allestimenti di mostre in Italia, 1949–1963 (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2007), 19–35. 13. Giulio Carlo Argan, “Problemi di museografa,” Casabella Continuità, no. 207 (1955): 64–66. 14. Architects such as Franco Albini and Carlo Scarpa, responsible for the refurbishment of the Italian museums after the Second World War, had the opportunity during the 1930s to practice exhibition design within the context of commercial and propaganda exhibitions. 15. During the Second World War, the Venice Biennale hosted in its pavilions only those nations allied with the Axis powers, formed by Italy and Germany. 16. For an introduction to the post-war conditions of Italy, see: Silvio Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia Repubblicana. L’economia, la politica, la cultura, la società dal dopoguerra agli anni ’90 (Venice: Marsilio, 1997). 17. Beginning in 1939 with a solo exhibition dedicated to Paolo Veronese organised at Ca’ Giustinian in Venice, Pallucchini started a series of exhibitions aimed at re-addressing the contribution of the Venetian arts to the art historical canon. Particularly renowned are his exhibitions dedicated to fve centuries of Venetian Paintings (Cinque Secoli di Pittura Veneziana, Museo Correr, Venice, 1945) and those titled Capolavori dai Musei Veneti (Masterpieces from the Veneto Region Museums, Museo Correr, 1946) and Giovanni Bellini (Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 1949). 18. The general elections that took place in 1948 after a heated electoral campaign presented a country divided between two major parties: The DC and the PCI. 19. On Carlo Scarpa at the Venice Biennale: Orietta Lanzarini, Carlo Scarpa. L’architetto e le arti, Gli anni della Biennale di Venezia, 1948–1971 (Venezia: Marsilio, 2004) and Marisa Dalai Emiliani, Per una critica della museografa del novecento in Italia. Il ‘saper vedere’ di Carlo Scarpa (Marsilio: Venezia, 2008). 20. Roberto Pallucchini, “Introduction,” in XXIV Biennale di Venezia (Venice: Edizioni Serenissima, 1948). 21. On the key role of Antonio Maraini and his approach to the Venice Biennale see De Sabbata, Tra diplomazia e arte. 22. Mussolini stated this at the opening of the exhibition Sette Pittori del Novecento, the 26th of March 1923, Galleria Pesaro, Milan. 23. As Francis Haskell points out in his study on Old Masters exhibitions organised in Europe, they functioned as “ephemeral museums,” therefore I propose to apply the same category to the Venice Biennale, a perennial institution dedicated to organising exhibitions. Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum.

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24. Alessandro Del Puppo, “La Biblioteca del Novecentista,” Saggi e memoria di storia dell’arte, issue dedicated to “Rodolfo Pallucchini e le arti del Novecento,” no. 35 (2011): 167–174. 25. Maria Cristina Bandera, ed., Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini. Le prime Biennali del dopoguerra, 1948–1956 (Milan: Charta, 1999). 26. Roberto Longhi explains to Pallucchini his perspective in a letter dated 2 October 1947, published in Bandera, ed., Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini, 47–49. 27. Letter from Lionello Venturi to Rodolfo Pallucchini, Rome, 2 October 1947, published in Bandera, ed., Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini, 290–291. 28. Maria Cristina Bandera reconstructs the polemic in Maria Cristina Bandera, “Palluchini protagonista della Biennale,” Saggi e memoria di storia dell’arte, issue dedicated to “Rodolfo Pallucchini e le arti del Novecento,” no. 35 (2011): 75–92. Eventually these artists were included: Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Paul Cézanne, Aguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri De Tolouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat. 29. Bandera, ed., Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini, 55. Roberto Longhi’s letter to Rodolfo Pallucchini dates 16 November 1947. 30. Pallucchini, “Introduction,” XIV. 31. This section has been written by Vittoria Martini. 32. Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale 1895–1968. From Salon to Goldfsh Bowl (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 153. 33. Roberto Pallucchini, “Introduction,” in Catalogo XXVIII Esposizione Biennale internazionale d’arte (Venice: Edizioni Serenissima, 1956)m, XVII. 34. Between 1961 and 1969 the Petroli canal was built, following the development of the Marghera petrochemical plant. From 145,000 inhabitants in 1960 to 111,000 in 1970. Cfr. www.comune.venezia.it/archivio/4055 [Accessed: 18/01/2018]. 35. Cfr. Indro Montanelli, Per Venezia, Sodalizio del libro, 1969 and Wladimiro Dorigo, Una laguna di chiacchiere: note a margine a tutto Montanelli su Venezia (Venice: Tipolitografa Emiliana, 1972). 36. Refer to Vittoria Martini, “Come la Biennale ha istituzionalizzato il 1968,” in Arte fuori dall’arte Incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta, eds. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmediabooks, 2017), 203–208. 37. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il Caos,” Tempo, 14 September 1968, reprinted in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il caos (Roma: l’Unità Editori Riuniti, 1991). 38. Pasolini, “Il Caos.” 39. Pasolini, “Il Caos.” 40. Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato: dal miracolo economico agli anni ottanta (Rome: Donzelli, 2007), 368. 41. At the beginning of his career in 1929 Chiarini collaborated with the magazine Educazione Fascista (Fascist Education), edited by Giovanni Gentile; in 1938 he was among the signers of the Manifesto della razza (Manifesto of the breed) that introduced racial laws in Italy. As a matter of fact in Italy there was a profound continuity between the political class that existed during 1920s and 1940s fascism and that of the 1960s. 42. C. Ripa di Meana, “Presentazione,” in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975. Eventi 1974 (Venice: ed. Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, 1975), 9. 43. Law July 26 1973, n. 438, in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975. Eventi 1974 (Venice: ed. Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, 1975), 15. 44. Law July 26 1973, n. 438, in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975, 15. 45. Law July 26 1973, n. 438, in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975, 16. 46. Cfr. Alberto Ronchey, Scandalusia, in Accadde in Italia 1968–1977 (Milan: Garzanti, 1977), 103 and Crainz, Il paese mancato, 423. 47. Bettino Craxi was Prime Minister from 1983 to 1987 and Secretary of the PSI from 1976 to 1993. 48. A meeting of the Board of Directors, ASAC, 20 March 1974. 49. Piano quadriennale di massima delle attività e delle manifestazioni (1974–1977), in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975, 61. 50. Piano quadriennale di massima delle attività e delle manifestazioni (1974–1977), in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975, 61.

100 Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Vittoria Martini 51. Piano quadriennale di massima delle attività e delle manifestazioni (1974–1977), in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975, 61. 52. First meeting of the Representatives of the pavilions at the Gardens, 31 July 1974, 1974, ASAC. 53. Art. 18, Law no. 438 of July 26, 1973, in La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975, 19. 54. Cfr. La Biennale di Venezia: annuario 1975, 48. 55. On 28 May 1974 a group of neo-fascists carried out an attack in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, one of the darkest moments in the long ‘years of lead’ in Italy. 56. Stenographic report of the President’s introduction to the Piano quadriennale di massima, in I Meeting of the Board of Directors (open to the public), 18–19 May 1974. 57. In the message at the end of 1969, the Italian President Saragat (DC), made a frontal attack on the ’68 protest: “[it] transcends into violent acts that undermine the basis of the democratic system.” 58. International Conference on the New Biennale, 30–31 May 1975, Conference transcriptions, 32, Fondo Storico, Serie Arti visive, ASAC. 59. Vittorio Gregotti’s speech at Convegno Internazionale Rappresentanti Paesi Partecipanti Biennale, 9–10 January 1976, Convegno preparatorio 37a Biennale, Fondo storico, Serie arti visive, ASAC. 60. See Vittoria Martini, “The Evolution of an Exhibition Model. Venice Biennale as an Entity in Time,” in Just Another Exhibition. Histories and Politics of Biennials, Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini (Milano: Postmedia Books, 2011) 131. 61. Crainz, Il paese mancato, p. 586. 62. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Gli italiani non sono più quelli,” Corriere della Sera, 10 June 1974. 63. Giuseppe Galasso, “Premessa,” in La Biennale di Venezia Settore Arti Visive, Catalogo generale (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 1980), 9. 64. Cfr. Crainz, Il paese mancato, 566.

Section 2

Re-Reading Cold War Narratives

6

Artists in Service of the Masses The Untold Story of the Yugoslav Socialist Realist Project Ivana Hanaček

It could be claimed that no period in Croatian and Yugoslav art history is as despised as the Socialist Realist period. Already in the early 1950s, art from the frst years subsequent to the liberation and revolution in 1945 was regularly accused of being “moulded by dead and superfcial patterns.”1 Such denunciations, coming from advocates of autonomy of artistic creation, became especially frequent after the July 1948 Resolution of Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), signed by all other members of Cominform, which condemned the policies of the new Yugoslav socialist government. They should thus be viewed in the light of the geopolitical change that led to the breaking of Yugoslav–Soviet relations (the ‘Tito–Stalin split’) and subsequent Yugoslav orientation towards the West in the Cold War. It was “one of the most important turning points in the history of Tito’s Yugoslavia, when the Yugoslav Communists decided to tilt the country westwards in the Cold War, shift the domestic system towards ‘market socialism’ and decentralise the state.”2 From the year 1948 onwards, the development of the often-misunderstood “Yugoslav path to socialism” began. The change in economic and foreign policy was inevitably followed by a shift in cultural policy (although not until the 1950s). The cultural shift was most visible in the explicit abandonment of Socialist Realism. However, criticism of Socialist Realism by some art critics close to the Communist Party had begun prior to the Second World War, manifested in discussions on the heteronomy of art, known locally as the “Confict on the Literary Left.” Such discussion started in 1928 between the communist writers who were willing to give up avant-garde poetic principles and subordinated their work in the interest of the revolutionary struggle and those leftists who advocated the ‘freedom’ of artistic creation. In this regard, the offcial abandonment of Socialist Realism, advocated by a number of leading intellectuals close to the anti-Soviet faction of the Yugoslav Communist Party, especially after the paradigmatic speech by Miroslav Krleža at the 1952 Congress of Yugoslav Writers in Ljubljana,3 was often seen as the fnal ‘victory’ of advocates of autonomy of art. This alleged denouement of a largely contradictory discussion has rarely been critically analysed by art historians, especially with distance from the Cold War rhetoric.4 So I would argue that it should be re-examined in the light of factional confict within the Yugoslav Communist Party in the inter-war and early post-war periods.5 Subsequent art historical narratives in post-1950s socialist Yugoslavia more-or-less followed a consensus that “Socialist Realism was only a short and irrelevant episode in the history of post-war art, which failed to leave a deeper trace in the early 1950s art production.”6 However, paradoxically, Yugoslavia’s Socialist Realist artistic production has rarely been thoroughly researched or written about.7 Up until the breakup

104 Ivana Hanaček of Yugoslavia in 1991, not a single comprehensive art history study of Socialist Realist art production in Croatia had been written. A number of studies exist that deal with literary history, with one notable example being that by Stanko Lasić entitled “The Confict on the Literary Left.” This chapter views the period as a brief—and the only apparently peaceful—time of consolidation of Socialist Realism, in fact characterised by “sharp contradictions” below the surface.8 Crucially, he interprets it as a continuation of the so-called confict on the literary left, a discussion of left-leaning writers on the usefulness of Socialist Realism that started in the late 1920s and continued across the following decades. On the one side were those that saw Socialist Realism as a “barbaric profanation of art,” while on the other side of the discussion stood those who viewed it as a logical continuation of social literature, the highly vivid interwar art practices. Art historian Grgo Gamulin, himself a protagonist of the mentioned polemics, was at frst a member of a hard-line faction advocating Soviet-style Socialist Realism and referencing “social equivalence” theorised by Georgi Plekhanov.9 However, during 1948, he apparently changed sides and opinions.10 In his capital work of encyclopaedic character titled Croatian 20th Century Painting published in 1988— which is still used as a textbook on 20th-century painting in Croatia today and serves as national canon—Gamulin explicitly condemns Socialist Realism, calling it a “critical” period of “programmed art.”11 The next geopolitical upheaval in the region—the end of the Cold War and the breakup of Yugoslavia—further strengthened the desire for a sharp rebuke of Socialist Realism among local historians and art historians. This trend paralleled the growing popularity of anti-communist discourse and theories of totalitarianism and remains dominant even 30 years on. In their denunciations of Yugoslav socialist ‘totalitarianism,’ a large majority of critics are barely able to hide their contempt for any concept of culture that would, for the frst time, include the “uneducated and semi-educated popular mob”12 in cultural production, mediation, and dissemination. Based on the theory of ‘two totalitarianisms,’ these interpretations mostly try to equate ‘real socialism’ with national socialism, communism with fascism, as if these were in fact just mildly differentiating strands of the same historical phenomenon. Works of historians such as Zlata Knežević and Katarina Sprehnjak are characteristic of this approach. In the period immediately following the breakup of Yugoslavia, Knežević described the Socialist Realism period as a time of strict censorship and ferce pressure from the Communist Party upon the creative intelligentsia, which was “deprived of the freedom to create” with the purpose of “rejecting the cultural tradition deemed as bourgeois product.”13 The party diktat was such, claims Knežević, that “nothing was left of artistic expression, and the entire cultural and artistic production turned into pure pragmatism.”14 Katarina Spehnjak, in her study entitled “Public and Propaganda: The Peoples Front in the Cultural Life of Croatia,” written a decade later in 2002, employed a Cold War rhetoric to describe amateurism and mass popular creative activity that emerged as a result of the new socialist cultural policy as a “manipulation” with the sole aim of “demonstrate[ing] large turnout of citizenry [to different events] and forc[ing] the image of support for the new Government.”15 Art historians that follow this line of argument frequently describe totalitarian ideologies as ones that fought “against all manners of authentic culture that were not prepared to be instrumentalized and used as a mirror refection of the regimes’ real or imaginary power.”16 Such discourse can clearly be recognised as a continuation of narratives of historical revisionism, an attempt to completely redefne or negate the

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history of democratisation of art and society during the 20th century, and the opposing roles that socialists and fascists played in it. It should, however, be noted that this discourse is hardly something unique to the post-Yugoslav or Eastern European region, even if it came to dominate public discourse in these regions more than elsewhere. As was stated by Italian historian Domenico Losurdo, it is the West that is the birthplace of revisionist interpretations attempting at the “liquidation of the revolutionary tradition from 1789 to the present.”17 Avoiding dominant revisionist narratives on Socialist Realism, this chapter will deal with this specifc art as a legitimate form of international culture, as it was described, for the frst time in post-Yugoslav art history, by Croatian researcher Ljiljana Kolešnik in her 2006 book Croatian Art and Art Criticism in the 1950s, Between East and West.18 Kolešnik made an important contribution to the understanding of how strong the infuence of Soviet poetics was outside the Eastern Bloc, especially in countries that had strong antifascist movements during the Second World War and where in the post-war period communists held power, at least locally or regionally, as in France and Italy. Socialist Realism developed in the frst decade of the post-war period both to the East and West of the Iron Curtain, and thus forms an integral part of 20th-century global art heritage. Furthermore, I would argue that this specifc artistic poetics was far from merely ‘dead patterns of totalitarianism’ and that it is strongly linked to the most ambitious project of democratisation of culture in Croatian/Yugoslav art history. In order to open up new perspectives on Socialist Realism, this chapter further deals with primary sources. A comparative reading of archival material which has, to date, remained unexplored—from daily newspapers, artists’ diaries, and the logs of sessions of art organisations to artistic production in the early post-war period—reveals that Socialist Realism was a much more complex phenomenon than has thus far been presented in local art history narratives loaded with Cold War rhetoric.

Between Poverty and Repression: The Pre-Socialist Period The narrative of the early post-war period as a time of repression and totalitarianism in the art system, opposed to the freedom of artistic expression, can be relativised by contrasting the period to those that preceded it, especially the conditions of artistic production and the social position of the artist in the interwar period. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1941) was, in essence, a personal dictatorship of members of the Karađorđević dynasty, frst King Alexander and then, after his assassination in 1934, his cousin and regent Prince Paul. Apart from a few hand-picked artists that serviced the dynasty personally, the majority of artists were completely dependent on the weak and underdeveloped market. Lacking an adequate material base, they were often obliged to pamper the tastes and self-representational needs of a new Yugoslav bourgeoisie. However, this position, later often described as a one of a “dishevelled bohemian that works little and lives from the charity of the mighty,”19 is hardly the whole story. A plethora of diaries, letters, and memoirs gives evidence of a vibrant scene of artists critical of the system but unable to sell their work. One example could be Vanja Radauš, a sculptor and a member of the socially engaged artists’ collective Zemlja (Earth) which existed from 1929 to 1935 and was closely connected to peasants’ and workers’ political organisations. Through its strategy of ‘integral art,’ the collective systematically worked to democratise Yugoslav culture, which was

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not without serious political consequences. As Radauš explained in a later interview: “Although I was known to the Zagreb police, I was actually never arrested. But they took care of me in another way. For a full decade, from 1930 to 1940 I couldn’t get a normal job or a passport to emigrate. If you asked me what I lived off, I couldn’t really say.”20 Even artists that worked with relative success during the 1920s found themselves in dire straits in the following decade, characterised not only by the advent of a dictatorship but also the global economic crisis that hit Yugoslavia hard. Capital fight left many of the artists prepared to pamper the tastes of industrialists and bankers devoid of commissions for new works. Rare chances to work were mostly concentrated in a few cities,21 all of which brought with them severe accommodation problems. Finding a room to sleep was already a challenge, let alone an atelier. As sculptor Antonija Tkalčić Koščević testifes in her memoirs, writing about a colleague, Sava Šimunović: “When he returned to Zagreb, he couldn’t fnd a place, so he slept in the hall of my apartment. . . . He spent a long time there, unable to work, he just studied Old Master from books he bought himself.”22 Tragically, Sava Šimunović was later shot by Croatian fascists (Ustaše) in his hometown of Šid in 1943. Tkalčić Koščević was in a somewhat better position. As a descendant of an affuent bourgeois family, she was a close companion of the ‘frst generation’ of Zagreb art academy students and hadn’t faced as many existential challenges. However, her artistic production almost ceased after her marriage, except for occasional orders for small forms of sculpture or puppets.23 Poverty did not just bring with it a lack of workspace. Damp and dirty living quarters, a lack of food, and poor hygiene led to serious illnesses, such as tuberculosis. This infectious disease was especially lethal for artists active in Zagreb: at least six renowned Croatian painters died from tuberculosis in the interwar period.24 For other artists, the list is signifcantly longer. The diary of a painter named Juraj Plančić offers a detailed chronicle of poverty, hunger, and illness over a period of more than a decade. While still a student in 1920, he complains: “The food in the dormitory is getting worse. I feel I’m weakening by the day . . . I really started to suffer from hunger, but I’m unable to buy even extra bread.”25 A few years later, his position still hadn’t improved: “I left my food and went to bed burning up. By the afternoon I was 40 degrees. Our apartment is not just damp but also very draughty; no wonder we’re sick all the time.”26 He eventually died from tuberculosis in 1930, at the age of just 31. In addition to poverty, a signifcant number of artists of working-class or petitbourgeois background also suffered from political repression. Almost any type of political organising, even artistic, was severely prohibited during the 1930s, as well as public gatherings and a free press. The Communist Party and all associations connected to it had already been banned since 1921, but during the 1930s repression spread to include also those more loosely leftist or subversive. International Red Aid data shows that, between 1929 and 1932, at least 734 communists and sympathisers were convicted of political crimes in Yugoslavia, eighteen of them sentenced to death and four to life imprisonment.27 A prison sentence, however, rarely meant the end of political activism for those sentenced. On the contrary, life in prisons was meticulously organised by the party and included intensive political education with theoretical and practical courses, especially in prisons such as those in Sremska Mitrovica (in Serbia) and Lepoglava (in Croatia) to which the majority of political prisoners were sent, thus earning the moniker ‘red universities.’ It is there that the frst Serbo-Croatian

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translations of Karl Marx’s The Capital were created by painter Moša Pijade and writer Rodoljub Čolaković in 1934. Among the many artists imprisoned for political reasons was also the painter Krsto Hegedušić, one of the key fgures of the aforementioned association Zemlja. Imprisoned four times for “activities contrary to the interest of the State,”28 in 1941 he ended up in the fascist camp in Gospić but miraculously survived.29 His experience of incarceration left us a collection of prison drawings smuggled from jail in notebooks and other pieces of paper.30 It includes mostly portraits, not only of political prisoners but also impoverished peasants, workers, and unemployed youth and serves as a testimony to the nature of the prison system (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). Zemlja was itself banned in 1935; its attempt to organise critical artists oriented towards the representation of life of the oppressed had proved especially irritating to the police and authorities. The offcial police documents clearly incriminate Zemlja, accusing it of “painting popular life using anecdotes of government brutality towards the people” and depicting “low consumption of wheat among our people, use of wooden ploughs, primitive manor of habitation and relations between city and the village in general.”31 This sort of censorship of social art was thus prevalent even in the pre-war period, and it is not directly connected to the persecutions conducted in 1941–1945 by various occupying forces or local fascist collaborators.

Figure 6.1 Krsto Hegedušić, Pepek and his friends at noon (from the prison drawing series), 1932. Source: Photo Goran Vranić © Modernagalerija, Zagreb.

108 Ivana Hanaček

Figure 6.2 Krsto Hegedušić, In chains (from the prison drawings series), 1932. Source: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka.

In 1941, the so-called Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state, was established. Nazi legislation, which institutionalised racial theories, was introduced immediately, increasing segregation of Roma, Serbs, Jews, etc. By the summer of that year, state pogroms were organised and the frst death camp established, with catastrophic consequences. The genocidal campaign undertaken by Croatian fascist collaborationists (Ustaše) soon gave a strong impulse to the development of a resistance movement, led by the Communist Party. A signifcant number of artists joined the Partisans, especially in 1943, when resistance-controlled territories moved closer to urban centres, including the Croatian capital Zagreb. Former members of the Zemlja association, such as Marijan Detoni32 and Željko Hegedušić,33 actively contributed to the national branch of the International Red Aid organisation, which collected food, medicines, and clothes for the Peoples’ Liberation Movement. Other former members of the association, who were already known for their connections to the pre-war workers’ and peasants’ movement, were deported to camps, including Krsto Hegedušić,34 Franjo Mraz,35 and Ivan Generalić,36 all of whom fortunately survived. However, the artists Otti Berger and Danilo Raušević, also close collaborators of the association, were killed in camps during the war. Marijan Detoni, Antun Augustinčić,

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Vanja Raduš, Đuro Tiljak, Franjo Mraz, and Oton Postružnik joined the Partisans in the mountains and forests, where they worked in the “agitation and propaganda division” and created some of the most signifcant pieces of Partisan art.

Artist as a Public Worker: After the Liberation The year 1945 brought with it not only liberation from occupation but also a new political system as a consequence of the victory of the Communist-led Peoples’ Liberation Movement. This change in the social system and relationship between production and consumption had considerable consequences for art policies and the art production system. The nationalisation of industries and housing, together with land reform, practically eliminated some of the key fgures of the art world in earlier periods, such as benefactors, collectors, and gallerists. Also, a signifcant emphasis was placed on the redefnition of the role of the artist, who could no longer be seen as a producer of “inspirited property for the elite.”37 This ambition of redefning the artist was described by the historian Suzana Leček as an attempt to save them from the “anarchy of the market, that earlier forced them to act the role of helpless bidders” by giving them support of the state, “as art belongs to the people.”38 Leček’s study from 1991 of the immediate post-war art system in socialist Yugoslavia shows the signifcant extent of investment in culture by the new regime, notwithstanding immense wartime destruction and pre-war underdevelopment.39 Yugoslavia had the fourth-largest loss of human life in the Second World War among European states, after the Soviet Union, Germany, and Poland. Several anecdotes, however, show that the new state was prepared to sacrifce scarce resources, such as coal, to heat art exhibitions and thus maintain the continuity of cultural life.40 Special attention was also given to the social security of artists. This profession was formally self-regulated through special associations established in the immediate wake of liberation. In Croatia, the earlier artists’ and architects’ guild (Hrvatsko društvo umjetnosti “Strossmayer”) transformed itself in July 1945 into the Udruženje likovnih umjetnika Hrvatske (ULUH, Croatian Association of Fine Artists),41 an organisation with the goal of inclusion, as opposed to elitist exclusion. There was a clear reorientation away from the concept of the artist as a lone individual creator and towards an artist who works collectively and (self-)organises within the socialist construct.42 Through the Association, artists solved their material needs, such as housing, workspace, and working materials.43 Interestingly, the status of artist provided signifcant privileges, guaranteed by a special “Decree on Benefts for Science and Cultural Workers.”44 This is clearly evidenced in housing policies. Due to signifcant wartime devastation, the state restricted the maximum space per person in nationalised housing units. However, the Decree not only exempted artists from these restrictions but also specifed that their accommodation should be prioritised in the process of housing distribution.45 Similar privileges also existed in regard to the question of food distribution, as food was still very scarce and strictly rationed immediately following the war. Artists thus received an “R1 rations card,” intended for heavy manual labourers, and were prioritised in their acquisition of work materials. Although the post-war period was a very hard time regarding the general scarcity of food and heat, the state was willing to invest signifcant funds in the procurement of painting materials, especially oil paint. Some artists were even sent on trips abroad to procure painting materials from outside the country, especially to Czechoslovakia. The workspace itself was also

110 Ivana Hanaček not forgotten: signifcant effort was undertaken to construct new ateliers or to adapt spaces previously used for storage to such a purpose. Most of these ateliers were intentionally designed to be used as collective spaces.46 As for artworks themselves, special allocations were made in public budgets for their acquisition through exhibitions. Works by local artists were given central representative roles in public institutions: as much as 75% of them were exhibited in government or local authority offces and buildings, while the remaining quarter were destined for public galleries and museums. Their prices ranged from 50 to 80 thousand Yugoslav dinars, roughly the equivalent of a teacher’s annual salary.47 The public acquisition of works was not the only source of income for artists. A signifcant number also received a monthly salary for educational work in schools. In the new curriculum, art was an essential component of socialist education, tasked with fostering creative and imaginative ways of thinking in young children, which is well illustrated by Vilim Svečnjak’s programmatic frescoes School and after school activities, painted in 1948 for the Nikola Tesla elementary school in the city of Rijeka (Figs. 6.3 and 6.4).

Figure 6.3 Vilim Svečnjak, School and after school activities, two murals at the Nikola Tesla School, 1950, Rijeka. Source: Photo reproduction from Sušačka Revija.

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Figure 6.4 Photograph showing the location of one of the murals by Vilim Svečnjak, School and after school activities, at the Nikola Tesla School, 1950, Rijeka. Source: Photo Damir Stojić (WHW collective).

As teachers, artists once again seemed to occupy a privileged position. They requested and received a reduction in working hours from the standard 40 hours per week to just sixteen to eighteen hours, justifed by their obligation to produce works while simultaneously performing their teaching duties.48 Furthermore, the annual paid vacation for a master artist extended to an incredible three months, instead of the standard twenty working days.49 Artists also had the opportunity to receive other funds, such as scholarships to study abroad or expand their atelier and annual fne art prizes such as the Stalin Prize (unrelated to the Soviet prize of the same name) indented for most prominent artists and writers.50 As an integral part of the Yugoslav social order, artists had access to newly formed public services, such as free healthcare and education, ranging from basic literacy courses to universities, which also included courses in drawing, ceramics, etc. A pension fund was also accessible to artists too old or ill to continue working.51 Of course, as is often mentioned, not all artists were looked upon with benevolence by the new socialist state, with a number being exposed to post-war repression by the regime. However, contrary to what is sometimes suggested,52 there does not seem to be a single instance of an artist getting into trouble with the authorities for his/her art, even if some indeed suffered for their collaboration with the fascist occupation. Josip

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Horvat Međimurec can serve as an illustrative example: this Zagreb-based painter held the rank of captain in the Croatian fascist army, designing several famous propaganda posters for both Croatian collaborationist units and the German Wehrmacht and was shot as a war criminal in June 1945. He was one of several Croatian artists (along with Robert Auer, Otto Antonini, Ivan Topolčić, Jakov Machiedo, Gustav Likan, Rudolf Marčić, Kristijan Krekovčić, and Franjo Maxer) who were not just refused entry to the new artists’ association (ULUH) but also were recommended for investigation by the War Crimes Commission. Međimurec was, however, the only one to be executed. Gustav Likan and Jakov Machiedo, who served as consuls of the Croatian fascist government in Nazi-era Munich, died in exile. Others, however, continued their artistic careers despite the fact that they collaborated with fascist forces. The extent of their rehabilitation was judged by their colleagues Marijan Detoni, Đuro Tiljak, and Grga Antunac, all active members of the Peoples’ Liberation Movement, by means of a commission established under the auspices of the Hrvatsko društvo likovnih umjetnika (HDLU, Croatian Association of Visual Artists). While it remains something that is not easy to defnitively claim, the new regime appears to have been more lenient towards artists and workers from the cultural sphere in general than towards other collaborators. Painter Ljubo Babić is another interesting example. In 1941, this conservative anti-modernist53 Zagreb University art professor accepted an offer to design the new fag, military uniforms, and banknotes of the Nazi puppet-state in Croatia and to decorate the embassy of the Independent State of Croatia in Berlin.54 After the war, he was suspended from ULUH for six months, but by 1947 he was already instated as the director of a public gallery in Zagreb.55 In the early 1950s, he received a stipend to travel to the United States, which would suggest that by this time he had been completely rehabilitated. He led a successful career in socialist Yugoslavia until his death in 1972. State-mandated oppression against artists who did not accept the paradigm of Socialist Realism was non-existent. Artists, co-creators of the new cultural policies, were aware that they had to work on the development of the poetics of Socialist Realism, and therefore they started organising meetings for the ideological, political, and professional ascension of ULUH members.56 But art critics were less tolerant. For example, Grgo Gamulin began to sharply criticise those artists who remained faithful to the formal aspects of the bourgeois art. Serious problems with the state’s apparatus of repression affected those artists and cultural workers who did not support Tito and the Communist Party during and in the wake of the 1948 Tito–Stalin split, such as, for example, painter and critic Đuro Tiljak, sculptor Grga Antunac, sculptor Velibor Maćukatin, sculptor Ante Despot, and painter Edo Murtić. However, their troubles did not stem from their art poetics but rather their public opposition to the Communist Party.57

Constructing Socialism: Artists in Action The art of the future will be for everybody, or it will have no future.

Another signifcant change that occurred as a result of the liberation and revolution of 1945 was that relating to the spaces in which art was displayed. Instead of representative spaces (galleries, museums), there was a marked tendency to mediate art ‘in the feld’—i.e. closer to the broad masses of people—which was seen as an integral part of the drive for inclusion and the democratic transformation of society. The key instrument of this policy was the Popular Front, a mass organisation that was the

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direct descendant of the wartime People’s Liberation Front, the offcial political wing of the Partisan resistance movement that included communists but also a signifcant number of representatives of other antifascist parties and organisations. The post-war Popular Front bore the role of protecting the legacy of the liberation struggle but also mobilising the population to expand and accelerate the socialist modernisation of the country.58 Unlike the Communist Party, the role of the Front was to be more inclusive and less ideologically strict, so as to serve as an organisation that would— in an indirect way—represent the new political power closer to the population. Art was an obvious tool to help fulfl this goal, which led to the development of a close cooperation between the Front and artists’ associations, like the Croatian ULUH. Artists’ roles lay somewhere in between education and training, animating and mobilising, agitation and propaganda. Their duties often included months-long research and work in mostly unfamiliar spaces such as factories, villages, hospitals, streets, and construction sites and work alongside volunteer labour movements, etc. This was a far cry from the galleries, museums, and theatres to which they had previously been accustomed. This, of course, meant working with uneducated manual labourers, who received short courses and were soon expected to participate in art production, a process they hitherto knew very little about. This, however, wasn’t seen as a hindrance to projects but rather their main purpose. The socialist state was expected to provide an opportunity for every worker to be an artist, and art was expected to play an important role in the emancipation of every worker. An artist was generally required to work for a month each year ‘in the feld.’ However it was not unusual for artists to stay much longer on their own accord, after expressing their desire to contribute to the faster transformation towards a socialist society. This sort of engagement was particularly visible during the “Youth Labour Actions,” campaigns of volunteer work by the general population, with efforts primarily being focused on infrastructural development and construction projects. Although such campaigns were a necessity in the immediate post-war years, considering the level of devastation and lack of resources, they soon transformed into a place of youth socialisation outside the constraints of the family, as well as a place of hard work for the development of the country. Hard work was, however, always present, as was ideological education, and these two elements were seen as essential in the process of constructing a new socialist person. The popular slogan “We build the railway, the railway builds us” obviously had several layers of meaning. The popular participation in the modernisation effort was considered a crucial prerequisite for the construction of socialism. Socialism, in turn, would bring about not just material progress, but also broader social emancipation for the people. Artists, however, rarely participated in manual labour. They had a key role in organising cultural programs and social activities but also courses and educational programs that were an integral and important part of every labour action. Indeed, these campaigns were seen by many participants as an opportunity to learn basic skills, such as reading and writing, driving or drawing.59 The volunteers could choose to attend a drawing course, participate in a choir, or learn how to read and write. The latter course was important for spreading literacy, especially among women, a large majority of whom were still illiterate at the time. A drawing by painter Petar Kos entitled Comrade from [the mountain] Kozara learns how to write depicts this campaign (Fig. 6.5). Additionally, artists decorated communal spaces with murals or plaster reliefs and organised flm screenings or theatre plays to fll the time with activities after eight hours of work. Attending cultural courses was

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Figure 6.5 Petar Kos, Comrade from [the mountain] Kozara learns how to write, 1948–1949. Source: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka.

obligatory for youths in labour brigades; for many of them, this was their frst direct contact with the visual or dramatic arts.60 Finally, artists were expected to leave an artistic testimony of the successful campaign and to serve as “the centre of sensibility of their land, their class, its ear, eye and heart . . . a voice of their epoch,” as is stated through a quote by Maxim Gorky on the cover of a collection of drawings from the Brčko-Banovići railway construction volunteer campaign in Northeastern Bosnia. The documents from the Department of Culture and Art, part of the Ministry of Education, indicate that signifcant attention was given to artists’ participation in labour actions.61 Musicians, artists, and writers who were interested in working ‘in the feld’ received numerous awards and privileges and were seen as active contributors to development projects through their organisation of the cultural life of the volunteers and promotion of labour and construction efforts. The previously mentioned Brčko-Banovići campaign was one of the earliest ambitious Youth Labour Actions, culminating in the construction of a railway between the

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Figure 6.6 Cover and title page of Brčko-Banovići mapa crteža (Brčko-Banovići folder of drawings), 1948. Source: Private collection.

river port town of Brčko and a large coal mine in Banovići. The Brčko-Banovići mapa crteža (Brčko-Banovići folder of drawings) contained a collection of the reproductions of drawings (charcoal and ink on paper) of this campaign made by 37 artists, all students of art academies in Belgrade and Zagreb; it was published as a kind of artists’ book in a large print-run (Fig. 6.6).62 Through these reproductions, this publication gives a valuable insight into the Socialist Realist period of Yugoslav art in the medium of drawing and introduces the domination of labour as the central theme. Working the concrete mixer, digging dirt, sawing and chopping wood, courses for the illiterate, and other everyday activities of youth ‘brigadiers’ are depicted in sketches using cheap materials (Fig. 6.7). The Brčko-Banovići folder of drawings had a double function: on the one hand it was distributed to a wider audience to propagate volunteer labour, on the other it was given to the participants of the labour actions, especially those that had distinguished themselves, as a reward and keepsake in honour of their outstanding effort and engagement. Despite the general lack of resources, there were also works that used other media. One example is the bronze sculpture Woman with a Wheelbarrow by Kosta Angeli Radovani from 1947, signifcant for depicting a new socialist woman worker (Fig. 6.8). The tireless manual labourer, the heroine of a new age, is shown in an almost Hellenistic mode of absolute motion, thus emphasising the dramatic nature of a perfectly common moment of tipping dirt from the wheelbarrow. Radovani’s sculpture is an

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Figure 6.7 Two of the drawings reproduced in Brčko-Banovići mapa crteža (Brčko-Banovići folder of drawings), 1948. Source: Private collection.

Figure 6.8 Kosta Angeli Radovani, Woman with a Wheelbarrow (front, side, and back views), 1948–1949. Source: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka.

interesting representation of a female body in public sculpture and offers a good starting point to analyse the way in which gender and class were represented in an attempt to affrm women as active and equal participants in social affairs.63 As already mentioned, ‘feld work’ also included the undertaking of artistic activities in the villages. The so-called Dom kulture (Houses of Culture) soon emerged in

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many settlements—even relatively small ones—and became epicentres of cultural life in rural areas in the post-war period. They were frequently located in proximity to or opposite the church, to provide a socialist alternative to traditional patterns of socialisation in the village. The House of Culture was conceived as a place of education for the broader masses on the cultural and artistic achievements of their and other peoples and, simultaneously, as a centre for the collection of folk cultural and artistic heritage of the region.64 Cultural workers engaged in Houses of Culture were specifcally tasked with identifying individuals with artistic tendencies among the local population and then giving them help and encouragement to continue with artistic work.65 Writers played an especially important role, organising local amateur drama and establishing libraries. They were additionally expected to discover autodidact writers of peasant descent and engage them in writing cultural columns for local or regional newspapers.66 At the same time, cultural workers were themselves required to write about and report on the cultural situation in their area of operation. All those engaged in such ‘feld work’ were entitled to an apartment—provided by the workers’ collective of the factory or local administration where they were active—which had to include “work space and a bed.”67 Transportation for cultural workers inside the region was free of charge, while their trip to the rural area was subsidised by the state through an artists’ association.

Representing the Revolution in Public Space Alongside the countryside, the urban environment was also considered a suitable setting for the presentation of artistic works. Among artworks constructed for the purposes of the Peoples’ Front, a signifcant number were temporary interventions in the public space, or street-art, made from cheap and ephemeral material such as wood, terracotta, carded paper, cardboard, or plaster. Designed primarily with the intention of being displayed in town squares, these installations were often linked to dates of signifcant congresses, conferences, anniversaries, festivals, and celebrations. In August 1945, barely two months after the liberation of Zagreb, two temporary sculptures of monumental dimensions devoted to the emancipation of women were erected on Zagreb’s central square to celebrate women’s role in the socialist revolution. They were constructed specifcally for the occasion of the frst post-war congress of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Croatia (AFŽ), a mass organisation similar in purpose to the Peoples’ Front but dedicated exclusively to women. The monumentality of the sculptures was supposed to mirror the monumentality of changes in women’s political rights (Fig. 6.9). The right of women to vote in Croatia and Yugoslavia was reaffrmed and enshrined in law soon after the congress. Women had already held signifcant positions in the pre-war proscribed communist movement, as well as the People’s Liberation Movement, and the legalisation of the right to vote was the logical consequence of the communists’ consolidation of power. The Zagreb sculptures carefully and unequivocally conveyed the class status of the women depicted. The fourteen-metre-high wooden sculptures covered with plaster and paint were imbued with rich ethnographic detail. Although the colours are unfortunately lost (the surviving photographic evidence is in black and white), their village attire is unmistakable: woollen shoes and socks, with aprons and vests topped by a Partisan cap. The revolutionary iconography is present in the gun and sickle that they carry in their hands. The sculptures were probably

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Figure 6.9 Photographs of the temporary sculptures constructed for the frst post-war Congress of the Antifascist Womens’ Front of Croatia (AFŽ), 1945, Square of the Republic of Zagreb.

co-authored by Kosta Angeli Radovani and Vojin Bakić, although some authors suggest that other artists might also have been involved.68 Interestingly, one of the sculptures also—both symbolically and literally—covered an equestrian statue dedicated to Josip Jelačić, a Hapsburg loyalist general and viceroy. Early temporary sculptural interventions were also dedicated to other types of new thematic content, mostly related to the construction of a socialist society. They include sculptures celebrating the reconstruction of the war-torn country, industrialisation, electrifcation, or, quite often, memorialising fascist atrocities or the heroism of Resistance fghters.69 Before it was fnally removed in 1947, the already-mentioned statue of the viceroy on Zagreb’s central square was largely covered by a wooden frame fanked by a sculptural construction of an electrical column made of wood and plaster, which served as an announcement of the start of a large electrifcation campaign. Yugoslav temporary sculptures were a clear reference to an earlier post-revolutionary Soviet praxis. These monuments, also mostly made of wood and plaster, followed the so-called Lenin Plan for Monumental Propaganda70 and often depicted famous revolutionaries or served as foats during military parades and marches, such as the one organised for May Day.71 The broad concept of the Lenin Plan was inspired by late Renaissance Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella and his Civitas Solis; the Sun City. Campanella envisaged a theocratic socialist Utopia with walls of city edifces covered in frescoes that would serve as graphical lessons on science and history. This was appropriately called monumental propaganda. The climate of Soviet Russia, however, made frescoes impractical, which led to the choice of sculpture as a medium. The ephemeral character of material was also a necessity rather than a frst choice and was the result of a

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severe scarcity during the Russian Civil War years. However, the use of such material also opened up the time and space for a broad discussion on the successfulness of particular sculptural solutions, supposedly leading to the next step: their construction in a more permanent form. Despite a somewhat better situation concerning materials in post-war Yugoslavia, a similar concept seems to have been implemented. Interestingly, such temporary interventions were completely ignored by Yugoslav art history due to their supposed propagandist character or traditional formal poetics and are occasionally derogatorily called “an attempt at a monument.”72 I would argue, however, that this tradition deserves to be viewed not just from a formalist perspective but as a specifc revolutionary tradition with an educational purpose articulated by Lenin himself as an expectation of a “time . . . when the liberated people will rush into science, knowledge, literature, art and architecture, and will show the world the wonder of new achievements in every kind of feld.”73

Institutionalising the Revolution in Art and Culture Not surprisingly, existing cultural institutions proved to be rather badly suited for the revolutionary ambitions of the government established in the wake of the liberation. It was soon concluded that a thorough reconstruction of the institutional landscape was needed. The existing—mostly 19th-century—institutions like museums and theatres had to adapt to be more accessible to those parts of the population that would never have entered them previously. Or, as a key cultural magazine of the era published in Zagreb put it, those institutions had to be “subordinated to the interests of the working people so they could consider them truly theirs.”74 The Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb (HNK) can serve as a good example. This oldest and most respectable theatre and opera house in the Croatian capital made a signifcant change in its methods of work when it sent its actors and directors “to the feld.” HNK performed an incredible 303 plays away from its building in the centre of Zagreb in 1949 alone.75 Besides plays coming out to the people in their places of living and work, the workers were also encouraged to enter the theatre through offers of free tickets via trade union organisations, Peoples’ and Women’s Fronts, youth organisations, workplace collectives, and the army. While not infuencing the theatre budgets signifcantly, this campaign could serve as an incentive for those that had never been to a theatre before. A similar development can be perceived with regard to galleries and museums. They were expected, again according to the same cultural magazine, to “cease to be a closed cabinet, a collection of rarities accessible only to a narrow circle of scholars and antiquarians, and become a museum in a socialist sense of the word: schools for enlightenment of broad popular masses and peoples’ institutions for the thorough study of the issue they cover.”76 At the same time, completely new institutions were established, including theatres, museums, and galleries but also concert halls, radio stations, choirs, folk dance ensembles, and orchestras, as well as numerous cultural magazines, among which many were devoted to contemporary art and theory, such as Izvor, Život umjetnosti, Republika, Kultura, Književne novine, etc. The newly established institutions particularly targeted parts of the audience that were mostly excluded from cultural life in earlier periods, either due to class or age. Two theatres for children and youth were founded in Zagreb in the late 1940s; no such institution had previously existed. The Zagreb Pioneer Theatre organised plays for three age groups, covering children from

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the age of four to ffteen. A separate Youth Theatre was also established for those over the age of ffteen. In addition, a 600-seat satirical theatre, Kerempuh,77 named after a folk hero that ridicules the powerful, was established in 1949 by the Journalists’ Association. The Museum of the People’s Revolution in Croatia was also formed in 1945 as the frst institution in post-war Zagreb dedicated to the protection of the legacy of the Second World War in that county.78 Interestingly, the method of collecting artefacts for the museum was similar to what would today be called “participatory,” as a signifcant proportion was collected from witnesses and participants. This included oral accounts but also private archives, popular and folk songs adapted for use in the Partisans’ campaigns, etc. Similar museums were opened in other cities and towns, signalising an ambition to decentralise cultural life. From the very beginning, these institutions paid great attention to the gathering of Partisan art and Socialist Realist art relating to Second World War topics. Besides the already-mentioned Houses of Culture, Popular Reading Rooms were opened in many towns and villages, with the main purpose of eliminating adult illiteracy. This struggle was undertaken very seriously, in an almost military fashion. Centres for the Elimination of Illiteracy, established in most settlements, retained a list of illiterate residents that were to be encouraged to visit the local Popular Reading Room.79 The elimination of illiteracy, considered a major obstacle to development, was understood as a component of post-war reconstruction as well as a key aspect of the process of building socialism.80 This campaign obviously had to include signifcant propaganda efforts, in which artists played an important part, especially in the design of posters and other visual material that criticised illiteracy but at the same time had to be understandable to the illiterate. Another part of the decentralisation drive was the distribution of signifcant works of art to institutions in the peripheral regions.81 This campaign was also directed against the dominance of old cultural elites and their products. An example from the Dalmatian Hinterland, one of the most underdeveloped parts of Croatia, can serve as a good illustration. The diffusion of culture in that region is seen as a continuation of the struggle against reactionary values. As an article from the daily newspaper Vjesnik states: Works by our artist shouldn’t stay in the cities but go to [smaller] towns and villages. Our goal is that places like Imotski, Makarska, Kistanje or even hamlets like Prgomet [small towns and villages in an especially underdeveloped region] possess a few works by our most famous painters and sculptors. Just like [Nikolai] Ostrovsky’s ‘How the Steel was Tempered’ today liquidates pulp literature in many places, our paintings should push from the walls romantic compositions depicting feudal lords and their ladies or Austrian generals with their swords. . . . An artist whose work hangs in the Peoples’ Committee in Kistanje is immensely more close to the people.82

Aesthetics in Context An analysis of post-war cultural policies, mostly focusing on the examples of Croatia and its capital Zagreb, gives a rather more complex view of the Yugoslav Socialist Realist period, whose impact cannot be simply dismissed as irrelevant. Far from just ‘dead patterns of totalitarianism,’ the art produced in this period is strongly linked to the most ambitious project of democratisation of culture in the region. At least in the

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frst few post-war years, the new regime attempted to construct a whole new art system completely opposed to the one based on the notion of private property that had previously dominated. The new art was indeed intended to be not just different but explicitly opposed to the legacy of the ‘bourgeois salon’ and thus had to be reinvented in the local context. Part of this reinvention included the far-reaching ‘opening-up’ of institutions and making art accessible to the working classes. This in turn had a signifcant impact also on the art itself. Hitherto almost completely invisible, the working people took the iconographical centre stage and became the protagonist of art and, more broadly, the entire cultural feld. Those who had almost no access to art suddenly became its heroes as well as its intended consumers. A revolutionary turn, indeed. As art spilled over the walls of its earlier ‘castles,’ new perspectives and approaches to art mediation and dissemination appeared. These can be traced in the streets, factories, local administration buildings, schools, hospitals, and workers’ huts, as well as theatres and museums. In this art system, the artist became the primary fgure of the Enlightenment for the masses, a role they had rarely played before or since. This was not without its consequences, however. Experience of art quickly became an integral part of the socialist modernisation project for a large part of the population; an experience that was often not just passive. Indeed, the acquisition of basic artistic skills like anatomy and drawing was often seen as an integral part of citizens’ education in a new socialist country. Providing a stable material base for the production of art by the state was an unavoidable prerequisite for this. All of this undoubtedly had a signifcant impact on the democratisation of Yugoslav art. In this regard, the Yugoslav Socialist Realist art project was unavoidably strongly ‘ideological,’ as is any art, including that for which an attempt is made to decontextualise and divorce the underlying ideology from the political struggles that defne it. If this fact is to serve as a pretext for its expulsion from art history—as it often has—then we would have to do likewise with other periods, such as baroque, with its propagandist aesthetics par excellence. I would argue that it should rather be seen in its historical context, without which it is not possible to understand either its aesthetics or its ideology.

Notes 1. Marin Franičević, “Put našeg kulturnog preobražaja,” Republika VI, no. 2–3 (1950): 66. 2. Vladimir Unovski-Korica, The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2016), 71. 3. Balázs Trencsenyi, Michal Kopecek, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar and Maria Falina, A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume II, Part II: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ (1968 and Beyond), Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 360. 4. Velimir Visković, “Krležina uloga u sukobu na ljevici,” I, II, III. Republika 55 3/4, 5/6, 7/8 (1999): 44–62; 126–140; 171–186. 5. Between the two world wars, the Party was banned and operated underground, and after 1948 new confict started between factions who were for and against the liberalisation process and the opening up of Yugoslavia to the world market. This context is crucial for understanding how the dominant discourse on the autonomy of art was created in interwar and post-war Yugoslavia. 6. Grgo Gamulin, Hrvatsko slikarstvo (Zagreb: ITRO Naprijed, 1988), 446. 7. Ljiljana Kolešnik, “Prilozi interpretaciji hrvatske umjetnosti 50-ih godina. Prikaz formativne faze odnosa moderne umjetnosti i socijalističke Države,” Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnost, no. 29 (2005): 307–315.

122 Ivana Hanaček 8. Stanko Lasić, Sukob na književnoj ljevici 1928–1952 (Zagreb: Liber, Izdanja instituta za znanost o književnosti, 1970), 246. 9. Ljiljana Kolešnik, Između Istoka i Zapada: hrvatska umjetnost i likovna kritika 50-ih godina (Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2006), 88. 10. Tonko Marojević. “Ideja socrealizma u kritičkoj praksi Grge Gamulina. Nekoliko primjera iz vrućih, militantnih godina (1945.–1952.),” Desničini susreti zbornik radova (2009): 28–56. 11. Gamulin, Hrvatsko slikarstvo, 445–462. 12. Zlata Knezović, “Obilježja boljševizacije hrvatske kulture,” Časopis za suvremenu povijest (1992): 101–103. 13. Knezović, “Obilježja boljševizacije,” 110. 14. Knezović, “Obilježja boljševizacije,” 111. 15. Andreja Gržina, Katarina Spehnjak, “Javnost i propaganda. Narodna fronta u politici i kulturi Hrvatske 1945.–1952,” Politička misao 40, no. 2 (2003): 199–202. 16. Jasna Galjer, Likovna kritika u Hrvatskoj 1868.-1951. (Zagreb: Meandar, 2000), 296. 17. Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2015), 5. 18. Kolešnik, Između Istoka i Zapada, 19. 19. Suzana Leček, “Likovna umjetnost u društvenom životu hrvatske 1945.-1947,” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 22, no. 1–2 (1990): 137. 20. Radauš, Vanja. “Puntar u životu i u bronci,” interview by: Vladimir Maleković, Vjesnik, 27 July 1974, 22. 21. Those artists that moved from Zagreb to smaller towns found it hard to work in isolation from the artistic scene. A more detailed account of this can be found in the letters by painter Ivan Tabaković, a member of the Zemlja association, written to Krsto Hegedušić from July 1930 to October 1931. 22. Antonija Tkalčić Košćević, Sjećanje na prve generacije umjetničke akademije u Zagrebu (Zagreb: HAZU, 2007), 156. 23. Arhiv za likovne umjetnosti HAZU, Zbirka dokumentacije umjetnika, Autobiografja Antonije Tkalčić Košćević, 3. 24. Milan Steiner (1918), Tomislav Kolombar (1920), Kornelije Tomljenović (1930), Juraj Plančić (1930), Ignjat Job (1936), and Ivan Ettore (1938). More on tuberculosis in Croatian artists’ circles in Boris Vrga, Tuberkuloza i likovnost (Petrinja: Naklada autora, 2012). 25. Vrga, Tuberkuloza, 84. 26. Vrga, Tuberkuloza, 85. 27. Dušan Bilandžić, Komunistički pokret i socijalistička revolucija u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta, 1969), 113. 28. Vladimir Maleković, Hegedušić, Uznički crteži (Zagreb: Apertus, 2001), 133. 29. Maleković, Hegedušić, 134. 30. Maleković, Hegedušić, 8. 31. Ivanka Reberski, “Zemlja u riječi i vremenu,” Život umjetnosti 11, no. 12 (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1970): 69. 32. Marijan Detoni, Autobiografja, 1947, Osobnik Akademije likovnih umjetnosti u Zagrebu, 2. 33. Željko Hegedušić, Autobiografja, 1947, Osobnik Akademije likovnih umjetnosti u Zagrebu, 2. 34. Krsto Hegedušić, Autobiografja, 1947, Osobnik Akademije likovnih umjetnosti u Zagrebu, 2. 35. Zdunić Drago ed., Revolucionarno slikarstvo (Zagreb: Spktar, 1977), 254. 36. Ivan Generalić, Autobiografja, 1947. 37. Leček, “Likovna,” 136. 38. Leček, “Likovna,” 138. 39. Leček’s study of early socialist art approaches the topic as a well-funded state system with a strong social agenda. Until the present day, her paper has remained the only study of this system of art in early socialist Croatia. 40. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 314 Komitet za kulturu i umjetnost vlade FNRJ, fasc. br. 12, Izvještaj o radu prigodom izložbe slikarstva i kiparstva naroda Jugoslavije XIX i XX. vijeka u Zagrebu. 28 January 1947.

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41. Leček, “Likovna,” 134. 42. Leček, “Likovna,” 134. 43. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 314 Komtet za kulturu i umjetnost vlade FNRJ, fasc. br. 11, Podjela slikarskog materijala. 27 June 1947. 44. “Uredba o pogodnostima naučnim i kulturnim radnicima,” Narodne novine, 14 December 1945, 1. 45. “Uredba o pogodnostima naučnim i kulturnim radnicima,” Narodne novine, 14 December 1945, 1. 46. Leček, “Likovna,” 137. 47. Leček, “Likovna,” 136. 48. Arhiv Jugoslavije, fond br. 314, fasc. br. 12, Pravilink o dužnostima i pravima mastora, 17 October 1946, 2. 49. Arhiv Jugoslavije, fond br. 314, fasc. br. 12, Pravilink o dužnostima i pravima mastora, 17 October 1946, 2. 50. The Yugoslav State Stalin Prize in science and engineering and in arts was introduced in 1945 and was awarded until 1948 to the most important artists and scientists in each Yugoslav republic. 51. Arhiv Jugoslavije, fond 314 Komitet za kulturu i umjenost vlade SFRJ, fasc. br. 12, Pomoć likovnim umjetnicima za omogućenje njihovog rada i stvaranja-prijedlog, Novembar 28, 1945, 1. 52. “Jugokomunistički zločni nakon završetka Drugog svjetskog rata,” https://hr.wikipedia. org/wiki/Jugokomunisti%C4%8Dki_zlo%C4%8Dini_nakon_zavr%C5%A1etka_ Drugog_svjetskog_rata [Accessed: 18/11/2018]. 53. Frano Dulibić, Ana Šeparović, “Nekoliko primjera antimodernizma u hrvatskoj likovnoj umjetnosti,” Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnosti 37 (14 October 2013): 201. 54. HR-HDA 806 Emilij Laszowski, kutije 7 i 8: Dnevnik Emilija Laszowskog, 34. 55. “Odluka suda časti,” Vjesnik, 1 August 1945, 12. 56. HR-HDA-1979-HDLU, Upravni odbor, Zaključci 1947. 57. Ante Despot ended up in jail, on the notorious Goli Otok prison island, as did sculptor Velibor Maćukatin. Zlatko Prica and Edo Murtić were also accused of betrayal but were pardoned by the HDLU Court of Honor. Grga Antunac and Đuro Tiljak were expelled from the HDLU. More: HR-HDA-1979- HDLU Upravni odbor, Steneografski zapisnik Plenuma Udruženja umjetnika N.R. Hrvatske povodom izvještaja komisije o slučaju Tiljak-Antunac, održanog 20. siječnja 1950. u Zagrebu. 58. Spehnjak, Katarina, “Narodni front Jugoslavije (SSRNJ—razvoj, programsko teorijske osnove i procesi u društvenoj praksi 1945.–1983),” Povijesni prilozi 3, no. 3 (January 1985): 18. 59. Nikola Vukobratović, “From the Youth Labour Brigadiers to Football Hooligans: Socialisation and Politicisation of Youth in Socialism and the Transition Period,” in Back to the Square! Art, Activism and Urban Research in Post-Socialism, eds. Ivana Hanaček and Ana Kutleša (Zagreb: BLOK, 2016), 29. 60. Vukobratović, “From the Youth Labour Brigadiers to Football Hooligans,” 29. 61. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond 314 Komitet za kulturu i umjetnost vlade FNRJ, fasc. br. 10, Umjetnici na Omladinskoj pruzi, Autostradi i u masovnim organizacijama, Zagreb, 30 Decembar 1947, 2. 62. Mapa crteža studenata beogradske i zagrebačke Akademije likovnih umjetnosti “Brčko— Banovići.” (Zagreb: Izdanje centralnog vijeća narodne omladine Jugoslavije, 1946), 1–37. 63. The Woman with a Wheelbarrow was often exhibited in group exhibitions across the country and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (Muzej moderne i suvremene umjetnosti Rijeka) bought it. However, the sculpture in the City of Youth in Zagreb was set up quite late, in 1985. It still stands at the same place but is in a poor state of conservation, as are many other monuments from the socialist period. 64. The collected cultural heritage like folk songs, folk dances, oral literature, and folk visual art production is held in the Institute for Folk Art that was founded in 1948. Today this institution has been transformed into the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (IEF). 65. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond br. 314, fasc. br.10, Narodna Republika Hrvatska, O izvještaju odlaska književnika na teren za mart 1946., Mart 1946, 2.

124 Ivana Hanaček 66. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond br. 314, fasc. br.10, Narodna Republika Hrvatska, O izvještaju odlaska književnika na teren za mart 1946., Mart 1946, 2. 67. Arhiv Jugoslavije, Fond br. 314, fasc. br.10, Narodna Republika Hrvatska, O izvještaju odlaska književnika na teren za mart 1946., Mart 1946, 2. 68. Sanja Horvatinčić, “Erased: On the Circularity of Misogyny on the Example of Female Representation in Public Space of Zagreb,” in: Back to the Square! Art, Activism and Urban Research in Post-socialism, eds. Ivana Hanaček and Ana Kutleša (Zagreb: BLOK, 2016), 101. 69. Lidija Merenik, Politički prostori umjetnosti 1929.–1959: borbeni realizam i socijalistički realizam (Novi Sad: Galerija likovne umjetnosti poklon zbirka Rajka Mamuzića, 2014), 6. 70. Christina Lodder, “Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda,” in Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, eds. Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 16–32. 71. The execution of the Lenin Plan started in April 1918 and included the removal of tsarist monuments from the public space. According to the plan, sixty-six new monuments were supposed to be constructed by June 1918; however, only thirteen were actually realised. They depicted revolutionary fgures such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Spartacus, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht—but also less political and more cultural fgures such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Frédéric Chopin. The unveiling of the monuments was accompanied by a Sunday ceremony with speeches and music, “an act of propaganda and a small festival.” They also had an educational purpose: each pedestal included a short biography of the fgure, and accompanying booklets were printed in large quantities. 72. John Bawolt, “Russian Sculpture and Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda,” in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, eds. H. A. Milton and L. Nochlin (London: MIT Press, 1978) 189. 73. Lodder, “Lenin’s,” 21. 74. “Procvat kulturnog života u Zagrebu nakon oslobođenja,” Književna republika V, godište VI (1950): 164. 75. “Procvat kulturnog života u Zagrebu nakon oslobođenja,” Književna republika V, godište VI (1950): 164. 76. “Procvat kulturnog života u Zagrebu nakon oslobođenja,” Književna republika V, godište VI (1950): 164. 77. This theatre is today called Komedija, while the one that currently carries Kerempuh’s name was established in 1964 and is unrelated to the original Kerempuh. 78. Dolores Ivanuša, “Djelatnost i zadaci Muzeja revolucije naroda Hrvatske u dokumentiranju povijesti klasnog radničkog pokreta, Saveza komunista Jugoslavije i socijalističke izgradnje,” Iformatica museologica 17, no. 1–4 (April 1986): 26. 79. “U Kotaru Vodice provedena je akcija za širenje pismenosti,” Slobodna Dalmacija, 15 January 1946, 15. 80. “Početkom ove godine narod Velikog Iža otvorio je svoj Dom kulture,” Slobodna Dalmacija, 27 February 1946, 17. 81. “Omogućimo da slike naših slikara dođu do širokih narodnih masa,” Vjesnik, 15 May 1945, 3. 82. “Omogućimo da slike naših slikara dođu do širokih narodnih masa,” Vjesnik, 15 May 1945, 3.

7

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and PostRevolutionary Desire Producing the Art History Narrative of Yugoslav Modern Art Jasmina Čubrilo

Introduction The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MoCAB), the frst museum of its kind in a socialist country, was opened in 1965 after almost two decades of gradual and progressive preparations that began immediately after the end of the Second World War. The frst ideas for the museum refected an agitprop projection lacking any essentially clearly defned museological or curatorial concept. The Resolution of the Information Bureau of June 1948 led to dissent between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and consequently to the economic and political crisis that resulted in a turnabout in foreign policy, a change in the organisational model of administration and the administrative structure of the state, and also a rejection of the dogma of Socialist Realism. Parallel with the political, economic, and structural reforms introduced after 1948, the policies of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia towards culture and art were also gradually redefned through discussions and debates among intellectual and party elites at congresses and meetings in the 1950s. These processes of the liberation of cultural politics created the conditions in which it was possible to approach more systematically the realisation of the idea of the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCAB), that is, gradually to defne its concept, structure, program, and physical presence. As the principal expectation of any museum is to produce an adequate representation of the community and its identity as well as of the position of individuals within that community/in relation to that identity,1 hence the opening of the MoCAB was almost instantly followed by the project of systematising the modern art created from 1900 in a geopolitical and cultural milieu that was constructed as Yugoslavian in the years following the end of the First World War and was reconfgured during and after the Second World War. Initiated and conducted by the MoCAB’s frst director, Miodrag B. Protić, this project led to the institutionalisation of the notion of Yugoslav modern art and to the construction of the (master-)narrative of the history of Yugoslav modern art based on the timeline of decades, that is, chronological series of poetics sequences. Besides, the MoCAB, in its conception, collections, and historical and theoretical systematisations, institutionalised the process of the ‘reconciliation’ of the bourgeois culture and art of the pre-war Yugoslavia with that of the socialist Yugoslavia. In other words, the MoCAB, thanks to liberalised cultural politics, had the opportunity to reconstruct artistic modernism in socialist Yugoslavia, and it took full advantage of that opportunity, showing that progress and an emancipatory

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impulse were the two key values that modernism and socialism shared. The different aspects of the MoCAB’s role and activity in Yugoslav and Serbian art and culture in the second half of the 20th century have been examined in a number of texts and publications dealing with the historicisation of the period, as well as with the artistic and cultural phenomena. Notable research on the museum to date includes: a descriptive narrative of the results of the museum’s work,2 a narrative memoir,3 an examination of the museum through the theoretical lens of the space-memory system of museological values4 and likewise through a historical perspective and theory of architecture,5 as well as a recent collection of scholarly research articles concerned with historicising the museum, marking the 50th anniversary of the museum’s opening.6 One of the main arguments in favour of establishing the Modern Gallery, later renamed the Museum of Contemporary Art, was that the Yugoslav socialist state lacked museum institutions that would collect, preserve, document, study, and exhibit works of Yugoslav modern art, thus post-Yugoslav researchers interpreted this Yugoslav orientation as a nonhegemonic manifestation of cooperation among diverse groups7—and the museum is interpreted as an example of the culmination of the institutionalisation of the Yugoslav artistic space and the basis for the construction of the frst major narrative of Yugoslav modern art8—or, without going into broader analysis, it is argued that the sphere of the museum represents an attempt to found a Yugoslav art-historical discipline.9 Likewise, there is discussion around the ideological framework and meaning of the syntagm ‘Yugoslav modern art,’ as well as its programmatic establishment through exhibitions and interpretive projects and analysis of the methodological approaches of the art-historical narrative of Yugoslav modern art presented in the publications of the book series “Jugoslovenska umetnost 20. veka” (Yugoslav Art of the 20th Century), which accompanied the “scholarly exhibitions”10 organised at the museum between 1967 and 1980 and whose editor was the conceptual and curatorial author of these exhibitions and frst director of the museum, Miodrag B. Protić.11 Last but not least, it has been pointed out that the Modern Gallery/MoCAB had no associations nor in any other way represented a formal continuation with the pre-war Museum of Contemporary Art, the founder and patron of which was Prince Pavle Karađorđević, although there are some conceptual parallels open to question, such as the Yugoslav orientation and contemporaneity emphasised in the name of the museum. Its collection encompassed the works of moderate European modernism close to the taste of the contemporary European cultural elites but also the works of Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1935, almost six years after the opening, upon its merging with the History and Art Museum (founded in 1844), which formed the Museum of Prince Pavle, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade ceased to exist.12 This chapter critically discusses the foundation of the MoCAB, the reinvention of Yugoslav modern art, and the writing of the history of Yugoslav modern art as equally important and interdependent challenges in the construction of the post-revolutionary universe. Referring to Michel de Certeau’s theoretical concepts of ‘place’ and ‘space,’ it investigates the ideological and socio-political context and circumstances that preceded the opening of the MoCAB and critically analyses how they infuenced the conceptualisation of this institution as well as how they might have refected on the very processes of producing the art history narrative of Yugoslav modern art through the MoCAB’s

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exhibitions and research projects. ‘The place’ (le lieu) is New Belgrade: at the time that the frst competition for the design of the Modern Gallery was announced, the uninhabited and mainly swampy and sandy area on the left bank of the Sava, located between Belgrade, the historical capital of the Principality and the Kingdom of Serbia (from 1841 to 1918), later of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (from 1918 up to the beginning of the Second World War), and Zemun, until 1918 an Austro-Hungarian outpost on the border with Serbia. In another words, this area had been a symbolically empty area, for centuries a no man’s land in-between the East and the West,13 and therefore it had been recognised as an ideal territory for the constructing of an administrative centre of the new socialist and federative state. The Modern Gallery/MoCAB had been conceived and developed following the given political and ideological trajectories; more precisely, the Modern Gallery/MoCAB occurred as the effect produced by the ideology that was represented by New Belgrade, and therefore it could be possible to speculate on MoCAB as a ‘spatial practice’ (l’espace/ lieu pratiqué).14

The Place—New Belgrade The vast terrain between Zemun and Belgrade became the subject of urban planning considerations in the early 1920s, after the First World War, with the constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, whereupon the Sava and the Danube no longer represented state borders. However, the main obstacle to the expansion of the city ‘on the other side of the river’ and the realisation of the proposed idea was the land, unsuitable for building.15 Only six weeks before the German bombing of Belgrade in April 1941 this area was named New Belgrade. In accordance with the radical changes of the social and political circumstances following the Second World War and the communist ascension to power, the status of Belgrade also changed: the capital of the former monarchy was now to become the capital of the newly founded federal republic. Furthermore, as the monarchy from 1929 to the beginning of the Second World War (through the constitution, interior affairs, and cultural policies) had been focused on cultivating the new (supra)national identity— Yugoslav—now, the new capital of the federal and socialist republic needed to represent a new, different ‘Yugoslavhood’ constructed during the socialist revolution and antifascist struggle (1941–1945), conceived and subsequently developed as a socialist identity, a multi-layered construction in which the national identifcations were suppressed or repressed by ideological concerns.16 The key and constitutive concept of the Yugoslav system and its highest patriotic value was “brotherhood and unity,” an idea that emerged and took shape as part of the partisan rhetoric during the Second World War and that referred to the solidary coexistence of different—and in most cases similar— peoples (the South Slavs and minorities). According to Marxist theory, the social organisation of the human race develops from tribes, through ethnic groups and nations, to a supranational formation (socialist internationalism). It follows that national identities represent a historically inevitable transitional step towards socialism, the fnal goal of which was the transfer of state power to society,17 or, as it says in the League of Communists of Yugoslavia’s Program from 1958, “the creation of a society without a state, class or party.”18 In this context, 1948 was a pivotal year: between 1945 and 1948 Yugoslavia was being built up as a people’s democracy, so that Tito’s emancipation

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from Stalin in 1948 and the thought that it was possible to promote a different model of socialism oriented Yugoslavia in the direction of socialist (economic) democracy and workers’ self-management as a form of economic and social management, which entered the law in the 1953 Yugoslav Constitution. The initiative to build the new city on the left bank of the Sava River immediately after the end of the Second World War came from the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, while its implementation was left to the federal and the city governmental or administrative authority.19 In 1946 architect Nikola Dobrović, at that time in the position of Director of the newly established Urban Planning Institute of Serbia, conceived his “Draft Regulation of New Belgrade on the Left Bank of the Sava,” an urban planning proposal for the spatial realisation of an essentially ideological conception—raising the new city as an extension of old Belgrade: together they would form the area of Greater Belgrade, meant to become the main administrative centre and capital city of the newly established federation, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, or FPRY (1946–1963), with the primary purpose of being the core of the new federal bureaucratic structure.20 The issue of the urbanisation of the left bank of the Sava River was not only related to solving urban problems of Belgrade in expansion but above all to the question of forming the self-evident governing and political centre of the new state, uncompromised by symbolical association to the prewar monarchy and the dominance of the Serbian dynasty. According to this goal, the national Five Year Plan further specifed that a part of the city on the left bank of the Sava was to be built, and at the city level it was added that a large part of the public and cultural institutions would be located in this new part of the city.21 Dobrović’s “Draft” is the frst complete urban solution, conceived in the spirit of functionalism and the “Athens Charter” and above all by the example of Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radieuse, which only conceptualised a range of questions that pertained to the scope, functions, and character of the new city.22 The “Draft” opened up issues of the concept and character of New Belgrade and became the basis for open calls for government and public building projects, as well as for future urban solutions. By the end of 1946, public, all-Yugoslav competitions for preliminary designs of the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CCCPY) and the Presidency of the FPRY were announced by the CCCPY and the Presidency of FPRY respectively, including a demand to submit proposals for the urban regulation of New Belgrade.23 In addition to the state-owned consulting engineering organisations, all citizens of the FPRY, whether or not they were experts, had the right to participate in competitions. Furthermore, the members of the Evaluation Commission, i.e. the Consulting Expert-Technical Committee, got a chance to participate in the competitions.24 Due to its lack of perspicuous conception, propositions, and strategy on the one hand, and, on the other, due to the (consequential) ambivalence manifested by the political and expert elite towards submitting proposals, the open call did not yield satisfactory urban planning solutions.25 Therefore in June 1947, the Presidency of FPRY formed the Council for the Construction of New Belgrade, consisting of experts from all over Yugoslavia, and during August and September the Council held meetings in Zagreb and Belgrade to form the main recommendations for creating the general plan as well as the main ideological basis of New Belgrade.26 However, the frst winning draft proposal for the Palace of the Presidency of the Federal Government was chosen as a

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functionally convincing and formalistically acceptable solution that should serve as a basic project for implementation with recommendations on what should be corrected. In spite of the lack of consensus over the general urban plan, the construction season started on the building site of the Palace of the Presidency on 11 April 1948, on the anniversary of the beginning of the site preparation works a year before. Two years later, in 1950, as the consequence of the economic and political crisis that followed the Resolution of the Information Bureau, the construction of the Palace for the Presidency of the FPRY was briefy suspended. The change in the organisational model of administration and the administrative structure of the state led to a changing of the program concept of the palace: instead of the Presidency of the FPRY with numerous ministries, the Federal Executive Council was formed with secretariats and a smaller administration. Work on the construction of the Federal Executive Council building continued in 1954 by the decision of Federal Special Committee, which presumed changes in the original design and its adaptation to new requirements. The General Urban Plan of Belgrade from 1950 and the General Plan of New Belgrade from 1958 marked the beginning of the next phase of New Belgrade’s urban planning. With the reorientation from the Soviet model of socialism and the consequent change to the administrative structure of the state in the late 1940s and early 1950s, New Belgrade was also subject to redefnition: its basic designation was no longer exclusively ‘the administrative city,’ but rather it gradually became ‘the residential city.’ Public and administrative buildings, including the frst residential blocks, started to remodel New Belgrade’s barren scenery. In addition, the rejection of Socialist Realism led to an advocation of principles more similar to the International Style in architecture and to a general adherence to modernist expression and modernist aesthetics. Today’s appearance of New Belgrade was determined by the Plan of the Central Zone of New Belgrade from 1960, on the basis of which the Regulatory Plan of New Belgrade was made in 1962. In the early 1960s the centre of elite culture was envisaged as fnally and completely relocated to New Belgrade, and the emphasis shifted from administration to development of the central area of the future metropolis.27 The urban planning and regulation plans of New Belgrade adopted during the 1950s and early 1960s envisioned relocation of the institutions of elite culture from the old part of Belgrade to the left bank of the Sava River and the construction of several new museums besides the Modern Gallery: the Museum of Yugoslav Art, the Ethnographic Museum, the Museum of Revolution, the Military Museum, and the opera.28

The Space—The Museum of Contemporary Art The ambition for New Belgrade to become the capital of federal and socialist Yugoslavia demanded new forms of modern architecture—forms that were supposed to successfully represent the particularity of the Yugoslav political system especially after the Tito–Stalin split. This ambition led to demands for formulating the theory of a socialist city on the basis of which New Belgrade would be designed not only as the centre of a new federal bureaucratic structure but also as a model of an adequate urban and architectural expression of a socialist city, i.e. a “role model city.”29 The Yugoslav character of New Belgrade can be recognised in the all-Yugoslav competitions for preliminary designs, in the Yugoslav Council for the Construction of New Belgrade, in the fact that the idea of building the ‘administrative city’ on the left bank

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of the Sava had become part of the state Five Year Plan, and, fnally, in the appointment of the Ministry of Construction of Yugoslavia to be in charge of its construction.30 The socialist spirit that New Belgrade was also supposed to represent was present in the rule that gave the right to members of the Evaluation Commission, i.e. the Consulting Expert-Technical Committee, to participate in the competitions. They were expected to demonstrate a high level of objectivity and impartiality, selfcriticism, and consciousness about their responsibility, in other words, to demonstrate the moral ideals of the time and a frm belief in a new society capable of assessing the values of one’s own and another’s work in an objective and responsible manner. Finally, New Belgrade became a symbol of the enthusiasm and strong will of the new socialist man, precisely because of the fact that it was built by the collective efforts of thousands of volunteers from all over the country, some of them mobilised by ideology and authentic faith in the new system and some by fear of that system or even by force.31 The frst buildings to be constructed in New Belgrade according to the frst urban planning were the Modern Gallery, together with the Palace of the Presidency of the FPRY, the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and the luxurious Hotel Yugoslavia. In 1948, based on Dobrović’s urban design concepts of New Belgrade, an open call was announced for the project for the building of the Modern Gallery on the left bank of the Sava River. However, after the frst prize went equally to architects Edvard Ravnikar32 and Veljko Kauzlarić and the second to architect Branko Petričić, the winning design was not realised. This withdrawal from the realisation of the frst winning plan is interpreted by scholars as an indication of the absence of a real aspiration for the realisation of an object of this type, and the open call should be understood as a certain form of presentation of the state strategy in the domain of culture, conditioned by the conceptualisation of New Belgrade in the function of state representation.33 In the offcial history of the MoCAB, all projects and planning before 1951 and the frst consultations concerning the need to establish a new museum dedicated to collecting, preserving, and presenting (Yugoslav) modern art have the uncertain status of pre-history facts, if they are mentioned at all. The reasons for the omission (or rare and discreet mention) of these proposals and plans lie not only in the fact that no socio-political conditions existed in order for these projects to come to realisation34 but also in the fact that the conception of the structure and the appearance of the new, modern, socialist ‘role model city’ was not followed by an equally active designation of the organisational and programmatic concept of the Modern Gallery, nor were any practical moves in the late 1940s made in order to appoint the gallery’s administration or employ personnel. The post-revolutionary desire in the late 1940s was ahead of its time. With a devastated infrastructure and without material capacity after four years of war; complicated foreign policy relations; a society ideologically and politically divided into a majority of new, mostly modestly educated ‘revolutionary’ forces and a minority of old, well educated ‘reactionary’ ones; and an emerging—but not at all elaborated—cultural politics, a complex project such as that of Modern Gallery/MoCAB needed to wait a few years more to be properly launched.35 From the frst competition for a design of the edifce of the Modern Gallery announced in 1948 to the opening of the MoCAB on 20 October 1965, the republic state authorities were intensely present as initiators of the enterprise (which implied each stage in decision-making). In brief, the offcial history before the opening of the

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MoCAB comprised the following: during 1951 presidents of the Council for Science and Culture of the FPRY (chaired by Rodoljub Čolaković) and the Council for Education, Science, and Culture of the PR (People’s Republic) of Serbia (chaired by Mitra Mitrović) began their consultations on the launching of the Modern Gallery;36 subsequently, the Executive Council of the PR of Serbia issued its approval of the decision of the Council for Science and Culture on the commencement of organisation of the foundation works for the Modern Gallery, and the expert committees of the Council for the Modern Gallery and the Council for Education, Science and Culture of the PR of Serbia, with prominent artists and critics as members, now began the acquisition of artworks intended for the collection of the future Modern Gallery.37 At the same time, a building was sought among those already existing that would, in museological terms, adequately accommodate the Modern Gallery in formation, which means that for a while the idea to construct the Modern Gallery in New Belgrade had been abandoned. Decentralisation and administrative reorganisation of the government of the Yugoslav federation had caused a shift from the original conceptualisation of New Belgrade as an administrative city to issues of housing, which became its dominant content; this could be one possible reason for the (temporary) abandonment. Another one could be the uncertain economic situation as a result of the economic blockades imposed by the USSR after the schism between Stalin and Tito and, consequently, of the economic reorganisation and introduction of a new economic model, different from the one in its socialist counterparts. In 1954 the cultural section of the Council for Education, Science, and Culture of the PR of Serbia initiated a written survey with artists and members of professional organisations on the need to establish the Modern Gallery. The interviewees included relevant artists and artworld experts who at that time were living and working in Belgrade.38 All the interviewees supported the idea of launching the Modern Gallery so that as early as 1955 the Council for Education, Science and Culture of the PR of Serbia issued the decision to appoint a Board of the Modern Gallery composed of experts and public fgures, including some of the participants in the aforementioned survey, who would defne the concept of the future gallery.39 The board was appointed with several tasks, such as: conception of the exhibition layout of the gallery; study of the organisation of similar institutions throughout the world for discussing and establishing the most adequate model and a plan of organisation of the Modern Gallery; a proposal for an adequate edifce (an existing building to be adapted or a new one to be constructed); and the purchase of the most important works from current exhibitions with funds provided by the Council of the PR of Serbia. After several months of work on the elaboration of the conception and organisation of the future gallery, the board came out with the arguments in favour of the Yugoslav orientation of the Modern Gallery. At the time of the establishment of the Modern Gallery in Belgrade, such an institution existed in Zagreb (formally established in 1905) and in Ljubljana (founded in 1947), both as the central places for Croatian and Slovenian modern art, respectively. Thus, considering the fact that the entire country lacked a gallery dedicated specifcally to Yugoslav 20th-century art as well as the fact that Belgrade was not only the capital of the PR Serbia but most importantly the capital of the FPRY, the board concluded that the Modern Gallery should refect the overall development of the Yugoslav art sphere from 1900 onwards. In addition to this, the gallery should act as an academic/educational institution and a custodian of artistic treasures and should foster federal and international museum cooperation; thus, it should become a centre both of Yugoslav and European ‘artistic life,’ a domain of intersections of local and

132 Jasmina Čubrilo international modernist paradigms.40 The Council for Education, Science and Culture of the PR of Serbia and Council for Education and Culture of the People’s Committee of the City of Belgrade accepted the conception of the Gallery’s board. The board began to collect and gather the works for future exhibitions of Yugoslav art, consulting professors France Stele (University of Ljubljana) and Grgo Gamulin and Ljubo Babić (University of Zagreb) on matters related to Slovenian and Croatian modern art, respectively. In 1958 the Council for Education and Culture of the People’s Committee of the City of Belgrade issued a formal decision on founding the Modern Gallery, and in 1959 it commenced to operate at a temporary address in the centre of Belgrade’s historical old town. Miodrag B. Protić (1922–2014), intellectually formed under the infuence of French culture and modernism, Francophile and francophone, a lawyer by education and a professional painter, representative, and advocate of the current concepts in post-war modern art and its various abstract tendencies, art critic and theorist of great erudition and a methodical and precise style of thinking and writing, and, fnally, at that time the employee of the Council for Education, Science, and Culture of the PR of Serbia involved from the start in the Modern Gallery project, was appointed as its head and became its real spiritus movens during the period 1965 to 1980.41 Since every one of the suggested proposals among the existing edifces as a potential solution for the accommodation of the Modern Gallery did require serious and expensive (re) construction to meet the museological demands and standards, and since some of them had distinguishing and recognisable meaning and values accumulated by their previous function or history, every one of them was dismissed. Consequently, the Executive Council of the PR of Serbia came out with a principal decision that the Council for Culture of the People’s Committee of the City of Belgrade would implement and establish a board in charge of programming the construction of the Modern Gallery.42 By the end of the year this board announced a competition for the preliminary design of its building; results of the competition were published in early 1960: among the eighteen entries frst prize was awarded to architects Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović. Construction on the building lasted from 1960 to 1965 (Fig. 7.1). Preparations for the

Figure 7.1 Tito’s photograph of the Modern Gallery/MoCAB under construction. Source: Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.

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Figure 7.2 View from Kalmegdan. New Belgrade panorama with Museum of Contemporary Art and the building of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia across the Sava River. Photo by Branibor Debeljković, ca. 1965. Source: Dušan Debeljković and National Library, Belgrade.

construction were slowed down with the change of location originally set on the left New Belgrade bank of the confuence of the Sava and the Danube, by the main road, across from the edifce of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (built in 1964, twelve years after the Communist Party of Yugoslavia changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia) (Fig. 7.2) and relatively nearby the Palace of the Federal Executive Council (originally the Palace of the Presidency of the FPRY built with interruptions between 1947 and 1962). The new site of the gallery was moved towards the confuence of the rivers, away from the main road and the headquarters of the Central Committee (Fig. 7.3). The investor of the construction was the Executive Council of the SR (Socialist Republic) of Serbia; urban regulation was developed by the Urban Planning Institute of Belgrade, while the Directorate for Construction of New Belgrade took part in the designing process and organisation of construction. In 1960 the People’s Committee of the City of Belgrade founded and attached to the Modern Gallery in Belgrade the October Salon—conceived as a regular manifestation that would annually host on 20 October a representative exhibition of achievements in visual art in the PR of Serbia, thus honouring the anniversary of the liberation of Belgrade in the Second World War (1944). In 1961 the Salon of the Modern Gallery (subsequently the Salon of the MoCAB) was launched. In March 1965, six months before the opening, with the approval from City Hall, the name of the Modern Gallery was changed to the Museum of Contemporary Art. This rhetorical act of renaming was a consequence of postrevolutionary desire. The concept of contemporaneity was a pivotal concept for the politics

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Figure 7.3 Statue of the Victor. New Belgrade panorama with Museum of Contemporary Art and the building of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia across the Sava River. Photo by Branibor Debeljković, ca. 1965. Source: Dušan Debeljković and National Library, Belgrade.

(and consequently the cultural policies) of the new state as a result of the revolutionary impulse to overcome time. Contemporaneity itself strongly refected the ideological construct of a new beginning as a substantial part of post-revolutionary everyday life. As Blagojević noted, the comprehension of one’s own contemporaneity—and consequent authorisation of this contemporaneity as supreme and total concept— were together the most signifcant factors in the processes of the emancipation of the Yugoslav cultural model. The question of contemporaneity was deeply connected to the question of socialism. Despite the synonymous use of the concepts ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary,’ as well as the fuid and indeterminate chronological border between ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary,’ the concept of contemporaneity in the art and culture of socialist Yugoslavia is distinctly marked. Socialism is conceived as a process happening here and now, and, accordingly, forms expressing a new spirit and character should stand out with their authenticity in comparison to paradigms of the modernism of the Western model, transcending the “partial concepts of style, historicism, nationalism and aestheticism.”43 The conception of the Modern Gallery at frst had concentrated on art from the frst half of the 20th century, and, beginning in 1961, through the exhibition program of the Salon of the Modern Gallery, expanded to the presentation of contemporary art practice, leading to the change of name to the Museum of Contemporary Art and announcing its constant move forward along the timeline. This process refected the original conceptualisation of New Belgrade as a

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space of atemporal contemporaneity as well as the desire of a new, socialist Yugoslavia to build a whole new society, a whole new world.44 Regarding the renaming of the gallery into the museum, Protić himself explained that this gesture was the logical outcome of a decade long development from the initial intentions to have a site to present modern art, to the very complex and elaborated practices typical for the modern/contemporary art museums.45 Beyond Protić’s ambitious aspirations and expectations, and beyond his understanding of the museum format in a quite traditional sense as one based on selective practice and on the concept of a universal art history, this shift from gallery to museum emphasised in the frst place the post-revolutionary need not only to produce a ‘new today’ (signifed by the notion of the contemporary) but also to produce a convenient and adequate past for that ‘today’; museums are, according to Groys, the machine that produces both.46 In many of his interpretations of the art that was collected, preserved, studied, and presented by the MoCAB, Protić terminologically translates that past, perceived as a series of synchronic individual emancipations and progressive ‘avant-garde’ advancements, thus completely compatible with the (post)revolutionary spirit, into the present: modern art becomes contemporary, thereby implicitly pushing the beginning of the timeline back to the beginning of the 20th century. The conventional systematisation into modern and contemporary art that we fnd in a similarly signifcant number of Protić’s writings on 20th-century art in Yugoslavia is the result of the development of the dialectical nature of Protić’s research sensibility, his attempt at a dialectical synthesis of art from a multinational and multiconfessional civil society on the one hand and, on the other, art from a social system that was national in form and socialist in essence. In the presence of top-ranking state offcials—and in Tito’s absence—the museum was opened, quite symbolically, on the anniversary of the liberation of Belgrade, 20 October 1965 (Fig. 7.4). The architects (again quite symbolically but indeed well-deservedly) received the October Award for best achievements in the feld of architecture (which was another form of commemorating the day of the liberation of Belgrade) for

Figure 7.4 Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by Branibor Debeljković, ca. 1965. Source: Dušan Debeljković and National Library, Belgrade.

136 Jasmina Čubrilo realisation of the building of the MoCAB. Tito’s reserves, restraints, and misunderstanding of modern art were suppressed due to specifc foreign policy circumstances after 1948 that led him to occupy at best case an ambivalent position towards modern art. In front of the West he tolerated modern art or, more precisely, ignored it; at the same time, however, in terms of demands in an internal political context, especially after the normalisation of the relationship with the USSR at the beginning of the 1960s, he openly and sometimes fercely criticised modern art, which he equated with decadent, bourgeois ideology and/or abstract forms. Despite disagreement over modern and abstract art and everything that Protić and the MoCAB stood for, Tito, caught in a complex net of foreign affairs with the West, did not suspend the processes of liberalisation insofar that they did not openly question the Party, the revolution, and the system itself. Under such circumstances it was possible for Protić to be the director of the MoCAB and not to be a member of the Party. Eventually, and in spite of his disdain for and misconception of modern art in general, Tito paid a visit to MoCAB in 1967 (Figs. 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7)—and that would be his frst and the last one: his entry in the guest book newly opened for the occasion gives the evidence of this visit, as does the gladly retold anecdote that he would write more next time (Fig. 7.8).47 The frst exhibition on display at the newly opened MoCAB (October/December) was Yugoslav graphic arts of the 20th century, which clearly communicated the Yugoslav character of the museum with the purpose of completing the permanent collection of the Yugoslav painting and sculpture.48 Two years after the MoCAB’s opening, Protić initiates the book series “Jugoslovenska umetnost 20. veka” (Yugoslav Art of the 20th Century), and every title was preceded by the “scholarly exhibition.” The frst

Figure 7.5 Miodrag B. Protić guides Josip Broz Tito and Jovanka Broz through the permanent exhibition of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967. Source: Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.

Figure 7.6 Miodrag B. Protić guides Josip Broz Tito and Jovanka Broz through the permanent exhibition of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967. Source: Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.

Figure 7.7 Miodrag B. Protić guides Josip Broz Tito and Jovanka Broz through the permanent exhibition of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967. Source: Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.

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Figure 7.8 Tito signing in the guest book of the MoCAB, 16 November 1967. Source: Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.

title, published in 1967, was Treća decenija. Konstruktivno slikarstvo (The 1920s. Constructivist Painting), then followed: Nadrealizam i socijalna umetnost 1929–1950 (Surrealism and Social Art 1929–1950) in 1969 (Fig. 7.9); Četvrta decenija. Ekspresionizam boje, poetski realizam 1930–1940 (The 1930s. Expressionism of Colour and Poetic Realism, 1930–1940) in 1971 (Fig 7.10); Počeci jugoslovenskog modernog slikarstva. 1900–1920 (Beginnings of Yugoslav Modern Painting. 1900–1920) in 1972; Jugoslovenska skulptura. 1870–1950 (Yugoslav Sculpture. 1870–1950) in 1975 (Fig 7.11); Jugoslovensko slikarstvo šeste decenije (Yugoslav Painting of the 1950s) in 1980; and fnally, after Protić’s retirement but in keeping with his concept, Jugoslovenska grafka 1950–1980 (Yugoslav Graphic Art 1950–1980).49 Along with his book Jugoslovensko slikarstvo 1900–1950 (Yugoslav Painting 1900–1950) (1973), this edition made an effort to designate and give meaning to the notion of Yugoslav modern art, whose beginning was set at 1900.50 The edition and Protić’s book constructed a (master-)narrative of the history of Yugoslav modern art, including a matrix for the interpretation and systematisation of modern/contemporary art based on a timeline structured by decade. In his project of setting up the idea and corpus of Yugoslav modern art and its history, Protić, probably more out of a belief that they were more knowledgeable than because he followed the federal model of equal representation of each Yugoslav Republic (at that time popular in state and cultural politics), invited collaboration by colleagues from other Yugoslav administrative, cultural, and artistic centres (Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skoplje, Priština . . .) and institutions whose arguments were meant to contribute to a conceptual framework he had already established. The fundamental

Figure 7.9 Nadrealizam, socijalna umetnost (Surrealism and Social Art. 1929–1950) (ed. Miodrag B. Protić), Beograd 1969, book cover.

Figure 7.10 Četvrta decenija. Ekspresionizam boje, poetski realizam (The 1930s. Expressionism of Colour and Poetic Realism, 1930–1940) (ed. Miodrag. B. Protić), Beograd 1971, book cover.

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Figure 7.11 Jugoslovenska skulptura. 1870–1950 (Yugoslav Sculpture. 1870–1950) (ed. Miodrag B. Protić), Beograd 1975, book cover.

idea behind Protić’s approach was to “arrange the best works of an epoch in poetic sequences, the poetic sequences into chronological successions, so that the collection would reveal both the epoch and its representatives, rather than destroy, skip and block through subjective selection or random arrangement.”51 Protić was well informed and, above all, well prepared for his new position thanks to his time in Paris (1953–54; 1957) and at New York’s MoMA (1963), where he meticulously studied its organisation, structure, and exhibition concepts, which he would go on to adjust according to the local circumstances as his conceptual framework demonstrated. Protić’s timelines operated as a temporal and teleological matrix, structuring the narrative of the development of Yugoslav modern art. He established the schematic historical development of modernism featuring a constant, regular decade rhythm, primarily grounded in the transformations of form, language, and artistic expression and marginalising the impact of ideological, political, social, or economic factors. In that sense, Protić produced a kind of neutral art historical discourse based on the premise of the autonomy of art, just as Alfred H. Barr, Jr. did in 1936 with his diagram on the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at MoMA. In other words, Protić ‘translated’ the accepted Western modern art history terminology (created in Paris) and methodology (realised in New York) to produce an art history narrative on art created within the Yugoslav cultural space as well as temporal frameworks, with clearly defned beginnings and a dynamism of progressive

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movement. Protić himself said that he found in Barr and René d’Harnoncourt’s collection “a reinterpretation of history, a dialectic in which the whole justifes the works and the works construct the whole” and that their approach was more rigorous and universal than that of their French colleagues, for example, Jean Cassou, director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.52 For Protić, ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ were closely associated with ‘emancipated,’ ‘Yugoslav,’ and ‘international,’ and they all operated on the same level: these were categories created by the ideology of progress that both capitalist and socialist societies relied on and which helped them produce unquestionable truths about themselves, their goals, and organisation. In addition, the concepts of ‘international’ and ‘Yugoslav,’ as Protić tended to understand Barr and d’Harnoncourt’s model, were compatible, as they were in a dialectical relationship implying the multitude organised and systematised on the principles of simultaneity, permanent movement, and innovation. Protić invested a great deal of energy in collaborative programs with museums worldwide; the organisation of group, monographic, and retrospective exhibitions of European, American, and Latin American artists around a particular theme or issue; as well as the representation of Yugoslav modern and contemporary art around the world with the intention of initiating a dialogue about contemporaneity and aspects of difference and universality. The syntagm ‘establishment of a continuity’ marked the art world in the PR of Serbia (and the FPRY) during the 1950s and not only referred to the required affrmation of the interwar, bourgeois art following the general (however, by the authorities never genuinely accepted) distancing from Socialist Realism, but also accepted the authority of interwar modernism in art as the sole criterion able to grant legitimacy to modern art and new artistic tendencies. It was introduced with the exhibition 70 Paintings and Sculptural Works from the Period 1920–1940 held in early 1951— which commenced the rehabilitation of interwar art—and with the exhibition Half a Century of Yugoslav Painting 1900–1950, which ran from late 1953 to early 1954 in Belgrade and Skopje (with a distinct Yugoslav character and encompassing periods prior to the establishment of the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia and after the FPRY’s inauguration). This process of restoring the suppressed subsequently proceeded with a number of solo exhibitions of the protagonists of pre-war modern art, acquisitions, important state awards, or other forms of their institutionalisation, e.g. professorships; work on committees; appointments to membership of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU); Belgrade (or the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts JAZU, Zagreb); etc. The still fragile and precarious existence of pre-war artists in (radically) different historical and ideological circumstances became consolidated by ahistorical, Kantian (enlightened/emancipated) artistic and aesthetic arguments. This ‘reconciliation’ of the bourgeois culture and art of pre-war Yugoslavia with that of socialist Yugoslavia was made possible by the post-1948 political shift compounded with the formation of the post-revolutionary ideology of the newly formed socialist bureaucracy/social elite, shaped by various, even opposing concepts. The MoCAB, through its conception, collections, and historical and theoretical systematisations, represented a substantial part of this process. Protić’s museological and theoretical shaping of the synthesis of Yugoslav art, which can be thought of as an attempt to establish the Yugoslav history of modern art, develops from the perspective of modernist international rhetoric. The adjective ‘Yugoslav’ became a signifer of supranational generalisation, of questioning and overcoming “provincial delusions and tastes”,53 and, from a geopolitical point of

142 Jasmina Čubrilo view, it became a signifer of the dynamics of (cultural) politics between the national and supranational. On the other hand, in the context of the museum’s permanent exhibition, “where the focus was the artwork not the artist” and the works were displayed as a “chronological successions of poetics sequences”54 for the sake of better understanding the epoch, the adjective Yugoslav also referred to the political idea of the Yugoslav people shared by intellectuals at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries as well as to the state-territorial unit formed in 1918 and reorganised during the 20th century and its ideological-political constructs that produced identity positions and a cultural and artistic space. The Yugoslav orientation of the MoCAB was carefully harmonised with the initial ideological conceptualisation of New Belgrade as the main administrative centre of the newly established socialist Yugoslavia. The fact that the frst urban plans for New Belgrade already included a building intended for the representation of modern art of the “people of Yugoslavia” as one in a series of symbolic verifcations of the new order that included the new, socialist Yugoslavhood as well as of the process of generating the future in the present moment, is conclusive as well. On the other hand, according to Protić, this orientation created the possibility for Serbian modern art to obtain a more adequate, complete, complex, academic, and theoretical interpretation with regard to its conceptual, formal, curatorial, (non-)offcial, (non-)institution(al) intertwining with phenomena in the artistic and cultural centres of Yugoslavia: I defended that concept (then and later) from complaints that it meant a smaller exhibition space for Serbian art, that similar institutions in other national milieus do not show Serbian artists, that Yugoslavism in culture should be ‘their’ responsibility as well, not just ‘ours,’ etc., and added that it is a shame that we cannot move forward and exhibit both Serbian and Yugoslav art in the context of the respective periods and poetics of European art.55 Thus, according to Protić’s words, the MoCAB became for him as a critic a chance to “reconstruct the process of the development of Serbian and Yugoslav art of the 20th century.”56 Protić often pointed out this vertical line: Serbian art—Yugoslav art—international art, defending the MoCAB’s Yugoslav orientation as an adequate and necessary framework for understanding Serbian modern art not only locally but also internationally.57 Implicitly, it seems that he felt that was also the path for other national art scenes formed during the 20th century in the territory of Yugoslavia. The program of cooperation between the republics can be viewed in this light: the organisation of exhibitions of contemporary Serbian art in centres of other republics (in Zagreb in 1963, Ljubljana in 1971, and Skopje in 1972) and, in return, exhibitions of individual national cultures in Yugoslavia, organised by their respective local professional institutions and commissioned and shown at the MoCAB (Contemporary Croatian Art, 1967; Young Artists of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1967; Contemporary Slovenian Art, 1968; Contemporary Macedonian Art, 1969; Contemporary Montenegrin Art 1971; Contemporary Paintings from Vojvodina, 1972; Ten Artists from Kosovo, 1973). Besides, this Yugoslav orientation, as an outcome of the living revolutionary legacy but perhaps more as the expression of the desire and the endeavour of the political authorities to reconsider this legacy and to compensate for the consequences of institutional reorganisation of the Yugoslav socialist federation (as envisaged by the 1963 Constitution) with the very idea of Yugoslavhood, became

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a kind of widespread practice. The large number of cultural manifestations in the feld of visual arts (as well as in other cultural domains) launched in the early 1960s throughout Yugoslavia were oriented towards representing contemporary art practice from all over Yugoslavia, thus implying the existence of a Yugoslav contemporary art scene (Nadežda Petrović Memorial in Čačak, Visual Autumn in Sombor, Triennial of Yugoslav Art in Belgrade, Biennial of Young Yugoslav Artists in Rijeka, Biennial of Yugoslav Graphic Arts in Zagreb, etc). Protić’s interpretation of the term ‘Yugoslav’ was derived from various ideological positions (enlightenment-liberal and socialist), structured and subordinate to his belief in the universal, leading, emancipatory, noble role of art in society—coherent, self-confdent, and immediate when it comes to artistic production but indirect and rather implicit when related to scientifc-disciplinary and theoretical articulation. Therefore, given the traces of the ideological context in which the MoCAB and its Yugoslav conceptions were created, represented by the collection (Fig. 7.12), thematic exhibitions, and accompanying publication, it is possible to defend the hypothesis that ambitious, expert work on the MoCAB’s concept and program generated a narrative of the history of Yugoslav art of the 20th century and that the narrative itself (this ‘reconstruction’ or ‘systematisation’) was just as conceptually Yugoslavian as the art that was the subject of its study.

Figure 7.12 Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by Branibor Debeljković, ca. 1965. Source: Dušan Debeljković and National Library Belgrade.

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Epilogue In the context of the conception of the MoCAB’s permanent exhibition in 2002, two decades after Protić’s retirement and after the nineties marked by the violent disintegration of the common state whose claimed (supranational) unity and cohesiveness the MoCAB, among other things, was supposed to, but gradually ceased to represent, Jerko Denegri, Protić’s younger colleague and close associate, former curator of the MoCAB and later a university professor, looked back and refected on the issue of the museum’s Yugoslav orientation. In the times of post-socialist closure and focusing on the local, i.e. national cultures of the ex-Yugoslav republics and the production of national(ist) historical interpretations and narratives, Denegri in his consideration evaded both the political discourse of supranational, socialistic Yugoslavhood and the sentimental Yugonostalgia from the post-socialist period as distinct opposites to national-xenophobic identifcations. By focusing on this museum as a site of the intersection of national, supranational, and international discursive formations, he introduced the term ‘Yugoslav cultural and artistic space’ whose meaning he described as a real historical fact based on the knowledge that for almost the entire 20th century, the artists of several successive generations from the region (at the beginning of the century still not formed, but later, what would be the ‘frst’ and ‘second’ Yugoslavia) worked in mutual cooperation, usually based on very close interpersonal relations; they gathered in organizations, groups and associations, and the best of them exhibited abroad representing their own state. Therefore it follows that during this entire period they participated in a very intense artistic life of one decentralized, but at the same time unifed, art space that can reasonably be called ‘Yugoslav’. . . . [t]his space was polycentric and shared at the same time, because, over time, in each of these regions, a suffciently autonomous and autochthonous cultural and artistic scene was formed, with distinct problems, physiognomies and its own protagonists, and yet, all of these scenes were naturally and organically included in one greater, expanding ‘artworld’ or ‘art system’ based on a very intense fow of artistic events. Denegri also points out that this polycentric artworld “unifed and unique, was comprehended and accepted from the external international (European, global) ‘art world’, and was appreciated as an integral part of it.”58 In other words, the syntagm ‘Yugoslav cultural and artistic space’ took over all the key relations of Protić’s signifying form ‘Yugoslav art’: an idea of the innovative and experimental nature of art which, through the (autocritical) exploration of its own language, semantics, structure, ontology, substance: a language that sublimates but also transcends national specifcities and differences, empowers not only its own creative and emancipatory capacity but also empowers the dialectic and constructive potential. Hence, the state played a decisive role in each phase of the realisation of the Modern Gallery/MoCAB project, following the idea that “to control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community’s highest values and most authoritative truths.”59 Nevertheless, the way in which art history of Yugoslav 20thcentury art was suggested through the MoCAB’s permanent display, thematic exhibitions, and publications was undoubtedly related to questions of who constitutes the

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community and defnes its identity—but more to the delicate process of installing critical and challenging arguments to the inconsistencies and discrepancies between proclaimed state and ideological principles and lived reality. The MoCAB, beside the already constructed buildings of the Federal Executive Council and Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, embodied the initial ideas of New Belgrade as a representative socialist city and centre of the new socialist and federal state. But through the articulation of the narrative on Yugoslav modern art, it collaterally gave its own interpretation of key ideological and political concepts of that state—as a space of post-revolutionary desire produced by place (New Belgrade), it became a new place in its own terms.60

Notes 1. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 19–20. 2. Miodrag B. Protić, Deset godina Muzeja savremene umetnosti u Beogradu. 1965–1975 (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1975); Miodrag B. Protić, “Intervju: Miodrag B. Protić, kritičar,” interview by Radmila Matić-Panić, Miodrag B. Protić (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1986), 27–40. 3. Miodrag B. Protić, Nojeva barka. Pogled s kraja veka (1900–1965) (Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 2000), 353–354, 510–515, 565–568, 573, 629–637. Miodrag B. Protić, Nojeva barka. Pogled s kraja veka (1965–2000) (Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 2000), 21–25, 117–121, 271, 275–487. 4. Milan Popadić, “Građenje pamćenja: prostorno-memorijski sistem muzeološke vrednosti” (PhD diss., University of Belgrade, 2011). 5. Milan Popadić, “Arhitektura Muzeja savremene umetnosti,” Nasleđe, no. 10 (2009): 159–178; Ljiljana Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam (Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike, Arhitektonski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu, 2007), 232–240. 6. Dejan Sretenović, ed., Prilozi za istoriju Muzeja savremene umetnosti (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 2016). 7. Ješa Denegri, Ideologija postavke Muzeja savremene umetnosti: Jugoslovenski umetnički prostor (Beograd: Samizdat, 2011). 8. Sretenović, Prilozi za istoriju Muzeja savremene umetnosti, 19, 23. 9. Lidija Merenik, “Miodrag B. Protić (1922–2014)—Gašenje poslednjeg svetla jugoslovenske moderne,” ZLUMS, no. 43 (2015): 317. 10. Miodrag B. Protić, Deset godina Muzeja savremene umetnosti u Beogradu. 1965–1975, 5. 11. Jasmina Čubrilo, “Yugoslav: Toponym or Ideology in Miodrag B. Protić’s Art-Historical Systematization of 20th-Century Art,” Acta historiae artis Slovenica, no. 23/1 (2018): 199–215. 12. From the very outset, as an institution founded in Belgrade, capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and main city of the Yugoslav people, the Museum of Prince Pavle had the signifcance of a representative museum meant to “exhibit supreme achievements of the Yugoslav and European art and material culture created on the domestic soil.” In that sense, both the display and the structure of the museum, housed in the New Court, which King Aleksandar I Karađorđević generously bestowed on the people in the likeness of similar endeavors from the history of European dynasties, were focused, among other things, on the construction of desirable and positive images of the new state (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and its new (supra)national identity, i.e. Yugoslavhood as such. After the Second World War the Museum of Prince Pavle would be renamed the Art Museum, and in 1952 it reassumed the old/original name, the National Museum, and the history of the pre-war Museum of Contemporary Art became an ‘episode’ in the intricate game of power of Belgrade’s cultural and court elite. Aleksandar Ignjatović, “Arhitektura Novog dvora i Muzej kneza Pavla,” in Muzej kneza Pavla, ed. Tatjana Cvijetićanin (Beograd: Narodni muzej, 2009), 58–89; Milan Popadić, “Muzej kao epizoda. Muzej savremene umetnosti (1929–1934),” Acta historiae artis Slovenica, no. 17/1 (2012): 135–146.

146 Jasmina Čubrilo 13. Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 58. 14. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984), 117–118. 15. The most prominent objects built during the period between the two world wars were mainly related to the organisation of the transportation network: the Old Airport (1926– 1931) and the King Alexander I Bridge (1934); as well as for commercial purposes: in 1937 the pavilions of the Belgrade Fair were erected by the river, according to the designs of the municipal architects Rajko Tatić, Milivoje Tričković, and Đorđe Lukić. See: Branko Maksimović, “Vrednosti generalnog plana Beograda od 1923. godine i njihovo poništavanje,” Godišnjak grada Beograda, no. XXVII (1980): 241; Biljana Mišić, “Palata Saveznog izvršnog veća u Novom Beogradu,” Nasleđe, no. 8 (2007): 130; Biljana Mišić, Palata Saveznog izvršnog veća u Novom Beogradu (Beograd: Zavod za zaštitu spomenika kulture grada Beograda, 2011), 23–24. 16. Dejan Jović, Jugoslavija—država koja je odumrla: uspon, kriza i pad Četvrte Jugoslavije (1974–1990) (Beograd: Reč, 2003), 119–134. 17. Mari Žanin Čalić, Istorija Jugoslavije u 20. veku (Beograd: Clio, 2013), 225–226. 18. League of Communists of Yugoslavia’s Program, 1958, as cited in Jović, Jugoslavija— država koja je odumrla: uspon, kriza i pad Četvrte Jugoslavije (1974–1990), 123. 19. Bratislav Stojanović, “Iz građe za istoriju Novog Beograda,” Urbanizam Beograda, no. 25 (1974): 32. The planning of New Belgrade was carried out under the constant interest and watchfulness of the secretary general of the Party, the prime minister of the FPRY, and Marshal Tito. On 11 April 1947, by laying the foundation stone after a solemn meeting of the youth brigades, construction of New Belgrade offcially began. On 30 June, Tito, accompanied by his closest associates, visited the construction site. Mišić, Palata Saveznog izvršnog veća u Novom Beogradu, 29–30. Several architects confrmed Tito’s personal involvement, especially in relation to the Central Committee building. See: Edvard Ravnikar, “Maršal Tito našim arhitektom,” Novi svet, no. II (1947): 363; Neven Šegvić, “Stvaralačke komponente arhitekture FNRJ,” Urbanizam i arhitektura, No. 5–6 (1950): 34–35. 20. Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 58. 21. A detailed list of the segments of the federal, republican, and municipal Five Year Plan related to the planning and construction of New Belgrade can be found in: Bratislav Stojanović, “Istorija Novog Beograda, prvi deo,” Godišnjak grada Beograda, no. XXI (1974): 225–229. 22. Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 61. 23. For details of the competitions and specifc entries, see: Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 72–105; also: Mišić, Palata Saveznog izvršnog veća u Novom Beogradu, 39–63. 24. Seventy entries arrived during the competition at the end of 1946 for the building design of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, in which 111 experts and 36 non-experts took part, whereas twenty-six entries developed by seventy-fve experts and fourteen non-experts competed for the building design of the Presidency of the FPRY and the master plan of New Belgrade. Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 73. 25. Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 83; Mišić, Palata Saveznog izvršnog veća u Novom Beogradu, 29. 26. See: Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 104–106; Bratislav Stojanović, “Posleratna beogradska arhitektonska izgradnja,” Godišnjak grada Beograda, no. XVII (1970): 213–216; Stojanović, “Istorija,” 219–220. 27. Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 220. 28. O.M., “Nove zgrade za operu, modernu galeriju i narodnu biblioteku u Beogradu,” Borba, Beograd, 21 June 1959; K.M., “Beograd dobija nove zgrade za Modernu galeriju, Narodnu biblioteku i Operu, Konferencija za štampu u Savetu za kulturu Srbije,” Politika, Beograd, 21 June 1959; Popadić, “Arhitektura Muzeja savremene umetnosti,” 161–163; Mišić, Palata Saveznog izvršnog veća u Novom Beogradu, 34–35. 29. At the meeting of the Board of Experts, formed in 1948 beside the already existing Council for the Construction of New Belgrade, architect Milorad Macura submitted a report about the draft of New Belgrade that formulated the concept of New Belgrade as a ‘role model city’ as well as the demand for an adequate theoretical platform. The report is available in:

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30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

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Bratislav Stojanović, “Istorija Novog Beograda, drugi deo,” Godišnjak grada Beograda, no. XXII (1975): 213–214. “New Belgrade will be a model of New Yugoslavia,” said Minister of Construction in the Government of the FPRY, Vlada Zečević, among other things, in his speech, during the opening of the construction of New Belgrade in 1947. See Mišić, “Palata,” 145. Only in 1956, with the establishment of the Directorate for the Construction of New Belgrade, did construction frms take over the work on the construction of New Belgrade, and the work that before had been voluntary was now professional. Biljana Mišić, Palata Saveznog izvršnog veća u Novom Beogradu, 35. A Slovenian architect, Edvard Ravnikar was author of the project of Ljubljana Modern Gallery, which was built, with interruptions, from 1939 to 1951. Milan Popadić, “Arhitektura Muzeja savremene umetnosti u Beogradu,” Nasleđe, no. 10 (2009): 161. Popadić, “Arhitektura,”162. Ljubodrag Dimić, Agitprop kultura, agitpropovska faza kulturne politike u Srbiji 1945– 1953 (Beograd: Rad, 1988), 19–71. Miodrag B. Protić, Nojeva barka, Pogled s kraja veka (1900–1965) (Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 2000), 351–355. Protić, Nojeva barka, Pogled s kraja veka (1900–1965), 353; Miodrag B. Protić, Muzej savremene umetnosti (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1965), 16. The interviewees were: Svetozar Radojčić, Chair of the Department of History of Art (Full Professor since 1956); Sreten Stojanović, Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts; Nada Andrejević Kun, President of the Museum Society of Serbia; Oto Bihalji Merin, painter, art historian, writer, and publicist; Branko Šotra, Rector of the Academy of Applied Arts; members of the Association of Visual Artists of Serbia and Yugoslav (Serbian) painters who, after their class ‘clandestinity’ during the brief post-war episode of the dogma of Socialist Realism, became prominent exponents of the concept of “establishing continuity” with pre-war modernist art; Petar Lubarda, Milo Milunović, Đorđe Andrejević Kun, Predrag Milosavljević, Milan Konjović, Marko Čelebonović, Miloje Nikolajević. The members of the board were Stanka Veselinov, social-political worker in the FPRY/SFRY, President of the Board; Miodrag B. Protić, Secretary; Veljko Petrović, writer and, at the time, Director of the National Museum; Oto Bihalji Merin; Milo Milunović, painter, who resigned due to other commitments; Đorđe Andrejević Kun, painter; Svetozar Radojčić; Predrag Milosavljević, painter; Stevan Bodnarov, sculptor; Dobrica Ćosić, writer; Vlado Mađarić, conservator; and Aleksa Čelebonović—painter, art critic, and founder of the Yugoslav section of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA, International Association of Art Critics) and commissioner of the Yugoslav selection at the biennials in Venice (1957) and São Paulo (1958). All members were from Serbia except Mađarić, who was from Croatia. “Report on the Work of the Board of the Modern Gallery and Conclusions,“ undated and unrecorded document (Documentation of Museum of Contemporary Art). On Protić biography see: Protić, Nojeva barka, Pogled s kraja veka (1900–1965); Miodrag B. Protić, Nojeva barka, Pogled s kraja veka (1965–2000) (Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 2000); Merenik, “Miodrag B. Protić,” 311–320; Čubrilo, “Yugoslav: Toponym or Ideology in Miodrag B. Protić’s Art-Historical Systematization of 20th-Century Art,” 199–205. The board included respected social-political worker and poet Milorad Panić Surep (President); architects Branko Petričić, Oliver Minić, and Stanko Mandić; painter and art critic Momčilo Stevanović; painter and playwright Predrag Milosavljević; sculptor and art critic Risto Stijović; and Miodrag B. Protić as the head of the gallery. Blagojević, Novi Beograd: osporeni modernizam, 212–213. See: Milan Popadić, “Kako je Moderna galerija postala Muzej savremene umetnosti,” in Prilozi za istoriju Muzeja savremene umetnosti, ed. Dejan Sretenović (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 2016), 104–106. Protić, interview, 35–36. See Boris Groys, “On the New,” in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 30–31; Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamkunstwerk,” e-fux journal, no. 50 (2013): 1–3, www.e-fux.com/journal/50/59974/entering-

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47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

the-fow-museum-between-archive-and-gesamtkunstwerk/ [Accessed: 10/01/2018]; Popadić, “Kako je Moderna galerija postala Muzej savremene umetnosti,” 105–106. Protić, Nojeva barka, Pogled s kraja veka (1965–2000), 24–25. On Tito as an art collector see: Nenad Radić, Pusen i petokraka: zbirka slika druga predsednika (Novi Sad: Galerija Matice srpske, 2012). Protić, Deset godina Muzeja savremene umetnosti u Beogradu, 28. Miodrag B. Protić, ed., Treća decenija. Konstruktivno slikarstvo (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1967); Miodrag B. Protić, ed., Nadrealizam, postnadrealizam, socijalna umetnost, umetnost NOR-a, socijalistički realizam. 1929–1950 (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1969), Miodrag B. Protić, ed., Četvrta decenija. Ekspresionizam boje, kolorizam, poetski realizam, intimizam, koloristički realizam. 1930–1940 (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1971); Miodrag B. Protić, ed., Počeci jugoslovenskog modernog slikarstva. Plenerizam, secesija, simbolizam, minhenski krug, impresionizam, ekspresionizam. 1900–1920 (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1972); Miodrag B. Protić, ed., Jugoslovenska skulptura. 1870–1950 (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1975); Miodrag B. Protić, ed., Jugoslovensko slikarstvo šeste decenije (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1980); Kosta Bogdanović and Ješa Denegri, eds., Jugoslovenska grafka. 1950– 1980 (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1986). On the questionable status of 1900 as the chronological beginning of Yugoslav modern art see Čubrilo, “Yugoslav: Toponym or Ideology in Miodrag B. Protić’s Art-Historical Systematization of 20th-Century Art,” 206–207. Protić, Nojeva barka. Pogled s kraja veka (1900–1965), 565. Protić, Nojeva barka. Pogled s kraja veka (1900–1965), 564–565. Protić, interview, 27. Protić, interview, 33. Protić, interview, 30. Protić, interview, 29. In the book series “Jugoslovenska umetnost 20. veka” (Yugoslav Art of the 20th Century), a book on Serbian 20th-century architecture (Srpska arhitektura 1900–1970) was published. In addition to this title, from 1980 to 1981 Protić edited Ideje srpske umetničke teorije i kritike 1900–1950 (Serbian Art Theories and Critiques 1900–1950) in three volumes, published by the MoCAB. In 1983, three years after Protić’s retirement, the MoCAB published the title Nova umetnost u Srbiji, pojedinci, pojave i grupe 1970–1980 (New Art Practice in Serbia, Individuals, Phenomena and Groups 1970–1980). Also, in 1970, he published the book Srpsko slikarstvo 20. veka (Serbian Art of the 20th Century), in two volumes. Ješa Denegri, Ideologija postavke Muzeja savremene umetnosti: Jugoslovenski umetnički prostor (Beograd: Samizdat, 2011), 6. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, 8. This chapter is an extended version of the article published under the title “The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade from Ideological Space to Desired Place: Producing the Art History Narrative of Yugoslav Modern Art” in Zbornik Matice srpske za likovne umetnosti, no 47 (2019): 281–293.

8

Simultaneous Equations Early Cold War Cultural Politics and the History of Art in Greece Areti Adamopoulou

“We belong to the West” was the most famous motto of Konstantinos Karamanlis (1907–1998), a fervent supporter of the idea of European unifcation in post-1945 Greek politics. This declaration of belonging was not only a political statement; it also indicated a commitment to furthering the Westernisation of the contemporary Greek society and culture. Although Greek cultural identity was perceived as European and thus Western when the Greek nation-state came into being in the 19th century, the country’s cultural (and political) identity was redefned in the 1950s and 1960s, when the term ‘West’ acquired a particular ideological signifcation. As I will argue in this chapter, Cold War ideology, in the specifc shades it acquired in Greece, became the frame for the development of a Greek ‘Western’ consciousness which, in turn, shaped discourses and practices in the cultural domain. It is in this context that we can trace the appearance of art history as an academic discipline in Greece. To be more precise, it was in these circumstances that art history became an appropriate, almost necessary, and even desired feld of study to be included in Greek universities. Although a discourse on art fourished in the interwar period, and the ‘birth’ of the discipline cannot be attributed to any one or direct political decision, I will maintain that it was the newly constructed Cold War Greek identity that fuelled the development of art history studies in Greek universities. In this chapter I will not discuss in depth art trends or art exhibitions in Greece, neither will I focus on specifc authors or books on art. I will, however, explore this historical context to explain the appearance of art history in Greek higher education, perceived and defned as the history of Western European art and of the art produced in the modern Greek state.

Greece After the 1939–1945 War Greece entered the post–Second World War Western world at a different time and in a more violent way than its allies. Although on the victorious side, the country found itself torn apart by a civil war that delayed the return to peace and devastated social unity. The ideologies of the Cold War, in combination with inter-war internal political problems, created an explosive situation that affected all aspects of life.1 The Greek Civil War of 1946–1949 is regarded by historians as the frst episode of the Cold War. It was fought between the government army and the National Liberation Front (NLF), which was organised in 1941 by the Greek Communist Party. During the occupation of Greece by the Axis (1941–1944), the NLF had acquired signifcant infuence throughout the country, in contrast to the monarch and the

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established politicians, who fed to Egypt and co-operated with the Allies. By the end of the Second World War the antithesis of right- and left-wing politics acquired a distinctive ideological dimension, which corresponded to the emerging rift between the United States and the USSR. The Greek Civil War attracted the interest of Britain and the United States, which understood that its outcome was bound to affect their strategic interests in the region.2 Britain, until 1947, and since then, the United States, intervened in order to achieve political stability and supported the king and the prevailing Right-wing governments. Greece was seen as an important link to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and its connection to the West helped control access to those areas. In the ideological feld, British and American intervention in the Civil War was seen as an antidote to USSR expansionism. Under these circumstances, Greece became the frst testing ground for the US–USSR strategic antagonisms.3 After the war the country became a mainstream recipient of Marshall aid.4 The Greek Civil War ended in 1949 leaving the country fnancially and morally devastated. In a most crucial sense Greece entered its post-war period in the 1950s, and did so as a ‘Free World’ country. This Western orientation formed the basis on which Greece’s national identity was re-structured. In the 1950s and throughout the 1960s cultural politics were geared towards advancing Greece’s integration in the Western European frame. This process was by no means uniform, simple, or overtly controlled by a single source or centre. Different and often competing factors, such as the international French, German, and British cultural politics, the then-emerging Euro-American lifestyle of consumption, and the Greek intelligentsia, were shaping a contemporary European cultural profle for Greece.

Art and Art History in Greece Until 1945 Greece was under Ottoman rule from the 15th to the 19th century. Art and its institutions had developed in a different way compared to Western European standards. There was no royal collection or patronage for Western art during this period, the imports from Renaissance and Baroque artists were few and destined to the ruling class in Constantinople, and the 19th-century Greek bourgeoisie did not have a tradition in collecting art. The modern Greek ‘art world’ developed in the 20th century: political and state interventions in the inter-war period launched it and, during the Westernisation of the 1950s and 1960s, it grew steadily. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, classical art and texts provided Greek and other European thinkers with materials for confguring a national identity that did not as yet exist nor ever had existed in political reality. Art of the distant past and continuity in language thus became, already before Independence, fundamental resources for the construction of a Greek national character.5 The revival of the antique in Classicism fooded the world with columnated buildings, sparkling white statues of Homeric heroes and Greek gods, colossal paintings of ancient historical or mythological subjects, and fashion trends that imitated painted Greek vases. Thus, by the 1830s, when Greece became an independent state, Classical Greek art was universally well-known, much revered by the cultural elite, and much desired by collectors. The young Greek state had a strong interest in art education, history, and the preservation of its antiquities.6 Therefore, archaeology as a discipline fourished at the University of Athens—the only Greek university during the 19th century—and was cultivated by foreign Archeological Schools.7

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Until today, the collocation ‘Greek art’ was associated in the press, in library and auction catalogues, in popularised publications, and the internet mostly with Classical and Hellenistic works of art. This situation was quite awkward for 19th- and 20thcentury Greek artists, who felt that they lived in the shadow of their ancestors and were compelled to perform the herculean task of reaching the heights of accomplishments and fame they had. While Greek and foreign archaeologists were dedicated to studying at frst the glories of antiquity and, by the end of the 19th century, of Byzantium too, contemporary Greek creativity was considered elementary until the 1880s; it was under-discussed until the inter-war period, until the 1960s it was commented upon by literary critics and archaeologists who held columns of art criticism, and certainly it was not considered a feld of academic study. In Greek higher education the collocation ‘history of art’ appeared for the frst time in the late 19th century at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) as a course title.8 In the beginning of the 20th century this course was taught by Zacharias Papantoniou (1877–1940), poet, writer, art critic, and Director of the National Gallery in Athens since 1918.9 His successor, Pantelis Prevelakis (1909–1986), was the frst holder of a PhD in art history to be appointed to a chair under this name in 1939.10 The Metaxas regime (1936–1940) had set the stage for this development, both at the ASFA11 and at the Ministry of National Education.12 Prevelakis’ appointment is one of many facts which indicate that in the interwar period art history was introduced as an autonomous subject in the universities. Soon, beside the ASFA, other institutions placed art history in their curricula. At the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) at the School of Architecture, two new positions were created. Dimitrios Evangelidis (1886–1959) and Angelos Prokopiou (1909–1967) occupied them in 1941 and 1940 respectively. They had similar qualifcations: after acquiring their frst degrees in Greece they completed their education in France and/or Germany. Prevelakis, Evangelidis, and Prokopiou were the frst to teach art history under this specifc name in Greek universities and the frst who wrote brief surveys on Western European art. However, their chairs were created in schools (ASFA, NTUA) where the curricula offered general surveys of art, not in-depth study. They presented their students (be it future architects or artists) with survey courses based on a linear narrative: they began in prehistory, presented Classical Greek and Byzantine art, and then continued with Italian and North Renaissance art, discussed Baroque in European courts, and ended in 18th-century Classicism and Romanticism. According to the Greek academic system the ‘natural home’ for art history would be in Schools of Philosophy, where the history of ancient Greek and Byzantine art was already being studied in the frame of archaeology. The foundation in 1925 of the country’s second university, the University of Thessaloniki,13 helped in the establishment of art history in Greece. Its Philosophy School was meant to be more liberal than the one of the University of Athens. According to its founding decree, this new Philosophy School included new degree orientations, such as English, German, French, Italian, Balkan, and ‘Oriental’ (mainly meaning Turkish and Arabic) languages and literatures. When in 1926 a presidential decree made provisions for chairs in the new school, two new subjects appeared in the archaeology curriculum, Laographia (Folklore) and Istoria tis Neoteras Technis (meaning literally: History of the More Recent Art; but, as we shall see, ‘neotera’ is a more complex term).14 Of the initial twelve faculty members of the new Philosophy School, six were Ancient and Modern Greek

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philologists and linguists, the rest historians and archaeologists.15 History of the ‘More Recent’ Art was taught occasionally and in short terms by Classical or Byzantine archaeologists.16 Nevertheless, an important step had been made: for the frst time it was felt that archaeology graduates should have knowledge of the ‘more recent’ art.17 This development was linked in the 1930s to the policy of the governing liberals, who favoured an economic and social ‘Europeanisation’ and promoted modern art. What was meant by ‘neotera’ or ‘more recent’ art in the University of Thessaloniki? In contrast to the ‘general’ history of art, which had been the subject of the chairs in ASFA and NTUA, Istoria tis Neoteras Technis was a more explicit title. ‘Neotera techni’ was understood in two ways. First, as Western art since the Renaissance. Second, ‘neotera’ meant Greek artistic production (mainly painting and sculpture) of the 19th and 20th centuries, the period, that is, when Greece existed as an independent state. This second meaning became clearer after the Second World War. This perception of art history was closely related to the way Greek history was perceived and narrated. Ancient Greek art, philosophy, and language were considered the country’s cultural capital and the basis of Western civilisation. A linear narrative was constructed according to which Hellenism began in the depth of prehistory, continued in the Classical period, was Christianised in Byzantium, and survived the Ottoman rule for 400 years. This art and its history were the subjects of archaeology, a discipline that was well established, staffed with scholars who were well-educated, had connections with Europe, and enjoyed much esteem in Greece. The members of this cultural elite perceived themselves as keepers and curators of the most important art in the Western world. By setting the scene for the arrival of art history, they had to defne its feld of practice as lying outside their own scientifc interests. Thus, Istoria tis Neoteras Technis in the inter-war period was meant to give the linear narrative of Greek art, taught at the Philosophy Schools, a more fnite shape. In a way, a Vasarian cycle was becoming complete with the addition of a ‘recent’ part, both European and Greek, in the same way that Greek national identity was becoming European and Greek at the time.

Art History as the ‘History of Medieval and of the More Recent Art of the West’: The 1960s In the 1960s, the same Philosophy School that included art history as a distinct subject in the inter-war period changed the title of its still pending chair. It now was Istoria tis Technis tis Dyseos (History of the Art of the West) and was supposed to become an autonomous study orientation, leading to a degree.18 When the procedures commenced once again—after almost forty years—for the appointment of an art history professor, the offcial title of the new position became far more precise: Istoria tis Mesaionikis kai Neoteras Technis tis Dyseos (History of Medieval and of the More Recent Art of the West).19 The peculiar term ‘neoteras’ (more recent) was still coloured by the inter-war perception of continuity in history. However, now it became crystal clear that the linear narration of Greek history did not end with Greece’s recent past, plus some information on Europe. Now the title of the chair explicitly stated that the national art history’s terminal focus was ‘the More Recent Art of the West.’ Greek 19th- and 20th-century art was now included in this Western view. Greek and European art histories were perceived as moving in parallel paths, as Greece, both politically and culturally, became an integral part of the ‘West’.

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In retrospect, we can say that the character of art history in Greece crystallised when Chrysanthos Christou (1922–2016) was appointed to the chair of art history in the University of Thessaloniki in 1965.20 His scholarly profle was no different from that of the archaeologists of the school.21 After his appointment his research interests shifted according to the title of the chair he held. Christou became the initiator of a new academic feld, and it seems he was fully aware of his role. He was an extremely prolifc writer: his ten-volume textbook covers every period of Western art from the Renaissance to the 20th century. He was the author of dozens of books and hundreds of articles and reviews on modern Greek art and artists. He introduced not only undergraduates but also a wider public to art history: he organised exhibitions of Greek art in many cities of Northern Greece and gave lectures.22 He was the frst to teach postgraduate students and supervise doctoral dissertations on modern Greek art, preparing thus his academic successors. Five of his students succeeded him as fulltime faculty at the Philosophy School at the University of Thessaloniki in the early 1980s. As for Greek art of the 19th and 20th centuries, Christou began by ‘mapping the terrain,’ by articulating and teaching the frst survey courses. Although survey texts already existed, he expanded their scope and promoted modern Greek art as an autonomous and interesting feld for art historical writing.

The Cold War as a Frame for Art and Art History in Greece Art history was not the only new arrival at the Philosophy School in Thessaloniki in the 1960s. A Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology was created in 1965.23 The Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures, founded in 1931, began operating in the 1950s and 1960s. It comprised the departments of English, French, German, and Italian languages and literatures.24 There is a connection among these developments: the liberal Philosophy School of the country was opening towards Western thought, writing, and art. The marked difference with the past was that non-Greek texts and art became for the frst time the focus of research. Greek scholars felt free to engage in the study of European civilisation, without being accused of xenophilia. In addition, the distant past was revisited: the time limits of archaeology expanded to include the frst Chair of Prehistoric Archaeology. Nikolaos Platon (1909–1992), who was appointed to it in 1966, did not limit his teaching to the famous Aegean prehistory (Minoan and Mycenaean cultures), but included also European prehistory.25 I believe that the establishment of art history as a distinct discipline in the University of Thessaloniki in the 1960s was one of many signs that the country was redefning its national identity. The latter was becoming European—and Western—in the frst place, and Greek secondarily. Shouldn’t, then, the Greek public learn about their European cultural heritage?26 In contrast to its Western allies, Greece lacked a modern tradition of art institutions. Tonis Spiteris (1910–1986), a well-known art critic who played an important role in Greece during the 1960s, described with dark colours the situation in Athens in 1957: Not even one museum of contemporary [read: modern] art exists, we do not see but rarely foreign exhibitions. The teaching of neoteri [more recent] art is almost non-existent. There are no books [on the subject], because those who write do not have the means to publish. There is no art market, great collectors, institutions that could cultivate a market fow to provide artists with the means to survive.27

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The conditions were not very promising, but the 1950s marked an unprecedented, rapid Westernisation of the Greek state, society, art, and education, which culminated in the 1960s. Post-1945 Greece—as many small countries during the Cold War— became a feld in which heterogeneous ideologies clashed and political powers and economic systems competed for hegemony. Foreign cultural institutes had already a century-old presence in the country. France and Great Britain were competing hard in the cultural domain. After 1947, when the United States became both politically and economically involved in Greece, they became the third important player in this domain. Establishing scholarships for Greek citizens became a common practice, which aimed at educating a new generation of thinkers and practitioners who would become their advocates upon returning to their countries. Many scholars were encouraged—and fnancially and politically assisted—to visit the West. The number of fellows leaving the country in the years following 1945 was indeed greater than ever before. France, in particular, was the main pole of attraction—literally a refuge—for left-wing thinkers and artists, as the almost traditional anti-Americanism of French intellectuals allowed them to freely practice their political beliefs.28 The United States, on the other hand, was considered principally the place for believers in the American dream—though they were statistically very few in Greece. The United States Information Service (USIS) in Athens was a very important branch of the United States Information Agency (USIA) for the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean, staffed with 170 people and a budget of $340,000 in 1953.29 In Greece their activity included screening documentaries throughout the country, using the Voice of America radio station (favoured by 26% of the Greek audience), cultivating good public relations with the local press to disseminate American-friendly news, fostering language teaching, translating American literature, and organising exhibitions.30 The foundation of the Hellenic-American Union in 1957 absorbed part of this activity. However, contemporary art was not at the epicentre of American public diplomacy in Greece, although a good number of touring exhibitions of modern and contemporary American art were presented in the country. Like Europeans before them, Americans were for the most part interested in the history and culture of ancient Greece, especially the Classical age, as this was considered the cradle of democracy, that the United States now stood for.31 The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, founded in 1881, was already an important intellectual centre with a signifcant library and conducted excavations in many archaeological sites in Greece. In the 1950s the school constructed a museum on the site of the Athenian Agora—the most important site of Classical Athens—and landscaped one of Europe’s frst archaeological paths, with funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.32 In the Free World a connection with the specifc place that ‘gave birth to democracy’ carried a good deal of ideological weight. The British Council and the Institut Français continued their cultural activities in Athens during the Civil War. Along with the Hellenic-American Union, they staged numerous art exhibitions in the 1950s and 1960s, bringing to the Greek capital famous modern Masters. The Goethe Institut and the Casa d’Italia were also active—but to a lesser degree during this period—and promoted mostly modern and contemporary art production.33 Usually these exhibitions were presented in the Zappeion Megaron, the only available spacious exhibition hall in Athens. Thus, Henry Moore was shown in 1951 (Fig. 8.1), Picasso in 1955, Léger in 1956, Caravaggio and his followers in 1962 (Fig. 8.2), Goya in 1963, modern European sculpture in 1965, and American print-making and painting

Figure 8.1 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Henry Moore, Zappeion Megaron, Athens, 3–25 March, 1951.

Figure 8.2 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Caravaggio and his Followers, Zappeion Megaron, Athens, 27 November 1962–6 January 1963.

156 Areti Adamopoulou several times in the 1950s and 1960s, to mention but a few.34 Since only the National Gallery had a small post-Renaissance art collection in the country, these exhibitions were the only opportunity for the Greek public to become acquainted with Europe’s cultural heritage and with European and American modern and contemporary art. These exhibitions were mediated by newspaper articles and art reviews, the number of which multiplied impressively in the 1950s. In the next decade, following the increase in the number of newspapers and magazines published in Greece, reviews of exhibitions and survey texts on European art proliferated, ‘educating’ or orienting the public towards the new values of the West.35 Note that the Greek branch of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA, International Association of Art Critics) was founded in 1950,36 and two journals of art criticism appeared in 1955, namely Zygos (The Scales) and Epitheorisi Technis (Art Review). Exhibition spaces and art galleries in Athens multiplied at a stunning rate: fourteen in the 1940s, thirty-two in the 1950s, to ffty-nine in the 1960s.37 During the same period cities outside Athens acquired art collections and art appreciation societies: the Macedonian Art Society “Techni” (Art) was founded in Thessaloniki in 1951, and municipal galleries were founded in Ioannina (1962), Kalamata (1962), and Rhodes (1964).38 A market for contemporary Greek art emerged in Greece, structured on the basis of its coeval European one.39 In the mid-1960s the efforts towards Westernisation produced fruits: two international art events were organised by Greeks in Athens. The frst focused on the country’s medieval contribution to European culture. It was the ninth annual show of the Council of Europe and was tellingly entitled Byzantine Art. An European Art (Fig. 8.3).40

Figure 8.3 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Byzantine Art. A European Art, 9th Exhibition of the Council of Europe, Zappeion Megaron, Athens, 1 April–15 June 1964.

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It was organised in 1964 by the prominent Byzantinologist Manolis Chatzidakis (1909–1998), director of the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens. He worked for years with European and American peers and a team of young researchers to select the almost 700 artefacts from museums and collections from eighteen countries. The objects covered all areas of Byzantine creativity, from the 7th to the 14th century. Chatzidakis’ foreword to the exhibition revealed the ideological connections implicit in the title: “Byzantine art is European, and the only art between East and West which kept alive that spirit of Greek humanism now recognised as pre-eminently the basis of European values.”41 In this spirit Greece’s Byzantine past was also sanctioned as part of a common European culture. The exhibition is still considered an important international milestone in the history of Byzantine art exhibitions and byzantine studies. It also propagated the linear narrative of Greek culture, which radiated greatness not only in Classical antiquity, but also during the medieval period. The next year Spiteris, Secretary General of the AICA at the time, organised an open-air, modern sculpture exhibition at the Philopappos Hill, opposite the Acropolis of Athens. The exhibition, which was included in the Athens Festival program, was under the aegis of and funded by the Greek National Tourism Organisation, a postwar public organisation. The Panathenaia of Sculpture was a major cultural event for the country, covered by the international press.42 The exhibition comprised 130 sculptures by the most famous modern artists (Brancusi, Calder, Giacometti, Hepworth,

Figure 8.4 Cover of the exhibition catalogue 1st International Exhibition of Sculpture. Panathenaia of Contemporary Sculpture, Athens 1965.

158 Areti Adamopoulou Moore, Gargallo, Lehmbruck, Picasso, Miro, and Ernst, to mention but a few) selected by Spiteris and the art critics Denys Chevalier and Giuseppe Marchiori (Fig. 8.4). Their personal connections to European artists, collectors, and museums made the exhibition possible. The emblematic character of the Panathenaia was stressed by the very name chosen for it: the Great Panathenaia were festivities, held in ancient Athens every four years in honour of Athena, patron-goddess of the city. This twin reference to antiquity, by choice of site and name, speaks volumes about the ideology at work: it established a link between antiquity and modernity and at once bestowed importance upon present-day European art as an offspring of the ancient prototype. It also fattered the Greek public by suggesting that Greece was the origin of modern sculpture (Figs. 8.5 and 8.6). In brief, Greece became progressively an active participant in the Cold War Western culture. Governmental and other institutional practices, scholarly discourses, and university curricula all pointed to subtle shifts, which with time acquired greater force and durability and cumulatively brought about a signifcant change in the perception of Greek identity. Another indicator of these changes was contemporary art production in Greece. After 1945 the ASFA was still directed by conservative academic artists, which the local bourgeoisie still preferred. However, the prevailing contemporary trend in painting was a modern idiom with vague stylistic or thematic references to

Figure 8.5 Auguste Renoir, Venus Victrix, 1914. Bronze, 180 × 90 × 130 cm. Musée de Cagnes, Cagnes-sur-Mer. Here as presented at the Panathenaia of Sculpture, Athens 1965. Published in Marmo. Rivista internazionale d’arte e d’architettura 4 (1966): 209.

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Figure 8.6 Henry Moore, Standing Figure, 1961. Bronze, height 284,5 cm. Here as presented at the Panathenaia of Sculpture, Athens, 1965. Published in Réalités 239/12 (1965): 101.

Greek tradition from antiquity to folklore art, which appeared in the 1930s. The quest for ‘Greekness’ dominated the inter-war discourses on art and signifed the need of contemporary Greek artists to participate in the European art scene. No wonder that it gained ground after the Second World War. In the late 1950s, with the support of a few art critics and art historians, some Greek artists turned to abstract expressions. One of them, Yiannis Spyropoulos (1912–1990), was awarded the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale of 1960, aided by Spiteris, who was then the Greek commissioner at the Biennale. He and other Greek art critics promoted Spyropoulos as equal to the French painters of art informel.43 After 1955, artists at various stages in their career adopted abstract expressions for their works.44

Art Historical Writing in Greece in the Early Cold War Period In the early 1950s Greek governments were frmly committed to the fght against communism. Artists who had been members of the Greek Communist Party were now political outlaws and had, therefore, to choose camps: stay faithful to their

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ideology and work outside the public sphere, leave for the Eastern bloc or for other Western countries tolerant towards the left, or succumb to the dominant ideology and act within the new system.45 The situation was the same for art critics and art historians. Politics played a signifcant role in the intense inter-war debates on contemporary Greek art and aesthetics. The liberal Prime Ministers Eleftherios Venizelos and Alexandros Papanastasiou personally and institutionally supported Greek modern art, which they regarded as an unmistakable sign of modernisation in society. The same notion was still at work during the early Cold War and, in general, a ‘Greek’ version of modern art was favoured by politicians. However, no direct state interventions can be traced. Contemporary art was left to private initiatives for its development and to art critics for its promotion in the European fora. On the other hand, as art historical writing on ancient and Byzantine art already had a tradition in the country, it shaped the discussions and preferences regarding the History of Medieval and of the More Recent Art of the West. Archaeologists and art critics in the 1930s were cosmopolitans, well-educated on theoretical discourses on art. Formalism was for them an invaluable tool for stylistically dating the artefacts they studied. They also favoured the same methods when writing about contemporary art production. Their familiarity with art theory is unquestionable. For example, Evangelidis who before the NTUA taught at the University of Thessaloniki, was the frst to introduce in Greece the work of Heinrich Wöllfin, Franz Wickhoff, and Alois Riegl.46 And another example: when Prevelakis indicated his preference for Oswald Spengler’s theory during his viva for a doctorate degree at the University of Thessaloniki, the examiners were very comfortable with discussing in depth his theoretical points and evaluating his dissertation.47 Whether as strict formalism—in the fashion of German art historical methodology—or following the French approach of ‘pure visuality,’ form was considered quintessential in the study of art in Greece in the 1950s and 1960s. Art history’s ‘classical’ approaches were followed almost throughout the Cold War period. Wöllfin was a favourite of many writers (Christos and Semni Karouzos, Bertos, and Kalligas, among others), Prevelakis was infuenced by Spengler and Henri Focillon48 and Christou by Pinder. Although the European theoreticians dealt with medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art, their methods were applied to the study of other periods as well. Evangelidis and Manolis Andronikos (1919–1992), for example, examined modern art movements (e.g. Expressionism and abstract art) while pointing at analogies with ancient Greek art and literature.49 The formalist approach to art historical hermeneutics reigned during the early Cold War period in Greece. The emphasis on the intrinsic value of art disconnected it from society and politics, and sensitive ideological issues were thus avoided. Modern art was coming for the frst time to the centre of the attention of art historians, surveyed under a Western prism, which excluded any Eastern bloc artists. Formalism was considered the most suitable methodology for approaching art without the dangers of suggesting political motives or intentions on behalf of the artists and writers. Sir Herbert Read’s (1893–1968) part-radical, part romantic-humanist thinking and, to a lesser extent, Clement Greenberg’s (1909–1994) formalist approaches provided solid, safe models for narrating at least the history of modern art. These principles formed a framework for narrating a linear history of modern art in Greece as they did in Western Europe and the United States.

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Leftist art critics and art historians in Cold War Greece self-censored their ideological preferences. Yiorgos Petris (nom de plume for Yiorgos Simos, 1916–1997), an important art critic and member of the editorial board of the Leftist literary journal Epitheorisi Technis (Art Review), had been a militant member of the Communist Party (Fig. 8.7). His reviews on contemporary Greek art, based on content criteria in the mid1950s, became more and more morphologically oriented after 1958.50 This turn from content to form should be attributed to his exposure to French Leftist literature and to the awkward role he had to play as a communist in reviewing abstract painting.51 The early Cold War discussions on which style should be promoted as the new postwar Greek art presents an interesting case. The inter-war linear narrative had strong roots and continued to be the basis of the post-war perception of national identity. Contemporary creation should have references to the age-long art tradition of Hellenism. The great majority of Greek authors favoured a modern idiom in which they could easily trace ‘Greekness,’ through elements perhaps indiscernible to non-Greek eyes: a balanced composition could refer to Classical art, the use of gold leaves for the background suggested connections to Byzantine art, bright colours and lack of depth could allude to folklore art, etc. They believed that abstract art was a passing

Figure 8.7 Cover of the frst issue of Epitheorisi Technis (Art Review), Christmas 1954.

162 Areti Adamopoulou folly and, in any case, not compatible with Greek ideals. Left-wing thinkers, as Petris, encouraged styles not totally abstract, an option that was not only due to their commitment to communist principles. Very few wrote in favour of abstraction and, when they did, they praised mainly the French École de Paris. Andronikos tried a more scholarly approach and argued that abstraction was an idea found in Plato’s writings. Among those writing on contemporary art, Prokopiou triumphed as the main and fully committed advocate of the Free World and, consequently, of Abstract Expressionism in the country. His is a unique case because of his post-war absolute adherence not to Europe, but to the United States. A former communist and a supporter of Metaxas’ totalitarian regime in the 1930s, Prokopiou completed in the 1950s his turn from a Marxist approach to a Wöllfinian type of interpretation. In 1951 he was invited by the US Department of State for a four-month fellowship in the United States. John E. Peurifoy (1907–1955), ambassador of the United States to Greece (1950–1953), personally intervened to secure this invitation, thus bypassing many well-established university professors and museum directors. For US agents Prokopiou seemed to be a much more promising candidate than any other French-oriented scholar.52 Prokopiou’s texts published during this visit, compiled ten years later in a book, lauded the American way of life. He wrote in amazement of what he encountered: people, cities, public spaces, political and ideological systems, thoughts, and behaviours (Fig. 8.8). Above all, he was impressed by the American art education system, Greek-American artists, and

Figure 8.8 Cover of Prokopiou’s book Aesthetics and Art in America, Athens 1961.

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abstract art. In Greece there was no interest in art produced in the United States until 1947.54 The local art scene was oriented towards European production. Prokopiou supported abstract art in every way. As one of the founders and directors of Nees Morphes (New Forms) Gallery in Athens in 1959 and editor of an art journal with the same title (1962–1963), he promoted mostly abstract artists, Greeks as well as Greek-Americans. The climate he cultivated did not change Greece’s art scene in spectacular ways. Despite the recent developments, the art public in Greece was still relatively small, the art market anaemic; the artists were more interested in retaining an ‘aroma’ of Greek tradition in their works, and theoretical debates centred on Greek contemporary art creation and national (and European) identity. 53

Conclusion A good deal has been written about the Cold War cultural politics in regard to the United States and Europe. Revisionists and post-revisionists have documented the ways in which certain styles were promoted, by which institutions or individuals, and for what purposes. As in many other cases, it is diffcult to conclude to what extent foreign policies have shaped the post-war art orientation in Greece. French, British, and American institutions fought for the people’s minds and hearts. Their presence in Greece certainly helped shape the new canon of contemporary art and introduced new lifestyles and cultural values. However, it was the local intelligentsia that played the most important role. Members of the intellectual elite, despite their political beliefs, frmly believed that this was the ideal time for contemporary Greece to become a co-producer of European culture. As Athens was an ally of the West but lacked most of its art institutions, it fought to establish them and to survive in its new political environment. It was in these circumstances that art history appeared as a distinct academic discipline in Greece. In fact, if art history existed in the country before as archaeology, this was the time when art history’s subject changed: it shifted from antiquity and Byzantium to European art since the Renaissance. Its scope moved away from artworks created within Classical Greece’s cultural borders to objects rarely seen in Greece but also to more or less contemporary creations. Situated on the edge of the Iron Curtain, Greek scholars turned to the West as the legitimate source of knowledge and introduced a discipline with a new name, one that was devoted to studying the art of their new cultural alliances and their own, new self, created in the Cold War environment.

Notes 1. The transliteration of Greek terms, names, and titles follows the system used in the publications of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, unless otherwise established in existing literature of art. All excerpts of Greek texts are translated by the author. For an introduction to all aspects of the history of the years after 1945 see: Christos Chatziiosiph, ed., Istoria tis Elladas tou eikostou aiona, Vol. D (D1 and D2) (Athens: Vivliorama, 2009); Evangelos Kophos, ed., Istoria tou ellinikou ethnous, Vol. 16 (Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon, 2000). 2. Thanasis D. Sfkas, “Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations Commission of Investigation in Greece, January–May 1947,” Contemporary European History 2, no. 3 (1993): 244–245. 3. Nikos Alivizatos, Oi politikoi thesmoi se krisi, 1922–1974: opseis tis ellinikis empireias (Athens: Themelio, 1983). John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Appraisal of Postwar American National Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Yiannis Stephanidis, Apo ton Emphylio ston Psychro Polemo (Athens: Proskinio, 1999), 27–38. On the Greek Civil War and on the impact it had on Greek society there is an extensive bibliography, in Greek and English. Konstantina Botsiou, “The Interference Between Politics and Culture in Greece,” in The Americanization of Europe, ed. Alexander Stephan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 279. For a detailed analysis of the American intervention in Greece during the period 1944–1953, see Yiorgos Stathakis, To dogma Truman kai to Schedio Marshall. I istoria tis amerikanikis voitheias stin Ellada (Athens: Vivliorama, 2004). Elli Scopetea, “The Balkans and the Notion of the Crossroads Between East and West,” in Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions, and Cultural Encounters Since the Enlightenment, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 171–172; Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 17–22; Deborah Harlan, “Travel, Pictures, and a Victorian Gentleman in Greece,” Hesperia 78, no. 3 (2009): 422–424. The building of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens was founded in 1866 and opened to the public in 1874. The Greek Archaeological Service was established in 1836 and the Archaeological Society of Athens in 1837. The School for the Arts (which was to become the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1930) was founded also in 1837. The University of Athens was founded in 1837. It comprised four schools, one of which was the Philosophy School, where the German classical philologist/archaeologist Ludwig Ross (1806–1859) held the frst chair of archaeology in Greece. This early appointment (he taught during the years 1837–1843) testifes to the serious concern of the state to promote the study of antiquity at the University. See: Hans Rupprecht Goette, Olga Palagia, eds., Ludwig Ross und Griechenland. Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums, Athen, 2.-3. Oktober 2002 (Rahden, Westfalen: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2005). For the foundation and history of all foreign Archaeological Schools in Greece, see: Elena Korka, Maria Xanthopoulou and Eleni Konstantinidi-Syvridi, eds., Foreign Archaeological Schools in Greece: 160 Years (Athens: Melissa, 2005). Marina Lampraki-Plaka, “Anotati Scholi Kalon Technon. 150 chronia zois,” in Anotati Scholi Kalon Technon. Ekaton peninta chronia, 1837–1987 (Athens: Athens School of Fine Arts, 1990), 13. See also: Eleonora Vratskidou, “Archaioloyia kai Istoria tis Technis stin Ellada ton 19o aiona (I),” Istoria tis Technis 1 (2013): 10–45. Anna Malama, “O kritikos logos tou Zacharia Papantoniou,” in I istoria tis technis stin Ellada, eds. Evyenios Matthiopoulos and Nicos Hadjinicolaou (Irakleio: Crete University Press, 2003), 177–178. All data come from the ASFA website. Prevelakis was a holder of a doctorate degree, which was conferred to him by the Philosophy School of the University of Thessaloniki in 1935: AUTh, Minutes, C, 263, 31 May 1935. On Prevelakis’ studies in Paris and on the questionable academic credentials he acquired there, see: Titina Kornezou, “Oi spoudes tou Panteli Prevelaki sto Parisi (1930–33),” Mnimon 30 (2009): 263–283. On the scholarly credentials of art critics in the inter-war period and on the frst holders of Chairs of art history see: Antonis Kotidis, Monternismos kai ‘paradosi’ stin elliniki techni tou mesopolemou (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 1993), 48. Law 908, OGG, A416/ 20 October 1937. Decree “Peri kyroseos tou eidikou kanonismou tis didaskalias ton theoritikon kai istorikon mathimaton en ti Anotati Scholi Kalon Technon,” OGG, A31/24 January 1939. Article 4, paragraphs 1 and 5, Law 908/1937. Law 3341, OGG, A154/ 22 June 1925. Presidential Decree “Peri orismou taktikon kai ektakton edron tis Philosophikis Scholis tou Panepistimiou Thessalonikis,” OGG, A353/ 7 October 1926. AUTh, Minutes, A, 1, 23 November 1926. Dimitrios Evangelidis (during the period 1930–1932) and Manolis Andronikos (during the period 1957–1965) were the professors who taught history of art, along with Byzantine and Classical archaeology respectively. Evangelidis, in particular, was appointed in 1932 Professor of Byzantine Art and taught ancient Greek, Byzantine, and History of the More Recent Art (‘neoteri techni’). In the CV he submitted as a candidate for this

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

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position, he stated his competence not only in teaching Byzantine art but also general art (‘katholou techni,’ by which he meant that he could present survey courses on all periods of European—Greek included—art and that he could theorise on art as an aesthetic phenomenon). AUTh Archive, School of Philosophy, File Λ-2–6, 1926–1940. In the inter-war period for the frst time several archaeologists (e.g. Nikos Bertos, Dimitrios Evangelidis, Marinos Kalligas, Manolis Chatzidakis, Christos Karouzos, etc.) expressed a keen interest for the European history of art and promoted it to the Greek public by delivering open lectures and publishing articles in the press. A Royal Decree (“Peri tropopoiiseos tou organismou tis Archaioloyikis Etaireias,” OGG, A35, 13 February 1918) established a School for Art History within the frame of the Archaeological Society at Athens, which, however offered lectures on Classical and Byzantine art. AUTh, Minutes, 21/3/1963–11/2/1966, 859, 5 April 1963. Note that until today, art history was not an autonomous orientation leading to a bachelor’s degree at the University of Thessaloniki. AUTh, Minutes, 21/3/1963–11/2/1966, 899, 19 November 1964. AUTh, Minutes, 21/3/1963–11/2/1966, 921, 1 April 1965. Information on his life and work is in Euthymia Yeoryiadou-Kountoura and Kotidis Antonis, eds., Chrysanthos Christou. Aphieroma (Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2006). Euthymia Yeoryiadou-Kountoura, “Istoria tis technis,” in Philosophiki Scholi Thessalonikis. Ta prota 75 chronia (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2000), 130. Michalis Tiverios, “Archaioloyikes spoudes,” in Philosophiki Scholi Thessalonikis, 121. Stathis Eustathiadis and Aikaterini Douka-Kampitoglou, “Anglikes spoudes: Glossa, logotechnia, politismos,” in Philosophiki Scholi Thessalonikis, 129. I thank Professor Michael Fotiadis for this information. To educate the public in the new cultural identity was intensely discussed in the 1950s, even more so in the 1960s. Areti Adamopoulou, “Ta Panathinaia glyptikis tou 1965,” Dodoni 33 (2004): 269–294. Tonis Spiteris, “I pempti Panellinios,” Zygos, 19–20 (1957): 4. On scholarships for Greek citizens during the 1940s see: Nikolas Manitakis, “Xenes kratikes ypotrophies. Politistiki propaganda stin Ellada tou Emphyliou,” in Chatziiosiph, Istoria tis Elladas, Vol. D2, 133–157. For the frst post-war scholars in Paris see: Nelly Andrikopoulou, To taxidi tou Mataroa, 1945 (Athens: Estia, 2007). For anti-Americanism in France see: Richard Golsan, “From French Anti-Americanism and Americanization to the ‘American Enemy’?” in Stephan, The Americanization of Europe, 44–46. The United States Information Agency (USIA) was founded in 1953 and abolished in 1999. It was the main instrument of US cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Jack Masey, Conway Morgan, Cold War Confrontations. US Exhibitions and Their Role in the Cultural Cold War (Baden: Lars Müller, 2008). For the USIS in Athens see: Ioannis Stefanidis, “Telling America’s Story: US Propaganda Operations and Greek Public Reactions,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 30, no. 1 (2004), 50–54. Wilson Dizard, The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1961), 97. Stefanidis, “Telling America’s Story,” 53–57. Stratis Bournazos, “To kratos ton ethnikophronon,” in Istoria tis Elladas tou eikostou aiona, ed. Christos Chatziiosiph, D2, 9–49. See for example: Hesperia 82, no. 1 (2013): Special Issue: Philhellenism, Philanthropy, or Political Convenience? American Archaeology in Greece. Stephen V. Tracy, “American School of Classical Studies at Athens,” in Foreign Archaeological Schools in Greece, eds. Korka et al., 18–29. John Camp, The Athenian Agora: Excavations in the Heart of Classical Athens (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986). Matoula Scaltsa, “Athinaikes aithouses technis apo ti dekaetia tou ’20 os ti dekaetia tou ’70,” in Aithouses technis stin Ellada, ed. Matoula Scaltsa (Athens: Apopsi, 1989), 26, 28, 38–40, 42. Botsiou, “The Interference,” 286–287. Evyenios Matthiopoulos, “I proslipsi tis aphirimenis technis stin Ellada (1945–1960) sto pedio tis kritikis tis technis,” in Prosengiseis tis kallitechnikis dimiouryias apo tin Anayennisi eos tis meres mas, ed. Nikos Daskalothanasis (Athens: Nefeli, 2008), 71–82. Lampros Flitouris, “I galliki politistiki parousia stin Ellada ti dekaetia tou 1940,” Istor 14 (2005): 151–177. Lampros Flitouris, “D’un

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

‘modèle français’ de diplomatie culturelle à l’invasion de l’ ‘american life’. Le cas grec d’après guerre,” in Les relations internationales au vingtième siècle. De la diplomatie culturelle à l’acculturation, eds. Anne Dulphy et al. (Brussels: Lang, 2010), 149–162. For an overview of the exhibitions staged in Athens in the 1950s see Matthiopoulos, “I proslipsi,” 78–83. Nikos Zias, “Technokritiki kai istoria tis technis stin Ellada,” in I istoria tis technis stin Ellada, eds. Matthiopoulos et al., 296–298. The AICA-Hellas website contains information on the Association’s history. Scaltsa, “Athinaikes aithouses,” 50–51. Scaltsa, “Athinaikes aithouses,” 32–33. Scaltsa, “Athinaikes aithouses,” 27–43. The frst such exhibition, L’Europe humaniste (Humanist Europe), was staged in Brussels in 1954. From then on, every one or two years a new art exhibition was organised in a different European city, being the product of intellectual, institutional, and governmental collaboration among different states. There followed exhibitions on Mannerism (Amsterdam, 1954–1955), 17th-Century Art (Rome, 1956–1957), Rococo (Munich, 1958), Romanticism (London, 1959), Art Nouveau and Early Modern Art (Paris, 1960–1961), Romanesque Art (Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela, 1961), and European art around 1400 (Vienna, 1962). Manolis Chatzidakis, ed., Byzantine Art. An European Art (Athens: Offce of the Minister to the Prime Minister of the Greek Government, 1964), 11. For a detailed account of the event see Adamopoulou, “Ta Panathinaia,” 269–294. See for example, Angelos Prokopiou, “O kyvismos kai i aphirimeni techni sti Biennale,” I Kathimerini, 24 July 1960. E.g. Alekos Kontopoulos (1904–1975), Yiannis Moralis (1916–2009), Yiorgos Zoggolopoulos (1903–2004), Klearchos Loukopoulos (1908–1995), Christos Lefakis (1906–1968), Achilleas Apergis (1909–1986), Vaso Kyriaki (1937), Nikos Kessanlis (1930–2004), Vlassis Kaniaris (1928–2011). Matthiopoulos, “I proslipsi,” 69. Greek artists followed the Parisian and not the American trends of abstract art. Evyenios Matthiopoulos, “Oi eikastikes technes stin Ellada ta chronia 1945–1952,” in Istoria tis Elladas tou eikostou aiona, ed. Christos Chatziiosiph, 200–208. Dimitrios Evangelidis, Eisagoyi stin istoria tis technis: Enarktirios logos (1 Ianouariou 1930) (Athens: Dimitrakos, 1931), 19, 23–24. Panayiotis Bikas, “O theoritikos kai kritikos logos tou Dimitriou Evangelidi. I proslipsi tis morpholoyikis theorias stin Ellada,” in I istoria tis technis stin Ellada, eds. Matthiopoulos et al., 198. AUTh, Minutes, C, 260, 2 May 1935, especially 12. Ioanna Goniotaki, “I ennoia tis Anayennisis sto ergo tou Panteli Prevelaki,” in I istoria tis technis stin Ellada, eds. Matthiopoulos et al., 209–210, 219, 234. Evangelidis, Eisagoyi, 23. Manolis Andronikos, O Platon kai i techni (Athens: Nefeli, 1986, 1st edition: Thessaloniki, 1952). Evyenios Matthiopoulos, “Eisagoyi,” in Yiorgos Petris, Epitheorisi Technis, ed. Evyenios Matthiopoulos (Athens, Irakleio: AICA Hellas and Crete University Press, 2008), 20. Matthiopoulos, “Eisagoyi,” 32–41, 59–60. Matthiopoulos, “I proslipsi,” 85. Angelos Prokopiou, Aisthitiki kai techni stin Ameriki (Athens: Nees Morphes, 1961), 111–112, 119–127, 160–163, 183–195. Matthiopoulos, “I proslipsi,” 70–71.

9

Cold War Art Historiography Some Observations on an Interdisciplinary Approach Through the Social Sciences Nancy Jachec

In Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (2000), a stocktaking of Cold War historiography from its origins just after the Second World War, Odd Arne Westad marked the 1990s as seeing the emergence of a “new Cold War history.”1 A clear departure from the foreign policy and international relations-based studies of previous generations, he described this tentative new history as the “culmination” of the efforts begun in the 1980s to make Cold War history a truly “international history, rather than an outgrowth of the history of American foreign relations.”2 Fuelled by the opening of archives in Europe’s formerly socialist countries, the new Cold War history is “multiarchival in research and multipolar in analysis, and, in the cases of some of its best practitioners,” Westad observed, “multicultural in its ability to understand different and sometimes opposing mindsets.”3 Noting problems with certain methodological approaches to explaining historical agency at both individual and collective levels, he also observed that the most recent generation of writers of Cold War history, who tended to view the confict as “more about ideas and beliefs than about anything else,” were increasingly using words like “‘culture’ and ‘ideology’ . . . often, it is clear, without much thought being given to how they are used and which implications their use is having for our studies in general.”4 Consequently, he advised using such terms with caution and with limited objectives in mind.5 As Westad anticipated back in 2000, over the past two decades a body of literature has grown up around Cold War culture in Europe, in which studies specifcally on the visual arts have been appearing for the past eight to ten years.6 They are of a high standard. Focusing largely on Cold War art in Europe’s then-socialist countries and informed by some of the theoretical approaches more recently developed in the humanities disciplines, particularly memory and identity studies, they are highly sensitive to the historical context and to the institutions and policies informing the creation and dissemination of works of art. Maybe inevitably, this scholarship has built on the considerable body of work that has already been done on the political uses of American Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War, a subject that has been attracting scholarly attention for more than forty years. In the 1970s and 1980s, the frst wave of these studies took the form of a revisionist critique of the then-standard account of Abstract Expressionism’s so-called triumph in Western Europe, arguing instead that the success of American gesture painting abroad was actually a demonstration of aggressive American expansionism; this was followed by a second fowering of that discussion between 1998 and 2000.7 Thus, the frst wave appeared at more or less the same time as the broader revisionist movement within Cold War historiography, which, to quote Westad, also construed the Cold War as foremost “an American

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effort to force its will (and its economic system) upon a reluctant world.”8 In both cases, this has been followed by a more recent concern with Europe and its former colonies as participants in the cultural dimensions of the confict. If, as this suggests, Cold War art historiography is following Westad’s trajectory for Cold War historiography as a whole, it is also facing questions over how the subject has been and should be approached. While historians have been in disagreement over how best to approach the Cold War, hence the need for books like Reviewing the Cold War, the different approaches that have been taken to the history of art have also been the subject of discussion amongst art historians. Over the period that has seen the emergence of the new Cold War history a number of assessments of the discipline have been made, and there are now so many that this seems to be a continuous process. While there are too many to digest here, one thing that seems to unite them, however, is an agreement that the 1970s marked a watershed in the practice of art history. As Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk have summarised in their overview, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (2006), in that decade there was a turning away from connoisseurship towards an acceptance that art history cannot “be practised from a neutral, objective stance,” that artworks are inevitably “determined by their contexts, whether that be political or social.”9 Although this new orientation, they have told us, was led by Marxist and social historians of art, it is the latter who have more recently demonstrated an interest in the “historical agency” of culture.10 In other words, the social historians of art are now concerned with how culture has acted or is capable of acting in a broader social and political landscape. Taking this interest one step further, Beáta Hock, in her and Anu Allas’ Globalizing East European Art Histories (2018), the most recent addition to this body of stocktaking literature, has called for an actual integration of “art historical topics into the relevant established debates of the broader historical scholarship.”11 Although she does not see interdisciplinary research as the only way of achieving this integration,12 implicit in her observation is acknowledgement of the lack of art history’s involvement with other historical disciplines, an observation that is borne out by the still limited presence of work by art historians in the cultural history anthologies brought to us by the new Cold War history. Hock is absolutely clear about the nature of her and Allas’ project as an outcome of the fall of communism in Europe and the consequent deluge of Western methodologies into former socialist states since 1989, which stimulated the discipline of art history in those countries but also offered grounds for critique.13 Criticisms have been targeted, not least, at the ‘vertical’ canon of taste of the Euro-American tradition, which, she argues, has essentially overlooked Central and Eastern Europe in its own recent efforts to accommodate a rapidly globalising discipline.14 Art from Europe’s formerly socialist countries should be the subject of heightened scholarly interest, however, if for no other reason than the increasing number of discussions recently in the press about the likelihood of a new Cold War.15 Given the resurgence of widespread disaffection in international relations, an understanding of how the visual arts were used across Europe and elsewhere around the world for political and social ends has heightened importance once again. Whether art was used as a form of national or international propaganda by politicians, civil servants, and their consultants within highly centralised regimes, or within democratic institutions, for example; or by complicit, disengaged, and dissident artists alike, we need to know how and to what effect it was used. And, if the collapse of communism in Europe has given a substantial impetus to the rise of the new Cold War history through the opening of archives there,

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this, combined with the declassifcation of collections in the West, has made a wealth of documents available to art historians, just as much as it has to historians in other disciplines. Among other things, these documents concern exchange programmes for art and artists, travelling fne art exhibitions, and cultural policy discussions within relevant government bodies in the East and in the West on domestic and international cultural matters, as well as personal correspondence by a whole range of historical actors involved. Such primary source material can reveal personal, institutional, and state cultural objectives; it can also uncover how those objectives were pursued and to what end. Research of this nature is inherently interdisciplinary, in my view. For one of the implications of incorporating such source material into art historical research, beyond enabling art historians to assess the actual political capacity of fne art in specifc historical situations, is that the resulting studies can be at least compatible, if not actually integrated with, other practices within Cold War historiography, not least, the histories of foreign policy and international relations. Art history’s entering into dialogue with the discipline of Cold War historical studies in a larger sense actually matters, because during the Cold War the fne arts were regularly used as a means of pursuing policy goals—and of shaping opinion—far beyond the confnes of the art world. As I argued in my book on the Venice Biennale, the Biennale’s promotion of the Informel during the frst phase of the Cold War was a demonstration of Europe’s own, as opposed to American-dictated, participation in that confict, using the exhibition as a diplomatic site for furthering the cause of Western European integration.16 Yet it was equally an example of the deployment of cultural propaganda by—and above all—for intellectuals, a social group that, in certain situations, had considerable political power during the Cold War. But we will return to this further on. Because any given topic requires a bespoke methodological approach depending on what the researcher wants to know about it, the primary sources available to him/ her, and the analytical or interpretive methods that both the sources and research objectives require, it is unhelpful to make general recommendations about how to write about the visual arts and the Cold War through an interdisciplinary approach. Equally, given that I have been writing about Cold War cultural, political, and intellectual history for thirty years now, to advocate my own approach could be seen as blinkered or self-serving. And, as I have already noted about the art historical studies that have been appearing in anthologies of Cold War culture, some excellent work has been produced through means that are different from the ones that I use. Many of those studies have been infuenced by ideas from the theoretical humanities, whereas I have been infuenced more by methodologies found in the social sciences.17 Consequently, what follows is a personal account of my experience in conducting research at the intersections of cultural and political history using research techniques more commonly used in the social sciences and of what I’ve found useful about them and why. I started writing about Cold War art and politics in 1988, as a doctoral student. The focus of my research at that time was on American Abstract Expressionism, and I was trying to determine why artists, critics, and curators alike had attached interpretations to these works that were so deeply rooted in philosophical concepts and terms taken, above all, from phenomenology and from French existentialism. Because of the crossover with philosophy, I felt from the outset that I was researching something that was foremost a history of ideas. Even when looking at institutions—in particular, those

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behind the publicly and privately sponsored travelling exhibitions which promoted Abstract Expressionism abroad as a movement that, via the language of existentialism, shared the international preoccupations of its times—I still perceived my work as such, as a history of ideas that included international political history and art history as integral parts. In other words, it seemed to me that the philosophical, the critical, and the political discussions around Abstract Expressionism were all related within the history of ideas. The challenge was to fnd out how and why these connections were made—and why so deliberately—in the case of Abstract Expressionism’s international career in the big travelling exhibitions of the late 1950s. In their refections on the recent resurgence in popularity of the history of ideas, the historians Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn have described that discipline as theoretically eclectic, as a discipline in which “[e]veryone cultivates his or her private garden as if writing history were a largely personal task.”18 Although they put together the anthology Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (2014) in order to “refect on this extraordinary reversal [of the discipline’s fortunes] and to chart future directions in the feld,” they ultimately value its eclecticism as an “opportunity, which offers to intellectual historians the prospect of enriching their own feld and the broader practice of history through novel openings and exchange.”19 In other words, its eclecticism offers the possibility of dialogue with other disciplines. It also allows for an interdisciplinary approach within the history of ideas itself. “There is no reason,” McMahon writes, elsewhere in the anthology: why historians of ideas can’t be social, following ideas outward wherever they were lived, investigating how they took shape institutionally, and how they were disseminated, diffused, and produced.20 McMahon anticipates that the following of “the migration of ideas across multiple domains—if only within the provinces of high culture alone” may well reveal, among other things, similarities and commonalities among them.21 This could have a revitalising effect, he observes, in the current climate, where “disciplines and discourses are most often confgured as distinct, and when historians are trained to go in search of alterity, discontinuity, and difference rather than to seek common ground.”22 McMahon’s expansion of the history of ideas from a preoccupation with the “work of professional philosophers”23 to following the career of ideas within different social spheres pretty much describes what I had been doing in my early work on Abstract Expressionism and in my subsequent work as a writer of Cold War intellectual history: following ideas across multiple domains and looking for intersections and common ground between them. Yet, in order to work across multiple disciplines, a degree of competence in each of them is essential, and McMahon, noting that “there are limits to what any one person can do,” has advised the abandonment of “the noble dream of exhaustive inquiry in the hope that we may gain in broad perspective what is lost in fne-grain detail.”24 Although, as McMahon has suggested, working across several disciplines does pose challenges, in my view, the methodological approaches that I used enabled me to preserve the fne-grained detail within the narratives I was trying to write. My preferred methodologies—institutional history, collective biography, and what has emerged in sociology as network theory or, as I prefer to call it, network analysis—have allowed me to keep the focus of my work tightly on individuals and their activities either on their own or within groups or institutions. This has had the

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additional beneft of shedding light on the question of agency that Westad found to be elusive in contemporary Cold War histories.25 If these methodologies have enabled me to untangle the activities and achievements of these historical players, I think that institutional history, collective biography, and network analysis are particularly well suited for Cold War studies because the Cold War, especially in the early years, was an era of institutions and of exchanges. Within ffteen years of the conclusion of the Second World War, many of the international and global institutions that are still here today were established, in part, in response to the polarising effect of that confict. They were set up by a range of historical actors, from the highest level government offcials, to museum curators, to intellectuals. These people could have diametrically opposed objectives, from consolidating international powers into defensive blocs, to establishing dialogue between them in order to break those blocs down. The institutions they created appeared in many domains, from culture (the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the European Centre for Culture, the European Society of Culture, the World Peace Council), to defence (the EDC, NATO, SEATO, the WEU, the Warsaw Pact), to economics (the EEC, the Mont Pèlerin Society), to human rights and international law (the Council of Europe, the UN and its numerous tributaries and affliates, including UNESCO), to name only some of the most salient ones. In the visual arts, the Venice Biennale resumed operations in 1948 after a brief suspension during the war and, I have argued, substantially reoriented its objectives to supporting the nascent European Union and reestablishing Italy as part of the European community after its experiment with fascism and to overcoming its isolated status as a former axis country.26 Charlotte Klonk’s work on Documenta (Kassel, Germany, est 1955) has shown that it was set up with similar aims in mind.27 The Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA, International Association of Art Critics) was also established in 1949/1950 with the aim of, in its own words, “developing international cooperation in the felds of artistic creation, dissemination and cultural development.”28 It was recognised by UNESCO in 1951. As an historian of the Cold War, institutions have always featured in my work, even when, as in the case of my early work on Abstract Expressionism, what I was writing wasn’t institutional history per se. In untangling their histories, what they set out to do, and what they actually achieved, the archival material held by them has proved to be readily available, particularly in Europe. Procès-verbaux, a typed record of meetings held by an institution’s administrative, executive, and other bodies, contain highly detailed accounts of those bodies’ objectives, internal assessments of their programmes, the obstacles they perceived, and often informal digests of relevant discussions their members may have had outside of meetings. Something between minutes and a report, these records are working papers and consequently are often frank and contain disagreements. Because of this, they can be very useful in giving the historian insight into what key members within an institution actually thought about its activities and how they may have tried to shape them. Such documents can also reveal the motives behind curatorial decisions, behind the travel itineraries of exhibitions, and similar details that seldom appear in offcial publications. In short, they show the inner workings of an institution. Procès-verbaux also capture the views of individuals and of groups and the decisions they made, and this brings us to collective biography. Although the artists featuring in galleries and in publications were more transient, editorial boards and directive committees tended to have more stable memberships, giving organisations, institutions, and other bodies their identity and their purpose. These groups of individuals decided which artists should be given shows, and they sometimes selected curators

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and catalogue essayists. They were often responsible for securing funding from the national government and therefore were also responsible for ensuring that their exhibitions were, at least ostensibly, in step with the latter’s cultural policy objectives when necessary. Directive committees typically contained a range of people, including artists, critics, curators, academics, and often politicians, usually from the ministry of culture or education. If the procès-verbaux and similar documentation capture how they acted as a group, individual biography is also invaluable in reconstructing a fgure’s values, views, objectives, and independent activities in relation to his/ her institution. Correspondence, both institutional and private, can illuminate his/ her contributions to the development of an institution and can shed light on the ideas that he/she brought to it and on how those ideas fared within the latter. Being able to track the dissemination of ideas through multiple domains—between people and within and between institutions and beyond, to their intended audiences and even into the sphere of government—is important, as it can give us some idea of their actual impact. Commenting on the value of ‘ideas-based’ analysis, or ‘discursive institutionalism’ in analysing the connection between domestic and international politics, for example, the Cold War historian and Soviet specialist Mark Kramer has noted that “[a]dvocates of this approach argue that ideas, mediated through domestic institutions and individual agents, decisively affect international outcomes. Ideas-based analysis,” he continues: is not necessarily incompatible with other ways of conceptualizing international change, but proponents contend that the other approaches omit a key explanatory variable, namely ideas. . . . Although the infuence of ideas is often impeded by institutional rigidity and the preconceptions of top offcials, analysts who emphasize the importance of ideas claim that at certain times, especially after the advent of new leaders or during periods of rapid international change, windows of opportunity open for “policy entrepreneurs” and “epistemic communities” to put forth innovative ideas. Policy entrepreneurs are individuals, both inside and outside the government, who propose and develop ideas for high-ranking offcials. Epistemic communities are national and transnational groups of specialists and professionals with a shared body of expertise.29 Although Kramer excluded ideas about culture from the sphere of public policymaking,30 cultural “policy entrepreneurs,” to use the terminology he gives us here, were nonetheless found within governments certainly in Europe’s socialist countries and in decolonising territories, and within ministries of culture in Western Europe. As such, they were important bridges between art and politics, often negotiating the relationship between the two. Many of these individuals wore multiple hats—it was common for a minister of culture to also hold a university post in a humanities discipline—and these people in particular were invaluable as an interface between the cultural and political spheres. In some instances, they challenged the government with fresh ideas, and in others they enabled the manipulation of culture by political interests. Not a huge amount of work has been done on these fgures that moved between the cultural and political spheres. In my own work I have referred to them as politico-intellectuals, describing them as: often politicians from a background in the humanities, but also fgures from academia, or from the world of arts and letters who held posts within or advised

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government ministries (typically for culture, information or foreign affairs)—and who were active within both national and international governmental institutions.31 More commonly found, and at higher levels, in the governments of Europe’s communist countries and in those of decolonising territories and emerging nations, they were “often capable of directly infuencing the national and international policies of their governments.”32 They also fgured in Western European ministries of culture and of foreign affairs, where they were crucial in securing government funding for the arts sector.33 In other words, if in the East they more typically injected new ideas into the upper echelons of political power, in the West, although they too helped with the spread of art and ideas, they worked in a cultural sector that was generally less closely regulated by the government both administratively and with regard to the contents of exhibitions. The link between the political and cultural spheres was therefore often— but not always—less binding and less direct. Equally, the directive committees of the institutions responsible for organising and circulating exhibitions internationally are the embodiment of the epistemic community, if we choose to use this terminology. They played a key role in enabling the circulation of visual arts exhibitions and shaping their contents and presentation. Using terms like ‘policy entrepreneurs,’ ‘politico-intellectuals,’ and ‘epistemic communities’ brings research in the humanities closer to the social sciences—in which network theory arose—and has recently come to feature in political and economic histories of Cold War Europe. In their introduction to The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity 1950–1972 (2009), Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht, and Morten Rasmussen have written the clearest and most persuasive argument I have come across on behalf of network theory, which readily lends itself as an approach to Cold War historiography in a broad sense and, crucially, has plenty of scope for application in the arts and the humanities disciplines. Remarking about the limitations of the current historiography of Western European integration that, in their view, conceives of the “history of the EU as merely one long series of national policy decisions and inter-state treaty negotiations” by leaders and foreign ministries, they have attacked it as “conceptually underdeveloped and methodologically weak.”34 What it lacks, in their view, is attentiveness to broader, transnational political society, to the “domestic political contestation of aims and objectives by political parties, socio-economic interest groups and other democratic actors” brought to bear on the policies brokered at the state and interstate level.35 In other words, it offers a one-dimensional history from above, which misses out on both the input from other interested parties in shaping those decisions and the reception of policy decisions and how it played out in wider society. This suggests, although they did not mention it directly, that this standard history from above lacks an account of agency. Against the prevailing approach to the history of European integration, they argue that the advantage of network theory is that it includes the “formalized and highly informal,” taking in “political parties, interest groups, policy experts, journalists and other actors with an interest, and a stake in, utilizing the new supranational political space for advancing their ideas and material interests . . . below the supranational level.”36 “Networks have played a crucial role,” they continue: in shaping what Keith Middlemas frst called the “informal politics” of European integration: from establishing recruitment methods for supranational institutions,

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Nancy Jachec to forming guiding integration ideas, infuencing policy-making cultures and developing socialization patterns. Paradoxically, contemporary historians of European integration have largely ignored this transnational dimension . . . precisely at a time when modern historians have begun to rediscover this same dimension in an attempt to conceptualize cross-border networks, communication and cultural and policy transfer during national integration and proto-globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century. Transnational networking and communication were in fact much more intense in Western Europe after 1945 compared to the nineteenth century.37

They conclude that the engagement of contemporary historians with the methodology of “social scientists, especially political scientists,” namely network theory and institutional history, will yield conceptually sophisticated, empirically based research with “strong transnational and supranational dimensions.”38 Those dimensions had already been a feature of social scientifc research for more than a decade, they have observed, and by drawing methodologically from the social sciences, historians can equip themselves with the “heuristic tools” that, among other things, will “show causal links in a more analytical and less descriptive research mode,” in which historical processes are contextualised in the formation of “dense political and social links and bonds across borders.”39 Cautioning that the use of these methodologies should be “strictly pragmatic,” they have advised an “inductive research process that focuses on the careful documentation, description and explanation of historical processes.”40 This is because an inductive approach permits irregular and accidental events into the historical narrative, as opposed to relying on general patterns or on “grand theory.”41 Kaiser, Leucht, and Rasmussen have valued institutional history and network theory because they allow for “the complexities of the social world,” driven by multiple causes and motivated by individual or multiple actors.42 Furthermore, the focus on biography that this suggests, both individual and collective, allows us to get at the problem of agency. This is because individuals lie at the heart of networks. Whether through their own or collective actions, they are the ones who give groups, organisations, and institutions their agency, within or against the limitations those bodies impose or through what those bodies were intentionally designed to do. It is interesting to note that Kaiser, Leucht, and Rasmussen’s recommended approach addresses the hopes expressed by Westad back in 2000 for a new approach to Cold War history that is sensitive to the differences among the “groups and individuals” who tended to “think and behave differently depending on their upbringing, their schooling, and the values they have acquired through interacting within social groups.”43 In other words, he appears to have been looking forward to a greater emphasis on biography and collective biography in historical accounts of the confict. Art historiography during the Cold War, whether we defne the latter specifcally as an ideological confict spanning from 1945 to 1991 or as a period which included many developments that were concurrent with, rather than an intrinsic part of, that confict—for example, European reconstruction or the economic miracle and the rise of consumer society in Europe—is, in my view, inevitably interdisciplinary. It is, in the case of the frst defnition, about art and ideology, art and politics. Looking at the arguments of McMahon and Moyn and of Kaiser,

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Leucht, and Rasmussen, an interdisciplinary approach to Cold War historiography appears to be an increasingly widespread desire across various disciplines.44 It was anticipated by Westad, who understood Reviewing the Cold War as “an early attempt at showing the value of an interdisciplinary discourse about the character and development” of the Cold War, encouraging “cooperation” and “open forms of scholarship.”45 Given that during the Cold War individuals concerned with art and culture, for example critics, curators, and museum directors, tended to be involved with a number of institutions, not all of which were confned to the cultural sector, Cold War art history lends itself to an interdisciplinary approach. For it was often through these historical agents that ideas were circulated between institutions, collaborations were formed, and new organisations and events, both public and private, were initiated, across different sectors. Collective biography, institutional history, and network analysis can enable researchers to reconstruct and evaluate their activities. Yet I also think that network analysis lends itself to art historical studies more traditionally defned, as is likely to be effective in tracing the career of a specifc object within the institutions that used it, for any number of reasons, within the Cold War confict. The great strength of these approaches, at least in my view, is that they can give researchers an idea of what individuals and institutions actually achieved. Correspondence, procès-verbaux, interim reports, annual reviews conducted by institutions, oral histories, and also intelligence reports can provide a great deal of insight on the effectiveness, perceived or otherwise, of various cultural programmes and events, often giving detailed evidence and rationales. Although there is, as mentioned earlier, disagreement as to whether we are now entering a second Cold War, it is undeniable that there is now a rising tide of nationalism in Europe and elsewhere. Bringing analytical tools from the social sciences to bear on the role of art in the Cold War can give us valuable insight into how, in a time of increased isolationism and polarisation, it was used to build international solidarity and to broach and maintain transnational dialogue and through culture when political relations between countries were breaking down. In other words, the fne-grained analysis these techniques can produce can give us a clearer idea of what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Notes 1. Odd Arne Westad, “Introduction: Reviewing the Cold War,” in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: F. Cass, 2000), 4–5. A renowned international historian, Westad is a multiple award-winning specialist in Cold War history and current international affairs. 2. Westad, “Introduction,” 5, emphasis original. 3. Westad, “Introduction,” 5. 4. Westad, “Introduction,” 1, 3, 8–10. Regarding the approaches that struggled to explain historical agency, Westad was commenting here specifcally on the systems-based approaches used within the feld of international relations. 5. Westad, “Introduction,” 10. 6. See, for example, Jill Bugajski, “Tadeusz Kantor’s Publics,” in Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, eds. Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 53–72; Boitran Huynh-Beattie, “Saigonese Art during the War: Modernity versus Ideology,” in Cultures at War: The Cold

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, eds. Tony Day and Maya Ht Liem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2010), 81–102; Joes Segal, “Artistic Style, Canonization, and Identity Politics in Cold War Germany, 1947–1960”; Petra Henzler, “The First Cold War Memorial in Berlin: A Short Inquiry into Europe, the Cold War, and Memory Cultures,” in Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies, eds. Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk and Thomas Lindenberger (Oxford: Berghan Books, 2012), 235–253 and 347–369, respectively. See also Andreas Huyssen, “German Painting in the Cold War,” New German Critique special issue “Cold War Culture,” eds. David Bathrick and Anson Rabinbach, no. 110 (Summer 2010): 209–227. The revisionist critique of the 1970s is preserved in part two of Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), frst published in 1985 with Harper and Row. The second edition includes a third section that Frascina has called “Revisionism revisited,” which is “devoted to recent developments of revisionist critiques,” and “explore[s] the work of Greenberg’s contemporaries, the relationship between critical and commercial responces (sic) to Abstract Expressionism, and perceptions of cultural value in the 1940s and 1950s, and challenge[s] assumptions about ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the construction of the ‘post-war American artist.’” (Frascina, Pollock and After, unpaginated). The lightning rod of the frst revisionists was Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) preceded the second wave of revisionism, which included David Craven’s Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and my own The Politics and Philosophy of Abstract Expressionism 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Westad, “Introduction,” 3–4. Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 16, 19–20. Hatt and Klonk, Art History, 16, 121. Beáta Hock, “Introduction—Globalizing East European Art Histories: The Legacy of Piotr Piotrowski and a Conference,” in Globalizing East European Art Histories, eds. Beáta Hock and Anu Allas (New York: Routledge, 2018), 42.3. Hock, who favours what she describes as a “transnational approach” to art historical studies, regards the “interdisciplinary” as one variant of post-1970s art history, listing it alongside the “social” and the “spatial” as one of the number of alternative methodological approaches that have arisen since the 1970s watershed. Hock, “Introduction,” 40.6. Hock, “Introduction,” 26.5. Hock, “Introduction,” 35.3–42.3. The idea of a new Cold War is currently in dispute. Stephen M. Walt, in “I Knew the Cold War. This Is No Cold War,” Foreign Policy, 12 March 2018, https://foreignpolicy. com/2018/03/12/i-knew-the-cold-war-this-is-no-cold-war/ [Accessed: 09/08/2018], refutes the claims of a new Cold War recently made in Politico, The New Yorker, and The Nation largely on the grounds that the nature of the confict is not symmetrical with that of the past century, which was bipolar in both its primary contestants and in its ideologies (today it is, in his view, unipolar on both counts); and global in its scope. Odd Arne Westad, “Has a New Cold War Really Begun?,” Foreign Affairs, 27 March 2018, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-03-27/has-new-cold-war-really-begun [Accessed: 09/08/2018], also understands the Cold War as essentially a bipolar confict, marked by equally polarised ideological absolutes. These two features, he notes, are absent in the current situation, which is also distinguished by a rising nationalism that was absent during the Cold War. Proponents of the argument of a new Cold War have a more elastic understanding of the term and tend to emphasise the different circumstances conditioning today’s tensions, including the rise of the internet and social media, the weakening of Western institutions, and, above all the multipolarity of the world’s contesting powers and the geographical scope of its current conficts. See Susan B. Glasser, “Trump, Putin and the New Cold War,” Politico, 22 December 2017, www.politico.com/

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16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

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magazine/story/2017/12/22/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-cold-war-216157 [Accessed: 09/08/2018]; Michael T. Klare, “The New Cold War Is Here—and Now Three Major Powers Are Involved,” The Nation, 2 April 2018, www.thenation.com/article/the-newcold-war-is-here-and-now-three-major-powers-are-involved/ [Accessed: 09/08/2018], has attributed the New Cold War to the return of nuclear arms proliferation; and Evan Osnos, David Remnick and Joshua Yaffa, “Trump, Putin and the New Cold War,” The New Yorker, 6 March 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-andthe-new-cold-war [Accessed: 09/08/2018]. The New Cold War, by this point, had already been under serious discussion for a decade and has been the subject of several books: see, for example Robert Levgold, Return to Cold War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016); Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (London: Bloomsbury 2008); and Mark MacKinnon, The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007). See also “Syria: UN Chief Says Cold War Back,” 13 April 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-middle-east-43759873 [Accessed: 09/08/2018]. Here the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres points to the absence of “safeguards” previously in place to “manage the risks of escalation.” Nancy Jachec, Painting and Politics at the Venice Biennale, 1948–1964: Italy and the ‘European Idea’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 2–9. For further reading on the value of an interdisciplinary approach between history and the social sciences, see Richard Ned Lebow’s excellent “Social Science, History and the Cold War: Pushing the Conceptual Envelope,” in Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War, 103–125. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, “Introduction: Interim Intellectual History,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, eds. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. McMahon and Moyn, “Introduction,” 4. Darrin M. McMahon, “The Return of the History of Ideas?,” Rethinking, 26. McMahon, “Return,” 26. McMahon, “Return,” 26. McMahon, “Return,” 26. McMahon, “Return,” 26. Westad, “Introduction,” 8. Jachec, Painting and Politics, 3–6. Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 173–176. “AICA History,” http://aicainternational.org/en/background-objectives-of-aica/ [Accessed: 09/08/2018]. Mark Kramer, “Why Did the Cold War Last So Long?,” in Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, eds. Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014), 463. Kramer, “Why Did,” 463. Nancy Jachec, Europe’s Intellectuals and the Cold War. The European Society of Culture and Post-War Politics, Culture and International Relations (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 12. Jachec, Europe’s Intellectuals, 12. Jachec, Europe’s Intellectuals, 19. Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht and Morten Rasmussen, “Origins of a European polity,” in The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity 1950–1972, eds. Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht and Morten Rasmussen (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 1–2. Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 3. Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 4. Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 4. The work by Middlemas referred to here is Orchestrating Europe. The Informal Politics of European Union 1973–1995 (London: Fontana, 1995). Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 1, 5.

178 Nancy Jachec 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 5. Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 6, 7. Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 7. Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen, “Origins,” 7. Westad, “Introduction,” 19. For McMahon and Moyn, it may save European history from parochialism in “this global and globalizing age.” McMahon and Moyn, “Introduction,” 4. 45. Westad, “Introduction,” 20.

10 Something Is Happening Here Spaces and Figures of Change in Post-War Portugal Luís Trindade

Introduction Despite the explicit reference, in my title, to one of the most symbolic songs of the 1960s as a well-recognisable period of social and cultural change,1 this chapter will assume, from the start, a critical stance towards historical periodisation. When we deal with a historical period so covered up by narratives of historical transformation like post-war Europe, it becomes all the more urgent to identify not only what persists but also where and how exactly is change taking place. What I’ll do, then, will take the form of a search at two levels. On the one hand, I will look for alternative temporalities to those usually proposed by the chronology of European political history. This will take me, in a frst moment, away from the horizon of temporality altogether, in order to explore key social phenomena in post-war Portugal geographically. Such a search, on the other hand, will hopefully allow me to identify the emerging social fgures that better encapsulate what is most decisive in the period’s forms of historical transformation and thus reinsert my analysis in a temporal frame, this time one that is hopefully better equipped to deal with the specifc historicity of culture. The very familiar sense of history as novelty (particularly dramatic during this period) will not be lost throughout the analysis, but instead of looking at what is new in cultural objects as a refection of social changes, my fnal point will try to explore a different relation between culture and society, one in which the two terms are seen as different aspects of the same broader historical movement, rather than separately illustrating or determining one another. Despite my focus on Portuguese cultural history, I would like to propose an idea of Portugal as a society traversed by historical dynamics that are common to many other European societies in the post-war period and to see culture as a social space that hopefully shares some room with more specifcally artistic objects and with its historiography—thus opening room for transnational and interdisciplinary discussion.

Master Political Narratives More or less inadvertently, the master narrative of Portuguese post-war cultural history follows the script of the Cold War. There is, of course, no coherent theory organising the lines along which the country’s culture is submitted to this logic—and this is one of the reasons why the link between culture and politics emerges almost accidentally—but the way culture has polarised into distinct political ideologies pervades most narratives. What is interesting, here, and what invites us to linger a while

180 Luís Trindade longer within a frame of analysis otherwise simplistically dual, is that Cold War Portugal is situated in a rather complex context of intersections. This is apparent in the different variations of its master historical narrative from the 1940s. For, in fact, what makes any critique of this submission of a cultural logic to a political chronology so challenging is that the cultural divide itself was consciously aligned by contemporaries with the post-war period. In other words, Cold War Manicheanism was not just a political imposition on the cultural feld but the strategy used by many cultural agents to situate themselves during the Cold War, in particular under authoritarianism (until 1974).2 It is, in this sense, almost impossible to verify what came frst, whether the ferce anti-communism of the New State’s propaganda, the ‘Política do Espírito’ (Policy of the Spirit), or the antifascist Marxists organised around Neo-realism, the infuential cultural movement that would dominate several areas of artistic creation and critique from the 1940s to the 1960s. In either case, post-war culture seemed organised, from the start, around a clear political antagonism. And yet, transparent as this divide may seem, the position each of these sides occupied within the logic of the Cold War is far from straightforward. Portuguese nationalism after the war tried to reframe its geopolitical narrative (aligned, in the 1930s, with fascism) by legitimising its membership in the Western sphere with its impeccable anti-communist credentials. The membership of NATO in 1949 and of the United Nations since 1955 would allow nationalist culture to use its increasingly reactionary defnition of Portuguese identity and history to legitimate colonialism, the colonial wars, and authoritarianism itself as battles of Western Christianity against communism. Conversely, neo-realists too saw their side of the divide as both an alignment with communism and the Soviet Union, on the one hand and, on the other, with all those Western European democrats who had fought against fascism. By the 1960s, the increasing infuence of Neo-realism, indeed its hegemony in the cultural feld, gives rise to a frst master narrative in which the terms of the cultural antagonism can be framed in the dynamics of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural forms.3 According to this, nationalist culture, despite its late tour de force with ‘Filosofa Portuguesa’—a theory of ‘portugalidade’, a Portuguese essentialism—and with luso-tropicalism—a late Imperial appropriation of Gilberto Freyre’s theories of miscegenation—had gone from a position of dominance in the 1930s and the 1940s to a situation in which it was becoming increasingly residual. Neo-realism—on the other hand—or indeed any politicised cultural form in the opposition, paradoxically became dominant throughout authoritarianism. The 1974–1975 revolutionary process4 could thus be read as the corollary of this, the consequence of a long and hard process through which Portuguese society became politically conscious through cultural forms and thus liberated itself from authoritarianism and put an end to colonialism. However, as soon as Neo-realism becomes dominant and imposes our frst master narrative, another and more pervasive cultural history of the Cold War appears to challenge it. In this second narrative, neo-realism appears as the other side of the same totalitarian coin of nationalism. Rather than the tool of antifascist emancipation, the novels and paintings of rural poverty and peasant rebellion (but also the system of neo-realist critique in newspapers and magazines5) are shown as a form of cultural authoritarianism. Towards the end of the century and particularly after the end of the Cold War, more and more conservative and neoliberal intellectuals will tend to equate fascism and communism in the Portuguese context, by comparing the fgures

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of Oliveira Salazar and Álvaro Cunhal (the historical leader of the Communist Party) or by comparing nationalism and neo-realism as twin totalitarian ideologies. In an ironic twist, the narrative of neo-realist aesthetics going from emergent to dominant cultural form is kept, but whereas communists themselves saw in it the road from antifascism to liberation, late 20th-century liberals will accuse neo-realism of silencing the most creative and innovative cultural forms of the 1950s and the 1960s: Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, existentialism, the nouveau-roman, Pop Art, etc. Here too, the problem seems immediately articulated in political terms: fascism and communism had both been the driving forces of a powerful cultural malaise that had obstructed the free development of Portuguese culture and art towards political emancipation, aesthetic autonomy, and ideological cosmopolitanism. Put together as the dominant cultural forms throughout the whole of the dictatorship, both nationalism—with its permanent state of reminiscence and historical Messianism— and neo-realism—a long narrative of social misery—could be seen not only as markers of authoritarianism but also obstacles to progress. The politics in this second master narrative is, in this sense, more subtle, as it apparently remains detached from any recognisable 20th-century ideology (fascism or communism). But we know how this re-articulates politically in the context of the 1980s and later. The problem with fascism and communism is in their common opposition to liberalism as capitalism, the fact that both were obstacles to the ‘normal’ evolution of the law of progress and its most recognisable manifestations: freedom (which also meant creative freedom) and economic development. This is particularly important to our discussion, as progress and all its artistic variations in the form of breaks, avant-gardes, and originality, have become much more resilient doxae than any other previous master narrative of Portuguese culture.

A Critique of Time in Portuguese Culture In fact, the most persistent narrative in Portuguese historiography ascertains that the country lagged behind European modernity.6 According to this, Portugal could be presented as a latecomer to all major modern phenomena: industrial capitalism, urbanisation, democracy, literacy, whereas the main cultural currents and artistic movements in the Western canon, from Romanticism to Modernism and Postmodernism, could also be found in Portuguese cultural and art history, only a few decades after they had occurred in, say, France, England, or the United States. The problem with these narratives is clear enough: presenting modernity—or progress—as a necessity, the work of historians would necessarily become a simple verifcation of the exact moment when already foreseeable phenomena (from universal suffrage to rock music) fnally made their appearance in the country’s history. Not only is such verifcation not very challenging (theoretically, for example), but it also tends to divert analysis from all the synchronic relations that make events fully understandable in their contexts, subsumed as they are by a purely diachronic master narrative. This is particularly visible in the history of art, where Mariana Pinto dos Santos identifed two related distortions: the narrative of backwardness in relation to a mimicked Western canon (distortion number one) allows for an apparently opposite discourse to emerge, according to which such a discrepancy is actually what makes Portuguese art original and ultimately irreducible to any canon in the frst place (distortion number two).7 Against a perfect model of evolution, Portuguese art is

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established at a double distance: it mimics—but always late; and yet, precisely because it is late, it becomes irreducible to the original, too special to be compared. As it happens, some 20th-century Portuguese art histories have tried an interesting combination between the narrative of historical progress—in which after Neo-realism comes Surrealism, after Surrealism comes Abstract Expressionism and so on—with the narrative of political resistance, thus showing that what was specifc about Portuguese post-war art and in particular in its move towards abstractionism and, already in the 1960s, the emergence of Pop Art, was a particularly critical stance towards the market and media (as critiques of poverty and censorship) during the dictatorship.8 To art historians like Rui Mário Gonçalves and João Pinharanda, the narrative of progress meets the narrative of resistance. In the context of isolation and underdevelopment, abstractionism never completely lost some kind of political reference; the 1960s return to fguration opened the feld of subversion (to state violence, gender and sexual oppression, etc.) and Pop Art became profoundly ironic. These histories seem to propose a more critical approach to the narrative of backwardness, one in which what comes later, rather than just mimicking, may in fact appropriate the discourses and representations of the centre and put them to use in the specifc conditions of the periphery. You may have noticed that I have shifted from a terminology of time—where abstractionism and Pop Art were set free from the necessity of progress, just to fall back over to the narrative of resistance and democratisation—and started using (again, almost inadvertently) a terminology of space.

A Critique of Space in Portuguese Culture My analysis thus seems to be getting closer to some of the most interesting critiques of Portuguese national identity (and of its master narratives) that, from the social sciences and post-colonial studies, have questioned the same two narrative problems pointed out by Mariana Pinto dos Santos: backwardness and originality. The terms used by Boaventura Sousa Santos, for example, in his “Eleven theses on the occasion of still another discovery of Portugal,” echo this rather clearly. According to Sousa Santos, the question of originality should be addressed from an epistemological point of view: “It is in general believed that ignorance is a consequence of exoticism. I would suggest an opposite hypothesis, that exoticism is the consequence of ignorance. In other words, not much is known about Portugal, and for that reason Portugal is considered a relatively exotic country.”9 To overcome the discourses subsuming Portuguese history to any kind of master narrative—“Portugal has no destiny. It has a past, a present and a future”10—Sousa Santos proposes a complex rethinking of the country’s geopolitics, particularly in a period when, with the end of Empire, it is “renegotiating its position in the world system.”11 Portugal thus has to be analysed geographically, as a semi-periphery, with a specifc form of intermediary development and forms of coexistence of “representations of the center” and “representations of the periphery.”12 The risks run by this kind of analysis of falling into still another essentialism— of hybridity and universalism, in this case closer to the narrative of late colonial luso-tropicalism—are clear enough,13 but for now I would like to focus on one of the forms this geographical rethinking of Portuguese culture may take. In his work Fado Tropical, Marcos Cardão revisits the period of the colonial wars by triggering

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a strange combination between luso-tropicalism—the ideology of Portuguese colonialism’s racial tolerance—and other kinds of post-war emergent cultural forms: football, pop music, and beauty contests. The prominence of black football players like Eusébio and Coluna in both Benfca and the national team (in particular when the former became European champions and the latter fnished third in the 1966 World Cup), or of Eduardo Nascimento, the Angolan singer who represented Portugal in the 1967 Eurovision song contest, or even of the participation of female representatives from the African colonies in metropolitan beauty contests, all these fgures and their prominence were politically instrumental in the negotiation between what I initially described as residual—colonialism, nationalism, authoritarianism—and other emergent cultural forms—pop culture—in the 1960s.14 By bringing together the ultimate trope of the cultural canon—national identity— with popular culture and thus by drawing a geographical triangle between Portugal—the semi-periphery—the African periphery, and the centre—through the Anglo-Saxon cultural industries—Cardão’s work allows us to rethink all our initial master narratives and to create a new cultural space in which, rather than Portugal as a transcendental historical narrative, the focus of analysis becomes more socially (because spatially) grounded. The move in Fado Tropical is not far from Kristin Ross’s twofold approach to French culture and society from the perspective of both colonialism and Americanisation in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies.15 Taking Henry Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘colonisation of the everyday’ to the last consequences, Ross’s exciting thesis is that, with the decolonisation of Algeria, the disciplinary methods of colonialism were diverted to the metropole and in particular to the making of new suburban spaces. The model of colonialism is thus seen as an apparatus designed to control social change—whose threat to post-war social order in France would become apparent in 1968. In other words, colonialism—and a certain appropriation of the colonial Other to post-war metropolitan narratives—could in this sense work as an ideological negotiation—of the kind that keeps the cause absent by showing something more palatable—within a context of sharp perception of historical transformation. The similarities between the historical contexts of both countries in the 1960s— economic development, urban growth, late colonialism (and even a certain degree of authoritarianism in Gaullist France)—thus seem an interesting cue to grasp whether the colonial Other, in Portugal too, can be used to identify, by contrast, the decisive aspects of a deep post-war historical break and its key cultural manifestations. If this were the case, the hypothesis could be that luso-tropicalism, mediated by mass culture, would be in a particularly advantageous position to defne emergent subjectivities in between the very late persistence of colonialism and the social perception of change brought by Western European and North American culture industries. And yet, as I tried to suggest elsewhere, I don’t believe the colonial subject can work, as it apparently does in 1960s France, as the Other to the key emergent social subjects in post-war Portugal.16 In fact, my key hypothesis to disentangle our frst master-narrative—the one politicising the cultural feld by opposing nationalists to communists—requires a form of short-circuit, some kind of negativity, to the Manichean duality of post-war culture to which the colonial Other will not do because the geography of Portuguese national identity was not so much based on Empire as on the country’s rural countryside. In short, despite the profound dramatisation brought to narratives of Portuguese history by the colonial wars and decolonisation,

184 Luís Trindade I would like to insist that Empire and colonialism—due to the latter’s late and superfcial development—only had a tangential impact on metropolitan culture.17

Another Geography for Portuguese Culture I am thus keeping within a spatial line of questioning. However, rather than rethinking temporality by reframing the space of Portuguese culture in order to include the colonies and the imaginary of luso-tropicalism, I will insist that rural Portugal still was the true essence in the narratives of national identity. In this sense, it may be suggested that despite the appearances of political history—the pivotal role of the colonial wars in the way these triggered both revolution and decolonisation—the true breaks with which the ideology of nationalism was trying to negotiate were the deep social and economic transformations taking place in the metropole and from which the narrative of Portugal as an essentially rural country emerged in the frst place. More to the point, when, throughout the 1950s, more than half of the population starts living in cities and, in direct consequence of this, the working force dedicated to agriculture drops to under 50% (and also, in close relation with the former, when literacy fnally overcomes the 50% mark), this was the moment, then, when the master narratives of Portuguese culture were decisively challenged by phenomena taking place at the core of the country’s spatial distribution. It is impossible to grasp the challenge in full without going back to an historical diffculty within Portuguese culture. Since the emergence of Portuguese modern nationalism in the late 19th century—although this may well have been a problem reaching as far back as Romanticism—it was always very diffcult to subsume urban cultures under national identity. Cities and citizens always somehow managed to escape—or were unable to accommodate—the images of ‘authentic’ Portugal. It was as if the agitation of city streets and the everyday of its inhabitants always disrupted the passive landscapes of identity.18 So, my hypothesis can now be formulated in opposition to the ‘system of nationalism’ that, until well into the dictatorship, equated Portugal with its rural countryside and the Portuguese with peasants. Ideally, then, we should try to come up with cultural objects or social phenomena that somehow break this equivalence by challenging both terms, the national and the rural. I suggest we start by looking at an accidental source I came across in my research, one of those objects that was made to disappear—or at least to remain ignored by historians. In fact, the object as such—a private album with postcards—came to my hands rather accidentally when it was about to be thrown away in the refurbishment of an apartment in Lisbon. The postcards in the album are all of actors, actresses, and musicians. Young, cheerful, sometimes sensual faces appear before our eyes while we leaf through the album, in what seems the perfect illustration of the same process of cultural Americanisation identifed by Kristin Ross. In fact, those artists were surely very familiar to Portuguese audiences too, if not from movie theatres and record players, then at least through the proliferating popular magazines dedicated to mass culture, richly illustrated and flled with information, not so much about flms and records as about the artists’ privates lives and physical appearances. The familiarity with this emerging star system becomes apparent when we turn the postcards over and read what the album owner wrote in the back. Ricky Nelson, for example, we learn was born on 8 May 1940 (and is ‘now’ 22 years old), has brown hair, blue eyes, and is 1,82m tall. We are told his

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parents’ names, how he prefers hamburgers, coke (both surely very exotic in Portugal at the time), that he lives in Hollywood, enjoys open air cinema and dating in cars, and is into rock’n’roll, dancing, tennis, baseball, and clothes. However, we are also told in the notes Ricky does not like pretentious girls (too sophisticated or theatrical) and feels very uncomfortable around them. An open, charming, and youthful smile, a young man simultaneously close in his apparent simplicity and yet distant given the public status of his profession, the notes on the back of the postcard reproduce the morals of mass culture magazines: the movie and pop stars may be glamorous, but in the end they are people just like us, with their families and routines. Most importantly, their lifestyle shows no hint of subversion or immorality. This balance between sophistication and decency seems to draw the line along which the emergence of the culture industries—and their impact on lifestyles, especially in what relates to marriage, maternity, female labour, and divorce—is being negotiated in between 1950s and 1960s Portugal. We know this is the period when these otherwise undated postcards were produced (and assembled in the album) by confronting the artists’ age and date of birth in the data scribbled on the backs. By then, the country already was a member of NATO and the UN; it had beneftted from the Marshall Plan; its economy was growing at a steady pace mainly through industrialisation and the tertiary sector; and society, as we saw, was becoming more urbanised. However, this was not just a process of Americanisation. Along with Hollywood stars and the frst big names of rock’n’roll, the album is also flled with fgures of the European star system, with names like Brigitte Bardot, Johnny Hallyday, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale. Portugal’s semi-peripheral status can here be seen from a perspective that has nothing to do with Empire, whose absence is all the more striking as this happens in the moment when the wars had already started in its colonies: Portuguese society, especially its emergent urban strata, is by then trying to ‘modernise’ (and war and colonialism increasingly become an embarrassment to those plans), which involves a specifc cultural geopolitics in which the irresistible process of Americanisation19 is mediated through an explicit effort to Europeanise, that is, come closer to Western Europe, in itself experiencing phenomena of Americanisation. There are several negotiations at work here—and all decisive. Portuguese authoritarianism sails between its Empire and Western countries themselves in the process of decolonisation by carefully keeping its distance from the United States (whose support through NATO is fundamental but whose famous ‘way of life’ is seen as too disruptive) and by using Europe, its traditions and cultural legitimacy, as the limit for change. Conservative Portugal, on the other hand, tries to mitigate the impact of foreign cultural industries by controlling the forms of its appropriation—one of the most popular magazines, Flama, is edited by the Catholic Youth Organization—which would become increasingly diffcult throughout the 1960s. What is interesting here is how we seem to be getting close to a truly European (rather than just peripheral) periodisation: with the exception of some capitals—like Paris—and the United Kingdom, these processes of modernisation, urbanisation, and industrialisation are occurring in many other European countries, especially in the South and East, although at different rhythms. It may be said that I am reading too much into a simple album, which, apart from the date and city of origin, I know nothing about. The last three postcards, however, will allow me to pursue this hypothesis and return to my search of social subjectivities emerging against the master narrative that equated Portugal with its rural world and

186 Luís Trindade characterised the Portuguese as peasants. These fnal postcards show pictures of Cliff Richard, The Animals, and The Beatles (the album, presumably organised chronologically, becomes, towards the end, almost exclusively dedicated to The Beatles). But what is different about these fnal postcards is that they were indeed sent by the post thus allowing us to fnd out that the album belonged to someone named Ada, presumably a young woman, or teenager, a Beatles fan—“I wish you get better soon . . . to appreciate ‘your’ Beatles”—who was also an admirer of Cliff Richard, “the dear of the ladies.” Living in a city, enjoying foreign cultural forms, Ada was in many ways the opposite of what the narratives of national identity told about Portugal and the Portuguese—not to mention the distance between her cultural preferences and the traditional forms and attitude of the cultural canon. Being a woman, however, and a young woman at that, puts her in a particularly delicate position as a marker of social change. In fact, if we take the essential aspects of the narrative of Portuguese national identity, it is easy to see how the urban teenager listening to The Beatles fully disrupts it: she does not live in the countryside; does not work in agriculture (presumably, she does not work at all); she has no authority whatsoever, by being the head of the family— the bedrock of society—or through motherhood; and does not represent, nor do her cultural habits, anything ‘authentically national.’ Even if we distance ourselves from the frame of national identity and move to our initial master-narrative, the one opposing nationalists and Marxists or neo-realists, it is apparent how she does not belong here either. Ada, for what interests us here, is not defnable by being a communist or a fascist. In other words, in her pure negativity, we may have reached here the subject we were looking for, one that by being more deeply grounded in the processes of structural change in Portuguese society in the post-war period (industrialisation, services, urbanisation) allows us to criticise all master narratives and rethink both the logic of national identity and the submission of cultural history to the script of the Cold War. Being outside any familiar narrative is not just a cultural question as such, for these narratives are also forms of social and political discipline. Women, the young, the urban, in this sense, seem far from anything a chronology of the Cold War may have to tell us and remarkably closer to other forms of periodisation historically organising those same decades, be that of the ‘the glorious thirty’—describing the period of economic boom going from 1945 to 1973—or ‘the long 1960s,’ initially coined by Arthur Marwick to encompass the whole process of social change and cultural and political rebellion we usually recognise as the ‘sixties’.20

The Time of Urban Young Women But if the representation of women, the young, and the urban may be used as different contributions allowing us to escape the order of time imposed by our initial master narrative, the combination of the three in the fgure of an urban young girl like Ada may become truly disruptive. In other words, the complex relation between the three elements—the fragile woman, the unstable youngster, at loss in the cosmopolitan city—puts her at the centre of the ‘sixties’ as a process of social change and historical transformation. I suggest, therefore, that we look for some signs of this risky emerging fgures in two, rather different but contemporary, objects: the short stories of Maria Judite de Carvalho and the transition of Portuguese cinema from its classic period to Cinema Novo.

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In Os Armários Vazios (The Empty Closets), published by Maria Judite Carvalho in 1966, we can read the following description of a youngsters’ party: Another record, and one couple started to move. One tall girl, red haired, a body like a statue and lots of freckles, who was Lisa’s colleague in ballet class, and a small and smiley boy, with glasses and Chinese eyes. It was a modern rhythm (twist, surf?, Dora didn’t know), in any case rhythm that required the whole body to collaborate. It didn’t come from the outside to the inside (it didn’t even get to the inside, keeping itself at the level of mechanical gestures), as in the old days, when she was still a girl. . . . That was different, something else. Because they were distracted, chatting and laughing, and when the record started to move while they were chatting and laughing, something inside, one could say in their blood, started to gain shape, a kind of anti-corpus that music gave birth to and allowed to grow (but that then grew more than normal, and eventually became the disease), and then they set themselves in motion, bent while talking, without even noticing it. But when fnally they realized what they were doing, when the rhythm of the bodies became too strong to be ignored, then they would forget everything else and gave themselves completely.21 The work of Maria Judite de Carvalho represents a good opportunity to defne the emerging social fgure of the urban young woman, for two reasons. To start with, because of the unique—discreet, almost marginal—situation of the author in Portuguese literature, especially in the context of the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, with her urban settings and individual anxieties, in between the then-dominant genres of neo-realism and existentialism but without really dissolving into them. This creates a particularly striking picture of urban society through the perspective of individuals, both social and existential. Second, because Carvalho’s stories stand next to none in her representation of gender and the urban space. The title of her frst book, Tanta Gente, Mariana (So many people, Mariana), is a sentence uttered by a dying father to his daughter, on their solitude despite being surrounded by the urban crowd. Carvalho gives us a very comprehensive portrait of women experiencing things usually left unsaid and invisible in Portuguese literature: ageing, sex outside marriage, new professions, conficts within the family, and in particular the hostility of the urban environment when women skip the rules of what is expected from them in the family, in the offce, in relation to sexuality, or when getting old. The gloomy atmosphere in these stories can in this sense be seen as a reference to a threat: women were simultaneously the cornerstone of the social edifce and the weakest link of social change. In particular, they would necessarily be punished if they tried to extend their youth (i.e. the period before marriage and motherhood, a period marked by bodily appearances and libido) or make too much of it. Os Armário Vazios is a good example of this: a tragic story of a widow in her forties (Dora) who decides to put an end to her state of mourning, recover her sensuality and sexual drive; she will end up abandoned by the partner of a one-night stand after a car crash that leaves her disfgured; to make things worse, the man, a rich impresario, ends up marrying her very attractive seventeenyear-old daughter (Lisa), in a complex game of social mobility, moral conformism, and the reifcation of the young female body. And yet, the short scene of youngsters dancing—a dance Dora is unable to fully understand—with its strange energy coming from inside the body and completely escaping any rationality, seemed to take the

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threat represented by these emerging fgures even deeper, to the realm of the body and the unconscious. Here, urban young girls are virtually out of control, disrupting any form of social order and eventually writing a counter-narrative to any masternarrative in the period’s cultural history. This picture charges quite a lot from young women like Ada or Lisa as signifers of social change, so I would like to substantiate what for now is merely a hypothesis with another important post-war (or ‘long 1960s’) cultural phenomenon: the transition from the classic period to Cinema Novo in the history of Portuguese cinema. Of all artistic forms expressing transformation in post-war Portugal, cinema gives us an opportune combination of young female iconography, social change, and formal experimentation. In other words, not only is the relation between social and formal artistic change more apparent in cinema than anywhere else; it also happens that young female characters in many of these flms’ plots work as forceful fgurations driving flmic experimentation. More concretely, it may be argued that whereas the protected domestic environments where young women live in the righteous comedies of the 1940s and the 1950s allow for these flms to stabilise in a well-recognisable genre, the history of 1960s Cinema Novo could almost be seen as a permanent challenge to flmmakers by young women’s new urban lifestyles: a relation could in this sense be established between the engagement of Ilda with the modern city in Verdes Anos and director Paulo Rocha’s own visual treatment of modern architecture; between Marta’s struggle for autonomy in a world dominated by men in O Cerco and the way director António da Cunha Telles’s camera submits her body to its voyeurism; or between the young daughter’s process of political radicalisation in Brandos Costumes and the need felt by director Alberto Seixas Santos to close his allegory of Salazarism with the reading of the frst paragraph of The Communist Manifesto.22 If I’m entitled to come up with my own narrative of the changes at work throughout these flms, it could be said that, after experiencing the threats posed by the big city and the new regime of images of the 1960s, the passive girls of Salazarism become the active girls of Marxism, in a permanent tension between emergent subjectivities and residual forms of discipline, in new forms of reifcation or renewed ideological narratives. The problem with the narrative told by these four flms, however, is the way they, almost inadvertently, seem to fall back into temporal analysis, subsuming these women to a new periodisation and even to a new cultural canon, that of Portuguese modern cinema. But rather than withdrawing from the horizon of time altogether, I suggest we overcome this impasse by reversing the terms of the narrative and raise still another hypothesis according to which it is not the development of Portuguese cinema from its classic period to Cinema Novo—still another narrative of progress—that made those women the objects of domination, threat, and emancipation but, on the contrary, that it was the symbolic fgure of the urban young woman as the ultimate subversive subject to the social order that challenged all forms of fguration and forced this to reinvent its representation. Figuration, here, would appear as an aesthetic category that, rather than imposing any historical laws over the objects it represents, would be in itself a response to social change and historical transformation, a need to develop the forms of representation in order to catch up with emergent social subjects—such as our urban young women—whose sudden social visibility and historical potential were simply unimaginable by previous narratives. More than the ideological meaning of The Communist Manifesto being read by the rebel daughter of the Salazarist family in Brandos Costumes, it is her rebelliousness

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as such (young women were not supposed to utter their opinions, let alone subversive political ideas) that somehow forces director Seixas Santos ‘to rise to the occasion’ and to come up with narrative devices—allegory, theatricality, fragmentation—that are able to accommodate the challenge to order she represents. Granted, the way that particular scene anticipates the coming revolution that would open Portuguese society to democracy and European integration is an extreme one, almost too convenient to my argument. But I believe that to look at some of the most meaningful cultural objects emerging in the following decades—from pop music to television—as cultural versions of the same forms of social emergency I have encapsulated in the urban young woman, may allow us to identify change less as a cultural narrative imposed by artists (or historians) but as something that already was ingrained in the historical perception of contemporaries.

Post-Revolutionary Urban Young Women To resume my cultural history of social change in Cold War Portugal after the 1974– 1975 revolution that ended with authoritarianism and colonialism and paved the way to democracy and Europeanisation will involve considering a combination of the political impact of the revolutionary break and the changes in the cultural sphere, ideally (in order to keep the coherence of my argument) through the development of the public fgure of young women. The revolution itself can be seen as a coalition— or historical intersection—of two different forces: of political radicalisation, as we have seen in the reading of The Communist Manifesto by the young daughter in Brandos Costumes; and the emergence of a liberal middle-class culture, as the young women mentioned in the previous sections somehow illustrate. Both undermined the authoritarian order and combined in the same historical break. And yet, in the new post-revolutionary period, political radicalisation as such—the generalised social movement towards socialism—will suddenly become residual, whereas the emergent forms of social urbanisation, cultural cosmopolitanism, and political liberalisation will enter into a new, consolidated phase. In this context, television, along with popular music (rather than cinema or literature, for example), will occupy the centre stage of social perception and the cultural imaginary. From the late 1970s on, television will not only provide the most famous fgures of the incipient Portuguese star system, it will also drive other cultural phenomena (such as pop and rock music) and reorganise people’s routines and the everyday life. Not surprisingly, then, the last fgures of my analysis will be of young women made famous in late 1970s, early 1980s Portuguese television. Despite her work as a cinema and theatre actress, it was as a TV presenter that Ana Zanatti became a familiar face to Portuguese audiences. Her popularity was recognised by the cultural weekly Se7e—whose creation itself was as a response to the growth of urban and audio-visual cultures23—who chose her as its frst big interview, published in the newspaper’s second issue in June 1978. What makes this interview so interesting to my analysis is the way Zanatti embodies the tension between contemporary dynamics of residual and emergent cultural forms. On the one hand, the provocative tone she uses to ensure the freedom of her life choices—“I have no blood ties with anyone, except with the people I chose”—resonates with the rhetoric of emancipation of the revolutionary period. On the other hand, she implicitly inverts revolutionary demands by claiming those same values the revolution was supposed to

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have overcome: “I don’t know how to live without money. And I don’t like it either. And everything I fancy is expensive.”24 The corollary of this apparent contradiction was a new picture of gender politics, in which she could consider herself “a feminist without being part of any organized movement” as “I fght for my right within my own personal organization.”25 In short, what makes the interview with Ana Zanatti so interesting in this new post-revolutionary context is in the tension between political emancipation and emergent individual subjectivities. In different ways, the fgure of contemporary young women is always traversed by this tension. If we focus on another meaningful phenomenon at the intersection of cultural and social change, the television song contest (which would give access to the Eurovision song contest), it is possible to weave another decade long narrative of transformation as we did to the history of Portuguese cinema. Here, we see how the initial romantic songs (by both male and female singers) in the mid-1960s will become increasingly suggestive and politicised throughout the following decade up to the Revolution, until their gender and sexual politics become much more ambiguous in the post-revolutionary period. The period when Ana Zanatti gives her interview to Se7e is particularly decisive here, as it witnesses a shift from provocative affrmation26 to the naturalisation of female sexual desire. In 1979, for instance, TV audiences could see and hear two songs sung by young female singers Gabriela Schaaf and Concha, where they not only assumed their own bodily jouissance but also (which seemed even bolder) the initiative in the heterosexual relationship. The corollary of this process of affrmation of female sexuality in the song contest can be situated in 1982, when Doce (Sweet), a band made of four very sexualised female members, won the contest with a song, “Bem Bom” (So Good), with rather erotic lyrics and choreography. The way the tension between sexual emancipation and depoliticised subjectivities manifest in Doce’s performance is frst of all visible in the structure of the TV apparatus, where the exploitative gaze of the camera—enhancing the meaning of the night of love described in the lyrics through the provocative choreographies and outfts—will release the image of four young women openly expressing their desires or simply having fun. In other words, although everything in the performance’s mise en scène seems conceived to submit the subject of female desire in the song to an object of male gaze in the spectacle of television, the unrestrained image broadcast is much less controllable and more open to different appropriations.27 The historical meaning of the urban young woman thus becomes more complex. In Ada, Lisa, and the female protagonists of Cinema Novo, the engagement with mass culture and urban lifestyles constituted a clear challenge to authoritarianism and conservatism (in this sense, it can be read as part of a narrative of democratisation). Later, in the post-revolutionary period, many of the same phenomena can be seen contributing to the depoliticisation of Portuguese society heading to European integration in the 1980s (and to the promise of consumerism and a better quality of life). But to keep the dichotomy authoritarianism/revolution would, once again, submit the cultural analysis of these urban young women to a logic that is not necessarily their own. Ana Zanatti and Doce, as Ada and Lisa, require a specifc periodisation, and in the case of the former, one that may be already well beyond any political dichotomies of the Cold War. As before, what makes them fgures of social change is not their position within the struggle between the political cultures of communism and nationalism, not even between totalitarianism and freedom.

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One last fgure of post-revolutionary young women can help us defne their historical position (that is, the history we can tell through them) more rigorously. I am here referring to the continuity announcer, a very recognisable television fgure at the transition from the seventies to the eighties (Ana Zanatti was a continuity announcer herself), and that Portuguese television used to promote an image of modernity and sophistication. At frst sight, before these beautiful young women on screen, all we see is still another effort to sexualise the presence of women in the public sphere. And yet, if we look at them a bit closer—in the interviews they regularly give to magazines, for example—it is possible to identify what makes them so decisive to my analysis: they all show a strong awareness of being the frst generation of Portuguese women who will be able to fulfl both their personal desires and professional aspirations. Their discourses, in this sense, not only demonstrate a strong sense of autonomy and freedom, they also make apparent their middle-class values and aspirations of social mobility through education. Most of them had been in university, especially in the humanities; speak several languages fuently; have travelled extensively; and express very liberal views about the world. They are, in short, fgures of a new economy based on the tertiary sector, professionals equipped to face the new challenges (and promises) of post-Fordist production. In this sense, the fact that the public image of these socially and professionally empowered young women still has to be mediated by their good looks can be seen not as a contradiction but a key aspect of cognitive capitalism, a new period when the world of communication and the culture industries occupy centre stage.28 We have here reached a point where cultural and social phenomena, once again, intersect, not as different aspects of a broader political narrative (that of the Cold War or Portuguese authoritarianism and democratisation) but as constitutive aspects and privileged perspectives of a deeper historical narrative: that leading to late capitalism, a particularly challenging period in which commodifcation of the everyday and culture breaks the distinction between separate national histories and merges cultural analysis with politics, the economy, and society. This is how I would ultimately like to situate the urban young women of my analysis. As global fgures of change, traversed by that same tension between reifcation and utopia29 that defnes all manifestations of mass culture historically.

Notes 1. “Ballad of a Thin Man,” by Bob Dylan, included in Highway 61 Revisited (1965). 2. Eduardo Lourenço’s Labirinto da Saudade (Lisbon: D. Quixote, 1978) is probably the most infuential example of this master narrative. 3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 4. The 1974–1975 revolutionary process followed the military coup of 25 April 1974 that toppled the dictatorship in power since 1926. For almost two years, the country was immersed in an intense process of grassroots political struggle and a generalised challenge to private property and capitalism, with the occupation of land, factories, and housing. 5. Despite censorship and political persecution, neo-realist ideas (a discreet form of Marxist critique and aesthetics) became increasingly hegemonic in the discourse of critics, the editorial options of magazines and cultural supplements, and in some publishing houses. 6. Jaime Reis, O Atraso Económico Português (1850–1930) (Lisbon: INCM, 1993). 7. Mariana Pinto dos Santos, “Estou atrasado! Estou atrasado! Sobre o atraso da arte portuguesa diagnosticado pela historiografa,” in Representações da Portugalidade, eds. André Barata, António Santos Pereira and José Ricardo Carvalheiro (Lisbon: Caminho, 2011), 231–242.

192 Luís Trindade 8. Rui Mário Gonçalves, A Arte Portuguesa do Século XX (Lisboa: Temas e Debates, 1998); João Pinharanda. O Modernismo: expressão, estilização, disciplina (Lisbon: Fubu, 2009). 9. Boaventura Sousa Santos, Pela Mão de Alice. O social e o politico na pós-modernidade (Porto: Afrontamento, 1994), 49. 10. Sousa Santos, Pela Mão de Alice, 64. 11. Sousa Santos, Pela Mão de Alice, 58. 12. Sousa Santos, Pela Mão de Alice, 59. 13. Cf. João Leal, Antropologia em Portugal. Mestres, Percursos, Tradições (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2006). 14. Marcos Cardão, Fado Tropical. O Luso-Tropicalismo na Cultura de Massas (1960–1974) (Lisboa: Edições Unipop, 2014). 15. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 16. Luís Trindade, “The System of Nationalism: Salazarism as Political Culture,” in The Making of Modern Portugal, ed. Luís Trindade (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). 17. Although this may have changed in the context of post-colonialism. 18. Luís Trindade, “A cidade despovoada—povo, classe e literatura moderna,” in Como se Faz um Povo, coord. José Neves (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2010), 371–384. 19. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 20. Arthur Marwick, Sixties. Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). It is interesting, in this sense, how Marwick himself, in his analysis of more central societies such as Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, attributed a key and often ignored role to young couples and in particular to the role of women in them. 21. Maria Judite Carvalho, Os Armários Vazios (Lisbon: Portugália, 1966), 44. 22. Brandos Costumes, a portrait of a conservative middle-class family of the dictatorial period, ends with the younger daughter of the family becoming socially autonomous and politically conscious by sitting at a table where she starts reading—frst hesitantly, later almost by heart—the initial paragraph of Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, where the history of society is defned as the history of class struggle. 23. On the social and cultural meaning of the weekly newspaper, cf. Luís Trindade, “O Gosto do Se7e. Uma história cultural do semanário Se7e (1978–1982),” Ler História 67 (2014). 24. “Ana Zanatti de A a Z,” in Se7e, 22 June 1978, 10. 25. “Ana Zanatti de A a Z,” in Se7e, 22 June 1978, 10. 26. For example, in the controversial line “quem faz um flho, fá-lo por gusto” (something like “who makes a baby enjoys making it”) with which Simone de Oliveira scandalised the most conservative sectors of Portuguese society in 1969. 27. Namely by young female spectators. I would like to thank sociologist Inês Brasão for allowing me to nuance this argument. 28. For a critical picture of the cultural contradictions triggered by 1980s forms of late capitalism, cfr. François Cusset, La Decénnie. Le grand cauchemar des années 1980 (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). 29. Fredric Jameson, “Reifcation and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979).

Section 3

A New Europe?

11 Art Policies, Identity, and Ideology in Spain During the 1980s Daniel A. Verdú Schumann

The 1978 Spanish Constitution includes the world ‘culture’ twice in its 146-word-long Preamble, itself a mere declaration of intents of the fundamental law: The Spanish Nation, desiring to establish justice, liberty, and security, and to promote the wellbeing of all its members, in the exercise of its sovereignty, proclaims its will to: . . . Protect all Spaniards and peoples of Spain in the exercise of human rights, of their culture[s] and traditions, languages and institutions. Promote the progress of culture and of the economy to ensure a dignifed quality of life for all.1 The frst time it appears in its plural form (‘culturas’) as something associated with “human rights” and “traditions, languages and institutions,” belonging to “all Spaniards and peoples of Spain” and which needs to be endorsed by means of protection. The second time, right in the next line, it is the singular form that comes up, now tied in with “progress” and “the economy,” and presented as something that must be promoted “to ensure a dignifed quality of life for all.” This rather heavy presence of the term in the very beginning of the text shows the relevant role culture had in the imaginary of the authors of the Constitution. This was probably the result of a more or less conscious longing for the so-called Silver Age of Spanish culture during the Second Republic (1931–1936), abruptly rooted out by the Nationalists’ coup d’état and the Civil War that followed (1936–1939) and which was the illegitimate origin of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (†1975). At the same time, it also underlined to what extent culture was to rely, in this new-born democratic period, on public protection, support, and funding, private patronage being rather rare within the Spanish cultural tradition. Both references to culture also proved, split as the concept was into a threatened pluralistic heritage on the one hand and a proftable holistic asset on the other, somehow prophetic. It would be exaggerated to blame these very different understandings of both the object and the adequate way of handling it for the almost schizophrenic nature of the Spanish art world—mainly but not exclusively when it comes to identity issues—during the frst decade and a half of its democratic history. And yet one cannot but feel that things were doomed to happen the way they did under these premises. This chapter tries to throw some light on the role identity played in the promotion of the arts—mostly painting—in Spain during the 1980s. Departing from the

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problems posed by the cultural legacy of Francisco Franco’s long dictatorship, it looks specifcally at the rhetoric employed by critics and curators in the promotion of Spanish art abroad on the one hand and of parallel regional and local artistic traditions within the Spanish state on the other.

Ideological and Institutional Context Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1936/1939–1975) was notoriously based on a monolithic vision of Spain as a God blessed, historically homogeneous, fercely heroic, devotedly Catholic, and proudly chauvinistic nation. This characterisation of the country as an entity both ancestral and eternal was best summarised in the defnition of Spain as “una unidad de destino en lo universal” (a unity of destiny in the universal).2 This sentence was the second in a series of 27 points that laid the foundations of Falange Española3 in 1934 and quickly became a catchphrase throughout the dictatorship. Needless to say, in this delirious account there was little—if any—space for local or regional differences, which were accordingly either ignored or actively suppressed. On the other hand, culture and art were key elements in the construction of a narrative supporting those views. Many styles, movements, and artists were regarded as quintessentially ‘Spanish’—meaning rooted in a morally honourable, undoubtedly pious, aesthetically austere, everlasting tradition. According to Francoist historians, from the Middle Age cathedrals to the Valle de los Caídos (Franco’s burial site) and from El Greco to Velázquez and Goya, there was such a thing as typical Spanish artistic style, characterised by its spiritual grandeur, its down-to-earth realism, its expressive pathos, and its sober palette. And this allegedly applied to contemporary art too. Whether Spanish contemporary artists and eventually the ‘message’ behind their works really agreed with such a reading, or rather opposed it and the regime itself (hardly ever openly, obviously enough in a dictatorship), was another thing, as the complex case of the promotion abroad of Spanish Informalism (Tàpies, El Paso) by Franco’s regime clearly showed.4 During the last years of Franco’s regime, nationalistic and separatist movements arose in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country. In the latter, a split of the original group quickly turned into the extremely violent and long-lasting terrorist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Liberty). After the death of the dictator these but also other territories like Andalusia and the Canary Islands demanded a greater degree of self-government. By then it was obvious that one of the many touchy political issues post-Franco Spain would have to confront would be the so-called territorial problem: the accommodation within a single nation-state of different regions with a varying degree of sensibility concerning both their Spanishness and their own local identity. Given that the intrinsic historical, cultural, and linguistic pluralism of the Spanish state had been fundamentally denied and repressed during the strongly centralist dictatorship, the offcial recognition of such heterogeneity was to become a key element in the political debate during the transition period. The new democratic Constitution, sanctioned in December 1978 by the Spanish people in an extremely complicated context of major political instability, great social uncertainty, dire economic crisis, crude terrorist attacks, and military and far rightwinged upheaval, did not quite solve the problem—as the current situation in Catalonia clearly shows. Instead it put it off for a while by means of ambiguity. While the supreme law described Spain as an “insoluble unity,” it also recognised and guaranteed

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the existence of rather vaguely defned territories with a “historic regional status,” a “historic identity,” and “historic rights.” These could eventually become so-called Autonomous Communities, i.e. self-governing entities with an elective parliament and a president of their own.5 Although never explicitly mentioned, it was obvious at that time that the loosely defned ‘historic’ regions were meant to imply basically Catalonia, the Basque Country, Navarre, and Galicia; but eventually the whole of Spain was divided into Autonomous Communities. Established between 1979 and 1983, they have since then gained large competences on legislation, taxing, education, social welfare, and linguistic and cultural policies among others, as a result of continuous and complex negotiated processes of political decentralisation. Regarding culture, Section 148.1 of the Constitution states that “Autonomous Communities may assume competences over . . . the promotion of culture,” while section 149.2 reads that “Without prejudice to the jurisdiction which may be assumed by the Autonomous Communities, the State shall consider the promotion of culture a duty and an essential function.” The promotion of culture was hence considered from the very origin a task to be performed by both state and sub-state level institutions. As for the other meaning of the term, there was no further mention—apart from obvious references to the preservation and protection of the cultural and artistic heritage—to the need to endorse people’s “traditions”—the word actually never appearing again in the text. After an almost forty-year-long period of backwardness and relative isolation, the second half of the 1970s saw Spain trying to catch up with the rest of Europe and the Western world in all felds, politics and culture among them. In the decade thereafter, the intertwining of both was often seen as a shortcut to promote a modern, updated, and open image of the country and its constituent territories. In order to do that, the Central Government, in the hands of a social democratic party from 1982 onwards, tended to associate art with progress, open-mindedness, and economic growth. While also sharing most of those values, the governments of the different Autonomous Communities—in the most conspicuous cases in the hands of conservative parties— tended to emphasise the recuperation of local cultures and traditions in the arts as a means to normalisation. This tension between both conceptions of culture, with all its fuzzy—if not openly contradictory—ideological connotations, would permeate the critical discourses of the inner and outer promotion of the arts in the Spanish state during the 1980s, eventually showing to what extent identity had become a slippery bargaining chip in a country that was simultaneously accessing modernity and postmodernity at the threshold of a rapidly globalising world.

The Promotion of Young Spanish Art by the Central Government After Franco’s death in November 1975, the new head of state King Juan Carlos I forced the resignation of Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro. He appointed instead a much younger, not particularly well-known member of the Francoist administration, Adolfo Suárez (1976), who would turn out to be a key fgure in Spain’s transition to democracy (known in Spain simply as ‘la Transición’). He founded the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD, literally the ‘Union of the Democratic Centre’), a centreright political party (originally a coalition) that encompassed most of the right-winged political spectrum—from liberal-conservatism to Christian and social democrats—and with which he won the frst (1977) and second (1979) democratic general elections. However, in October 1982 the social-democratic Partido Socialista Obrero Español

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(PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) won the general election with a landslide victory, a landmark often considered to be the end of the ‘Transición.’ Felipe González became Prime Minister, a position he renewed in the general elections of 1986, 1989, and 1992, if only with a diminishing number of parliamentary seats each time. Research on the cultural policies of the Central Government during this period has often emphasised the spirit of reconciliation behind it. Quaggio stresses the both symbolic and conciliatory role of art and culture under the UCD governments (1977–1982); Rubio Aróstegui offers a similar narrative of the long socialist era (1982–1996).6 The achievements of both parties cannot be underestimated, even if they had to face very different circumstances. The UCD was responsible for creating ex-novo the Spanish Ministry of Culture following Jack Lang’s French model, promoting freedom of speech through the end of censorship, organising retrospectives of major Spanish contemporary artists, and bringing Picasso’s Guernica as a symbol of the democratisation of the country.7 The socialists, on the other hand, set up the basis of Spain’s current cultural and artistic world. They founded many of the institutions (museums, art centres, libraries), venues (fairs, exhibitions), and policies (subsidies, scholarships, marketing) that to a great extent still defne the cultural arena in Spain— up to the point that one might even be tempted to say that still today the patterns of cultural creation and consumption in Spain, with all their pros and faws, are basically the result of the democratisation of culture and its insertion into the capitalist logic of market rules that took place under the governments of Felipe González. Unsurprisingly, PSOE’s desire to make a fresh start when it came to culture and the promotion of the arts went one step further than UCD’s wish to turn over a new leaf in regard to the country’s dramatic past. The socialist government engaged from 1982— the year of the frst opening of Madrid’s Art Fair ARCO and of Miquel Barceló’s breakthrough thanks to his invitation to the documenta—onwards in a thorough process of transformation and modernisation of the country, which included projecting a renovated image of Spain.8 The idea behind was to show the whole world, and Europe in particular—entering the EU (EEC back then) was one of the country’s most urgent goals, fnally achieved in 1985—that the grey, dull, and backward-looking days of Francoism had been replaced in democracy by a free, (post)modern, vibrant, colourful, and transgressive outbreak of a long repressed Spanish creativity. This process implied the effective stimulation and diffusion of new artistic and cultural forms of all kinds that had arisen shortly after (sometimes even shortly before) Franco’s death. These included the rather unconventional, ground-breaking activities that took place under the umbrella term of ‘Movida madrileña’, but also the newest forms of literature, music, cinema, painting, fashion, design, architecture, etc. However, the combination of a rather peculiar political and ideological heritage with the freedom brought by democracy and the spending boost provided by a social democratic government proved complicated, leading sometimes to paradoxical results. This can be best seen in the promotion abroad of Spanish painting, one of the favoured ways the socialist government tried to reverse the image of the country in the eyes of foreigners. The key fgure here was Carmen Giménez, Director of the Centro Nacional de Exposiciones (National Centre for Exhibitions) from 1983 to 1989. She referred to the benefts of this operation quite neatly: a qualifed presence abroad, besides improving our image and our position in the international arena, would attract foreign art gallery owners and lead them

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to include exhibitions of Spanish artists, while at the same time revitalizing the domestic art market.9 Under this perspective, the promotion abroad of Spanish contemporary art could kill two birds with one stone: the improvement of Spain’s international image went hand in hand with the insertion of our young democracy in the capitalist (art) market economy. In order to achieve these goals, several programmes were implemented, among them the richly funded Programa Español de Acción Cultural en el Extranjero (PEACE, Spanish Program for Cultural Activities Abroad). Following these and other measures a very dynamic art world evolved in Spain, where artists had, practically for the frst time in decades, immediate access to the most recent international trends. This in turn brought an understandable fascination with the leading artistic trends in the international arena—namely German, Italian, and American painting. This fascination ran parallel to quite an open rejection of Spanish artistic traditions and styles, now deemed old-fashioned and reactionary, if not directly ‘Francoist.’ Hackneyed references to the quintessentially spiritual and dramatic nature of the Spanish artistic tradition were abolished from the vocabulary of both artists and critics just as rapidly as the dark colours associated with it—black, brown, ochre, grey—disappeared from the canvases. These became now colourful battlefelds exploring the infnite possibilities of what could loosely be defned as ‘postmodern’ painting: a famboyant mixture of all sorts of previous visual traditions, from classical narrative fguration to graffti, from abstraction to comic, from Expressionism to Cubism. A sort of heterogenic ‘everything goes’ based on the end of avant-garde Darwinism, the vindication of the pleasure of painting and the extensive quoting—if not looting—of past styles but also on the acceptance of new market conditions that boosted young painters overnight from New York to Naples, from Paris to Berlin and, to a lesser extent, from Madrid to Barcelona. As a result, when interrogated about their references or models most Spanish-born artists mentioned foreign painters and traditions. If questioned directly about the existence of a given ‘national identity’ in Spanish painting, the answers were overwhelmingly negative. As it is often the case, the thin red line that separates inspiration from imitation proved eventually too thin, and many Spanish artists ended up producing the kind of eclectic, postmodern, so-called Neo-Expressionistic painting that by the mid-1980s had become a sort of koine or ‘international style.’ This was problematic because that ‘Neo-Expressionistic,’ all-catching, historydiving, cut-and-paste painting was supposed to be part of a back-to-the-roots doctrine that emphasised the ability of the genius loci (local genius) to digest and process all previous traditions in order to produce an art piece that captured the essence of the country’s most relevant cultural features and aesthetic values, a work somehow imbued with a ‘national spirit’ of sorts. This is at least how Italian critic and factotum Achille Bonito Oliva, one of the key fgures in the promotion of painting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, defned his own version of ‘Neo-Expressionistic’ painting, the ‘Transavantagarde’.10 Following him and other theorists, Italian painting in the 1980s embarked on a postmodern re-reading of some of the country’s most celebrated artistic styles of the past, from ‘Neo-Mannerism’ to ‘Neo-Futurism.’ German painting, on the other hand, was considered ‘wild’ and ‘Neo-Expressionistic,’ because that is purportedly what German art had always been. This is obviously an oversimplifcation of the rather more complex ‘return to painting’ that took place in the Eighties, but it helps understand the peculiar situation of Spanish artists: what was

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the ‘essence’ of ‘their’ painting if they were openly turning their backs on their own national tradition? Today one would probably reply that there is no need for such an ‘essence.’ Back then however, if you were to compete in a global art world in which each country was trying to sell its artistic production by appealing to a certain ‘national brand image,’ this lack of ‘Spanishness’ was a problem. And, as a matter of fact, it was perceived as such by both the local promoters and the foreign audiences of young Spanish art. The former—Spanish curators and critics—struggled to fnd convincing arguments to present it as specifcally ‘Spanish.’ I will provide a few examples, all of them taken from the writings of Francisco Calvo Serraller. Calvo Serraller was an art critic for El País, Spain’s leading newspaper and hence a key player in the cultural arena of the ‘Transición.’ As a result of his indefatigable work as a critic, professor, curator, gallery consultant, museum director, and close collaborator of Carmen Giménez, he would very soon become one of, if not the most, powerful person in the Spanish art world. As such I think he exemplifes to a great extent the good and bad of the Spanish artistic and cultural milieu. One of the frst exhibitions attempting to give an account of the—by then still quite lukewarm—changes Spanish art had undergone with the arrival of democracy was New Images from Spain (cur. by Margit Rowell, Guggenheim New York, 1980). The catalogue to its companion show Works on Paper and Collages (Hastings GallerySpanish Institute) included a text by Calvo Serraller, signifcantly titled “Contemporary Spanish Art in Search of its Identity.” The author found the selection not entirely satisfactory but nevertheless supported the exhibition “because it fulfls the cultural purpose it aimed at: to show a new image of Spanish art and to awaken the interest of a public that ignores everything about it.”11 The list of works or their lack of identity might be problematic, but as long as the exhibition captured the attention of foreign audiences it was fne. He held a similarly pragmatic position that same year in his contribution for Five Spanish Artists (cur. by Donald Sultan, Artists Space, New York, 1985).12 He mentioned once again the lack of interest in any local tradition shown by all participants, arguably the most notorious Spanish painters of the time: Barceló, Campano, García Sevilla, Lamas, and Sicilia. Instead, he stressed their cosmopolitism and eclecticism, proudly claiming that “impact and projection have been achieved, leaving the feld rather open for young Spanish artists in the world’s current most proftable market, both in economic and aesthetic terms.”13 This combination of intellectual puzzlement on the one hand and sheer pragmatism on the other reappears in many texts Calvo Serraller wrote in those years, usually admitting that the goals (artistic and market promotion) justifed the means (sacrifce of personality in the name of cosmopolitism).14 By mid-decade, he could admit that artists ‘did not really care’ about identity: Neither for not against being Spanish, our young artists could not care less about the issue; since the beginning of the past decade, when the survival of Francoism was so implausible that no one would care to combat it from an aesthetic perspective, they seem to consider themselves from nowhere. Having access to sophisticated information on the latest international artistic trends, with growing possibilities of visiting and even living in the most prestigious avant-garde centres, what importance should they grant, from an artistic point of view, to their national identity?15

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That same year Calvo Serraller co-curated with Tomás Llorens L’imagination nouvelle. Les anées 70–80 (Paris, Museum of Modern Art, 1985). It was but one of an ambitious series of four big exhibitions of Spanish art organised by Giménez within the PEACE programme. In the catalogue he referred to the international homologation of Spanish art in terms of ‘liberation’ from the burden of the past: there is something quite clear in this new art: its will to get rid of a past that is perceived as a threatening burden, and the subsequent desire to build a style beyond the limits of traditional avant-garde. We are truly in the presence of a real wish to explore new horizons, to historically fulfl the old, emblematic commandment: plus ultra—granted, now detached . . . of any eschatological or redeeming component. These young artists’ plus ultra does not try to take Spain any further beyond, but actually attempts to go beyond Spain itself. Those who know the unbearable weight national identity has had in this country will immediately understand the audacious meaning of this challenge.16 Plus ultra (Latin for ‘further beyond’) is an inscription in the Spanish coat of arms dating back to the 16th century and to the expansionism of the Spanish Empire. Calvo Serraller’s reinterpretation of the motto from an internationalist point of view might seem a mere rhetorical fgure (even if the choice can hardly be deemed neutral, given Franco’s appropriation of that Imperial past and of the motto itself) but together with his appreciation of the artists’ disdain for the problem of national identity paradoxically comes to show the impossibility of eluding the past. As a matter of fact, this and other writings show Spain’s most conspicuous critic constantly bypassing a problem that would eventually remain unsolved: what makes Spanish art ‘Spanish’? Unable to fnd a suitable answer, he ended up saying that “there is no break-up with the past as traumatic memory loss; it is just suspended in order to better appreciate what there is today and what may be done with no restrictions in the close future.”17 According to Calvo Serraller, this sudden memory loss is then not the result of any trauma but a willing and strategical decision of the artists to readapt themselves to a new democratic and internationalised context—let alone the possibilities brought by Spain’s full insertion in a capitalistic market economy and a consumer society. The argument is debatable, but it is interesting in that it shows the same kind of sheer pragmatism that was—still is—often evoked to justify the voluntary oblivion of the past that characterised certain developments within the ‘Transición.’ A given degree of amnesia was then allegedly necessary for the sake of moderation and consensus. Obviously enough it did not actually save Spanish people their share of trauma, as the harsh ongoing debate on the character and limits of the so-called historical memory prove.18 Foreign audiences did not buy this argument easily. They often criticised the lack of personality of Spanish art, pointing out the striking similarities between the work of Spanish artists and that of international fgures such as Kiefer—in the case of German critics19—or Basquiat—US ones.20 Catherine Grout put it quite crudely: In the Eighties . . . a rampant international market with an eclectic interest in painting meant that Spanish artists could best establish themselves by eliminating any too explicit a reference to their specifc tradition or to the History of Art. . . .

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Daniel A. Verdú Schumann In this climate, too many young artists have aspired to an international context beyond their native borders, undermining their own work inasmuch as they surrendered to various fashions.21

It could be argued that this kind of criticism was just an expression of the disappointment of foreign critics in front of artworks that did not fulfl their expectations concerning Spanish art and identity—expectations shaped by a long romantic tradition of exoticism.22 In the words of Spanish critic Anna Mauri: “foreign critics . . . patronizingly observe Spain’s effort to measure up to international standards in all cultural felds, while . . . they are paradoxically interested in the ‘most’ Spanish painting— according to their own imaginary models.”23 As a result, as another Spanish observer put it while analysing the reception of Spanish art in London, foreign critics felt that: their Spanish roots are nowhere to be seen. . . . Nobody denies that Barceló and Sicilia are excellent painters and that Susana Solano is a terrifc sculptor. What they criticize about them is that their work could very well be the product of the Berlin School, or of the New York, Glasgow or London one for that sake—and that, as such, is not that interesting, especially if they are trying to endorse it like a sample of contemporary Spanish art.24 This seems indeed to have been mostly the case with foreign critics, despite some exceptions.25 As a matter of fact, Spanish art did achieve a certain international and critical recognition around 1986–1987, but it did not last long. Even if we assume many other elements might also have played a role in the ephemeral nature of this ‘Spanish boom’—the previously mentioned prejudices of international public and critics regarding a given Spanish identity, the global market’s ever-growing hunger for new and exotic images, soon satisfed by Eastern European and Latin American art—it seems hardly arguable that the lack of personality of Spanish art, which had tried to shortcut its way to postmodernism by imitating foreign models, was one of the main reasons for that failure. Wishing to detach themselves from a past they considered a burden, many artists decided to ‘borrow’ some of the most obvious features of the new American, German, and Italian painting. This mimicry, even if greeted with enthusiasm by many in Spain as a sign of modernisation and cosmopolitanism, was obvious for the foreign eye. Spanish artists traded identity for recognition, eventually losing both. As suggested also in other chapters in this volume, the boundaries between concepts such as modernisation, globalisation, and self-colonisation are blurred, particularly in transitional and post-transitional times.

The Promotion of Alternative Artistic Identities by the Autonomous Communities Parallel to this process of internationalisation Spain was also undergoing an opposite one: the legitimate vindication of a local and regional cultural diversity largely silenced and even censored during Francoism. After forty years of reactionary centralist Spanish nationalism, the recognition of such differences was meant to be a key element in the democratisation process. Many governments of the newly established Autonomous Communities, particularly the so-called historic ones, had now the

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possibility and the means to adequately promote local elements, traditions, and artists, therefore counterbalancing both aesthetically and ideologically the impoverishing unifying view of the country fostered by Franco’s regime. For the art world this was the beginning of a whole series of exhibitions and policies promoting the distinct identity and personality of the different territories that made up the Spanish State. As a result, Catalan art, Basque sculpture, Galician ‘Atlantism’ or Andalusian painting—to name just a few—became well-established concepts among Spanish art critics. These labels tried to catch up with and re-evaluate local traditions, often with the postmodern alibi of the genius loci and its purported resistance to the homogenisation brought by a then just emerging globalisation. The number of exhibitions devoted to these ‘regional’ artistic trends organised and/or sponsored by the governments of the Autonomous Communities and other local and regional institutions with mostly public funding is impressive: for the period between 1979 and 1992 and sticking to the ones big enough to be announced—regardless of their geographical venue—in the most important Madrid newspapers, there were almost twenty exhibitions on art from Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Andalucía each, and almost 25 on Galician art—i.e. roughly two a year. Some of those shows even travelled abroad.26 One of the purposes of these promotion policies was to support and reinforce a given local or regional identity as embodied in certain cultural manifestations. Like any other operation involving something as elusive as identity, this proved to be a complex procedure. It was undertaken from different perspectives in each territory, and a quick survey of the exhibition catalogues shows that even within each of them, different art critics and promoters held often diverse—when not directly opposite— points of view. While some authors limited their quest for a more or less repressed identity to the realm of culture and aesthetics, many others linked it to a particular historical tradition datable at least to the late 19th-century–early 20th-century nationalism, abruptly suppressed by the Civil War and the dictatorship. Some showed a more or less ideological or even political agenda, others did not. The analysis of all these materials would give an in-depth image of the extremely intricate identitarian and ideological panorama of early democratic Spain as refected in the arts. The task, however, well exceeds the limits of this chapter. Instead I will concentrate on the rhetoric deployed by some critics to support or deny the existence of these regional, smaller-than-nation-state artistic identities. Having explained the boomerang effect of the denial of any identitarian legacy in the promotion of Spanish painting abroad, throwing some light on the motives and consequences of the opposite position might prove telling. This other side of the identitarian coin remains however a complex, multifaceted issue. While many art critics and curators advocated the recuperation of certain artists and discourses on legitimate historical and artistic grounds, others drew rather deterministic and chauvinistic arguments that seemed borrowed from 19th-century positivism. Appeals to geography and history were made to recall a purportedly ‘essential’ inner character of the people inhabiting a given territory: a character defned ultimately by its climate, orography, evolution, or landscape. Bridging over the values brought by modernity and modernism, some of these theories were strikingly similar to the highly conservative, even reactionary ideas of 19th-century nationalism. I will provide some examples. Andalusia, a region well-known in and out of Spain for the purportedly distinct nature of its cultural manifestations and the ‘strong personality’ of its people, is a good case study. Many critics, curators, and promoters underlined in their texts

204 Daniel A. Verdú Schumann precisely these traditional traits in order to explain what they called the ‘Andalusian soul’: a soul with a particular fair and sensitivity for the artistic, from Diego Velázquez to Pablo Picasso via Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca. This eventually allowed them to ramble about the universality of the ‘Andalusian genius,’ capable of successfully intertwining tradition and modernity—be it a bullfghter, a famenco dancer, a poet, or a painter. And this was by no means a position held solely by nostalgic or conservative people but by critics from all sectors of the ideological spectrum. Francisco (‘Quico’) Rivas, a Sevillian by adoption critic and curator who played an important role in the promotion of painting in the late seventies and eighties and who defned himself as anarcho-syndicalist, stated: “It is undeniable: there is Andalusian soul beyond all ethnographic, anthropological, political, historiographic, psychological or administrative polemics.”27 Similar deterministic arguments were deployed to defne the personality of the people and the arts of other territories. See for instance this description of the Catalan by critic and curator Gloria Moure, herself a follower of Bonito Oliva’s theses: Catalan people are fundamentally in agreement with its natural environment and often content if they can just infer from it a certain order, harmony and balance. Nevertheless their lyricism, rich with sensuality as any other Latin culture, implies a deep consideration of what they know, albeit far from the dramatism a more hostile physical environment would bring. . . . The casual product of the millenary intertwining of cultures, Catalan creativity swings between systematizing idealism and libertarian belligerence, from the purest lyrical tension to the most symbolic and inscrutable romanticism, connecting both with the Mediterranean Basin and Central Europe. The anxiety to adapt itself to all mutations and to open up to all infuences is a historical constant.28 One could probably fnd at least one example of such crude generalisations for each Spanish Autonomous Community, with minor adaptations in each case. Cultural promoters in the distant and volcanic Canary Islands made extensive use of geographical and climate clichés in their texts, referring to its “telluric rhythm” or the “syncretic attitude” of its inhabitants.29 In Aragon, Goya was unsurprisingly the paradigm of genius loci, but the list of Aragonese ‘typical features’ was so vague, long, and allcatching that it could basically be applied to anyone.30 The most paradigmatic case, however, was undoubtedly that of Galicia. Atlántica was a Galician art group openly conceived as a follow-up of the Galician avant-garde culture rooted out by the Spanish Civil War. It held fve exhibitions between 1980 and 1983 in small and big locations of this northwestern region of the Iberian Peninsula. The brains behind the whole project was art critic and ‘Minister of Culture’ of Galician regional government José Antonio (later Xosé Antón) Castro Fernández, another enthusiastic disciple of Bonito Oliva, who in fact collaborated in some of the shows. The key idea behind the whole project was ‘Atlantism,’ or the centrality of the Atlantic Ocean and the Celtic substrate in the history and people of Galicia, as opposed to ‘Mediterraneism’ and the Iberian substrate traditionally associated with Spain. The whole concept was based on a typically romantic understanding of the infuence of climate, geography, and history in the shaping of a nation’s spirit.31 Castro Fernández claimed the existence of an essentially Galician identity that could be traced back to pre-historical megaliths and from then on through medieval,

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Renaissance, Baroque, 19th-century, and modern and contemporary art—including 1980s painting, even if in this last case one had to dig really deep to fnd that hidden essence.32 He insisted in the invigorating nature of Bonito Oliva’s theories, eventually surpassing the Italian critic in terms of enthusiasm: Atlantic Expression, which loves tradition and the past without nostalgia; which appeals to the decisive moments in our artistic history; which dresses up with constant living expressionism and primitivism, both sons of a humid, saudosa, pantheistic and romantic Galicia, with landscapes outlined by the eternal struggle between the sea and the land; a Galicia pregnant with imagination, literature, individualism, other lights and colours. An atmosphere that imbues Galician authors with vitality and a certain demiurgic quality. . . . Primitivism, which defnes Galician sculpture throughout many eras, recreates the roots of popular life, the Galician soul, the essence of an anthropologically eternal Galicia.33 Atlántica and other local shows established quite a reputation for some Galician artists (Lamas, Lamazares, Patiño) in Spain and even briefy abroad,34 at least in the short and medium run. This success was only possible thanks to the tremendous economic and organisational support it received from most Galician public and private institutions: the Galician Government, Provincial Deputations, Municipalities, savings banks, regional newspapers, local foundations, the Galician Association of Architects, the Archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela, the Pontevedra Art Biennale, etc.—even the Spanish Ministry of Culture collaborated at one point. Furthermore, many artists saw some of their works acquired by the two most relevant Galician art collections, Arte Caixa Galicia (owned by a regional public savings bank) and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo (one of the many new art museums that mushroomed in all four corners of the Spanish state during the eighties and nineties). Both collections were in turn connected through the previously mentioned Gloria Moure, a real art factotum in Galicia. In the new democratic, decentralised, market-driven, and globally connected Spain, claiming a (legitimate) local identity was not only a matter of words but also of money and power. In this context of cultural, social, political, and economic momentum on the regional level it is not hard to see why many Spanish critics thought they could take advantage of Bonito Oliva’s theories on the genius loci to promote, in a very pragmatic way, a sort of ‘local brand.’ After decades of Hispanicisation imposed by Franco, the new threat seemed to be the cultural homogenisation brought by a globalised world. In the words of British-born, Spanish by adoption art critic Kevin Power: Without a complex knowledge of the place that is ours, without faith in that same place upon which knowledge depends, that place will inevitably be carelessly misused and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and fdelity, the culture of a country would become superfcial, ornamental and only effcient as a status symbol for the affectation of an elite. . . . I am not suggesting an easy return to the ‘roots of the land’ or ‘regionalisms,’ but rather that there is a certain regionalism that is necessary for the strict survival of civilisation.35 This point of view was on the other hand harshly criticised by those who thought it exemplifed the regressive nature of postmodernism, as denounced among others by

206 Daniel A. Verdú Schumann Habermas, Jameson, and Foster.36 In this train of thought, several art critics accused some of those local initiatives of being instrumental in the promotion of a mostly conservative, sometimes even reactionary reading of civilisation: No matter how manchegos they are: never under the rule of the environment as embodied in Hippolyte Taine’s determinism. Never obfuscated by the mirage of mental autochthonies that are only good for primitive brains. Without suspicious provincialisms. . . . Because that other thing, the now so drowsily trendy ‘roots,’ is sheer primitivistic phraseology, sentimentalism, paralyzing regression.37 In a similarly critical tone, an author explained this fascination for the genius loci in the Basque Country as a result of the coming to power of a certain “rural traditionalism,”38 stressing the absurd parochialism of such essentialist views in times of hybridity and globalisation: When German expressionists are shown in American museums as a proof of the inclusion of American Informalism (the chauvinistic New York School) in the History of Painting tradition; when US art collectors fght over the works of French ‘Nouvelle Figuration’ as a follow-up to their naïf paintings and hoppers; when the International Congress of the History of Art has been held in Washington under the slogan “Periphery and Artistic Metropolis”; and when one can clearly see that when it comes to artistic exchanges we live in a whole new era ever since the First World War, it seems a bit too pretentious (and above all demeaningly provincial) to try to establish the originality of the Biscayne.39 This was by no means the only case where critics claimed art and culture had been abducted by politicians for their own agendas.40 Pretty much the same was said about Atlántica itself, the project being defned as a mere “conversion of artistic praxis into ideology through nationalism.”41 Castro Fernández himself seemed to prove his accusers right when he stated that one of the Atlántica exhibitions was “the answer of Galician artists to the centripetal tendency that Madrid agglutinates in the Spanish State right now,”42 hence suggesting the allegedly eternal Galician ‘Atlantism’ was little more than a marketing strategy in the context of a political struggle between centralism and nationalism. It may come as no surprise that the Galician, Basque, and Catalan governments— all ‘historic’ territories with their own language, a similarly highly developed ‘national consciousness,’ and a rich artistic and cultural tradition—were in the hands of conservative parties when most of the previously mentioned shows took place. However, any strict and indisputable association between those deterministic views and an exclusively conservative political ideology remains troublesome. First, because one could indeed fnd a certain fascination for that geographical and historical determinism in exhibition catalogues from almost every single Spanish region, even in the ones governed by the socialists (like the previously mentioned case of Andalusia or those of Aragon and the Canary Islands to a lesser extent). Second, because many of the critics, curators, and other agents who openly supported and spread those views considered themselves ideologically progressive, regardless of the political colour of the government they worked under. And third, because given the number of exhibitions organised or promoted by each regional government, it would be wrong to assume

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politicians had total control over details such as the content and tone of each catalogue text. This entanglement of ideological, political, and identitarian issues seems to confrm the intrinsically mixed and untransferable nature of any process of selfdefnition and identifcation, particularly in a country with such a complex and defning recent history.

Conclusions It is a historiographical commonplace that Spain “missed the train of History” ever since the mid-18th century—meaning it did not beneft from the economic, political, social, and cultural modernisation brought by both the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, instead remaining a rather backward country that clung to the values of the Ancient Régime. Problematic and questionable as this generalisation may be, it was long assumed to be an undisputed truth in and out of Spain. Franco’s fxation with the opposite belief—that Spain was the grandest of all nations and that any criticism to its grandeur was just a revival of the old Black Legend43—did nothing but reinforce that self-deprecating image in the minds of sensible Spaniards. After forty years of being ‘different’ (one of the mottos invented in the 1960s by the Francoist Ministry of Tourism to promote Spain as a holiday destination), it was probably the desire to put an end to and maybe overcompensate for that pessimistic and defeatist attitude what triggered the whole country to embark from 1975 onwards on a schizophrenic journey to its own ambiguous, tortured, split, and multiple identity. The visual arts were just one of many stages in that journey. As a result of the political decentralisation, both the central and the newly established regional governments felt committed to the promotion of art and culture. After the socialists seized power in 1982, the central government decided to look predominantly to the future and associate Spain with a postmodern painting à la mode they thought would sell (in all senses) abroad, hence making true the mandate of the 1978 Spanish Constitution concerning “the progress of culture and of the economy to ensure a dignifed quality of life for all.” The Autonomous Communities, on the other hand, looked rather to the past than to the future in their quest for an identity they had been at least partially stripped of by Francoism, thus linking art and culture to that set of “traditions, languages and institutions” that had to be protected, according to that same constitution. They were undoubtedly also committed to the same modernisation values the central government was endorsing, but reading some of the mushy and mouldy lyrical effusions they justifed their projects with, it seems some of them though of the arts as an old-fashioned ornament, a beautiful but passé wrapping paper whose mission was merely to decorate the freshly acquired self-government with references and updates of past glories. Trading a national identity severely tarnished by its appropriation by a fascist regime for several recently revived regional and local identities associated with freedom and democracy seemed like a reasonable thing to do in the new political and social context. The operation proved nevertheless troublesome, as Franco’s neo-imperialistic delirium had had by then two unexpected, almost opposite consequences. On the one hand, it had triggered the rejection by most Spanish artists of a ‘national tradition’ they associated with Francoism, hence leaving them in a kind of identity limbo that lacked all sorts of roots and references, what in turn torpedoed the international agenda of Spain’s central government. That same rejection, on the other hand, had helped

208 Daniel A. Verdú Schumann rehabilitate neglected local traditions, only if sometimes to a point of parochialism not far from Franco’s own enthusiasm for the ‘Spanish soul.’ Joint ventures between cultural identity and national agendas never proved easy. Obsessed with the idea of ‘catching up’ with Europe and polarised around two partial (mis)conceptions of culture—both of which failed to account for its most precious quality in contemporary times: to be a critical tool to apprehend and transform reality—the Spanish art world fell for the trendiest, if not the most brilliant postmodern theories. As a result, much of the art (mostly painting) made in Spain in the 1980s was advertised, exhibited, and marketed either as an international brand without any particular identity or as its exact opposite, pure local identity carved in stone. But nothing is ever that simple. By the end of the decade, on the threshold of a new globalised era, it was quite clear that both strategies were dead-end roads, and a new generation of Spanish critics and curators were raising their voices to criticise what they saw as a lost opportunity.44

Notes 1. “Spanish Constitution,” Spanish Congress of Deputies, 21 July 2016, www.congreso.es/ portal/page/portal/Congreso/Congreso/Hist_Normas/Norm/const_espa_texto_ingles_0. pdf [Accessed: 10/08/2018]. The English singular word ‘culture’ in the second paragraph is the translation of the original Spanish plural form ‘culturas,’ hence the emendation in square brackets. All quotes from the Spanish Constitution refer to this offcial English translation; sections and not pages are given. 2. Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 127. 3. Falange Española was a political party founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera following the example of Italian fascism. In its early days Franco’s regime largely borrowed its theoretical principles to build up the ideological basis of what was until then basically a military, rather anti-intellectual movement. Falange eventually became one of the so-called families of the regime—others being the army, the Catholic Church, the Carlists, the monarchists (early on), and the Opus Dei (later)— although its infuence declined greatly after the defeat of fascism in the Second World War. 4. In the 1950s Franco’s regime supported Spanish informalist art in an attempt to cultivate a more moderate, modern image in the international arena. While obviously benefting from the exhibitions abroad, most of those artists however opposed the dictatorship and even considered their work a denunciation of the repression and lack of freedom in Spain. This is but one example of the complex ideological position of the arts and culture under Franco’s regime, a much discussed subject in Spanish historiography. The earliest attempts to tackle the issue are Alexandre Cirici i Pellicer, La estética del franquismo (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1977) and Antonio Bonet Correa, coord., Arte del franquismo (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981). Some basic readings are Ángel Llorente, Arte e ideología en el franquismo (1936–1951) (Madrid: Antonio Machado, 1995); Miguel Cabañas Bravo, La política artística del franquismo (Madrid: CSIC, 1996); Julián Díaz Sánchez, La idea de arte abstracto en la España de Franco (Madrid: Cátedra, 2013). A less conventional, more up-to-date approach can be found in the frst chapters of both Jorge Luis Marzo, ¿Puedo hablarle con libertad, Excelencia? Arte y poder en España desde 1950 (Murcia: Cendeac, 2010) and Jorge Luis Marzo and Patricia Mayayo, Arte en España (1939–2015). Ideas, prácticas, políticas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2015). For the Francoist re-readings of the past see Francisco José Moreno Martín, coord., El franquismo y la apropiación del pasado (Madrid: Pablo Iglesias, 2017). 5. Sections 143.1, 147.2.a and Additional Provision One. 6. Giulia Quaggio, La cultura en transición (Madrid: Alianza, 2014); Juan Arturo Rubio Aróstegui, La política cultural del Estado en los gobiernos socialistas: 1982–1996 (Gijón: Trea, 2003). Lately less descriptive and more critical accounts of the period suggest this

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7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

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conciliatory spirit was in fact a follow-up of Franco’s instrumentalisation of culture in the name of social consensus and political whitewashing; see for instance Marzo, ¿Puedo hablarle con libertad, Excelencia?; Guillem Martínez, CT o la Cultura de la Transición (Barcelona: DeBolsillo, 2012); or Gregorio Morán, El cura y los mandarines (Madrid: Akal, 2014). I fnd many of the arguments in these works problematic, but they do capture the Zeitgeist: after a long period when it was often regarded as exemplary (‘modélica’), more negative readings of the ‘Transición’—not limited to the artistic and cultural worlds—have mushroomed in Spain following the dire fnancial, political, and social crisis beginning in 2008. Cf. Daniel A. Verdú Schumann, “La llegada del Guernica a España o el Zeitgeist de la Transición,” in Guernica entre ícono y mito (Madrid: Vervuert) (forthcoming). ARCO was explicitly conceived as a launching pad for young Spanish artists; cf. an interview with its founder, Juana de Aizpuru, in Gloria Díez, “Juana de Aizpuru: «La feria pretende conectar a los jóvenes artistas españoles con el arte internacional»,” Diario 16, 16 February 1984, 25. Miquel Barceló would eventually become the epitome of the successful young Spanish artist, to the point that the expression “before and after Barceló” became a (rather reductionary) way to describe the modernisation of the Spanish art world in the 1980s. I have dealt extensively with the art of the 1980s and especially with its promotion and criticism in several works, most notably in Crítica y pintura en los años ochenta (Madrid: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid-B.O.E., 2007). Carmen Giménez, “Defender nuestro arte,” Lápiz 13 (1984): 10. All translations of Spanish texts are by the author. Achille Bonito Oliva, The Italian Trans-avantgarde. La Transvanguardia Italiana (Milan: Giancarlo Politi, 1980); Achille Bonito Oliva, Trans-avantgarde International (Milan: Giancarlo Politi, 1982). This label, with its return to narrativity, traditional techniques, and craftsmanship was an ideologically conservative but economically proftable response to both the globalisation of the art world and the heating up of the art market. As we will see, Bonito Oliva’s infuence on a whole generation of Spanish critics and curators will be enormous. Francisco Calvo Serraller, “Arte español en Nueva York,” El País, Supplement Artes, 29 March 1980, 1. One of the many ways Spain opened up after 1975 was through an increasing cooperation with foreign institutions. It should then come as no surprise that some of the exhibitions of Spanish art abroad, particularly in the frst stages, were curated by foreigners like Rowell or Sultan. Later on other critics and/or curators like Dan Cameron or Kevin Power also played a very important role in the promotion of Spanish art inside and outside the country. Francisco Calvo Serraller, “Artistas españoles, a la conquista de Nueva York,” El País, 26 April 1985, 34. Other critics have justifed this attitude as a logical result of the over-enthusiasm that defned those years; cf. Daniel Verdú Schumann, “Entrevista a Fernando Huici March,” in Desacuerdos 8. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español, eds. Jesús Carrillo and Jaime Vindel (Granada-Barcelona-Madrid-Sevilla: Centro José Guerrero/ Diputación de Granada-MACBA-MNCARS-UNIA arteypensamiento, 2014), 172. Francisco Calvo Serraller, “El arte español es nómada,” El País, Supplement Domingo, 24 November 1985, 12. Francisco Calvo Serraller, “La imaginación nueva,” in Del futuro al pasado. Vanguardia y tradición en el arte español contemporáneo (Madrid: Alianza, 1990), 160–161; this is a Spanish translation of the original “Les colonnes d’Hercule et la fn du monde,” in L’imagination nouvelle. Les anées 70–80 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1987), 11–19. Calvo Serraller, “La imaginación nueva,” 161. In 2007 the socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero passed the so-called ‘Ley de Memoria Histórica’ (Historical Memory Law), which recognised symbolically the victims of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s Dictatorship and required the elimination of Francoist symbols and legends displayed in Spanish cities and towns. It also adopted rather lukewarm measures to help recover the remains of thousands of people

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19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

killed by Francoist troops during and after the Civil War. The law was harshly criticised for different reasons by both right- and left-winged political parties and associations and remains a controversial issue in Spain. Peter Winter, “Spanische Bilder,” Kunstforum International 84 (1986): 252. Javier Martín Domínguez, “Nueva York: Pequeñas presencias en el gran escaparate,” Lápiz 33 (1986): 28; cf. Kim Levin’s review cited in Judd Tully, “Post-Franco cultural offensive puts Spanish art on the map,” New Art Examiner 5 (1987): 27. Catherine Grout, “Spain’s New Generation,” Flash Art International 138 (1988): 80. Cf.: “Spain hesitates between adapting to whatever comes from abroad and the return to its own sources, where many lively and vital resources exist”; Simone Guski, “Dramatische Gesten im Glaspalast,” Kunstforum International 88 (1987): 340. Winter says that German curators had specifcally selected ‘Spanish-looking’ pieces, “somehow distant, strange, almost exotic” (“Spanische Bilder,” 252). For other articles particularly loaded with clichés, see Barbara Probst Solomon, “Out of the Shadows. Art in Post-Franco Spain,” Art News 86, no. 8 (1987): 121; Christopher Kuhl, “The Spanish Infuence. A Visual Legacy,” Horizon 30, no. 10 (1987): 17–30; Robin Cembalist, “Spain. «I love Flamenco»,” Art News 89, no. 9 (1990): 127–129. Anna Mauri, “España. La pintura y la generación de los años 80,” Arena 1 (1989): 75–76. Cf.: “That was the frst and biggest paradox: they and we defned us as different, but we strained not to be. . . . That was our drama: we were neither ‘avant-garde’ nor ‘exotic’ or ‘primitive’ . . . nobody ever cared about who we actually were. They just expected a confrmation of what they thought we were”; Estrella de Diego, “Al borde,” in Impasse. Arte, poder y sociedad en el Estado español, ed. Glòria Picazo (Lérida: Ayuntamiento, 1998), 128. Eduardo de Benito, “Londres: Reacciones de la crítica ante las exposiciones de arte español. España, algo más que turismo,” Lápiz 34 (1986): 12–13. See for instance the texts of American critic and curator Dan Cameron, himself a key fgure in the promotion of Spanish art: “Report from Spain,” Art in America 73, no. 2 (1985): 25–35; “Spain Is Different,” Arts Magazine 61, no. 9 (1986): 14–17; “Arte in Spagna,” Flash Art 146 (1988), 98–99; “Cómo hemos cambiado,” Arena 1 (1989): 73–74. For instance 30 artistes valencians (Mainz and Bologna, 1981–1982), New Painting from Valencia (New York, 1982), Visiones Atlánticas (Vienna, 1985), Le déf catalan: de Picasso a la nouvelle génération (Dordogne, 1988), Artistas catalaes do fundo de arte da Generalitat de Catalunya (Lisbon, 1990), or Constantes del arte catalán actual (México D.F., 1991). Francisco Rivas, “Rompecabezas andaluz. Notas sobre la historia del Arte Moderno en Andalucía,” in Pintores de Andalucía (Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes, 1982), not paginated. Cf. José Ramón Danvila, “Andalucía. Arte de una década,” in Andalucía. Arte de una década (Sevilla: Junta de Andalucía, 1989), 5–7. Interestingly enough, Andalusia’s new Statute of Autonomy (2007) uses the word ‘culture’ and its derivatives ten times just in its preamble, full of general and bombastic considerations on the geography, history, and heritage of the region; see www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2007-5825 [Accessed: 21/07/2016]. Identity issues may no longer be a hot topic in the art world, but if applied to culture they are still a sexy asset when it comes to endorsing a political project. Gloria Moure, “La nueva pintura española,” in Trans-avantgarde International, 308. For another reference to the Catalan genius loci cf. Marta Moriarty, “Frederic Amat. El placer de viajar,” La Luna de Madrid 17 (1985): 26–28. Sometimes these views came hand in hand with a more or less open nationalistic claim; see for instance the catalogue of Extra (Barcelona, 1987), where its promoters explain the lack of support for the arts as a result of Catalonia not being an independent state (the original Catalan text is translated into English and French but signifcantly not into Spanish). Carlos Díaz-Betrana and Antonio Zaya, “Frontera Sur. Una selección de artistas canarios,” in Frontera Sur. Una selección de artistas canarios (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 1987), 7–23. Pablo J. Rico, “Genius Loci,” in Artistas aragoneses desde Goya a nuestros días (Zaragoza: Ayuntamiento, 1991), 33–44. Cf. with its companion text by Antonio Domínguez, “Los artistas aragoneses: entre Prometeo y Tántalo,” in Artistas aragoneses desde Goya a nuestros días (Zaragoza: Ayuntamiento, 1991), 45–48.

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31. Xosé Antón Castro Fernández, “Galicia y la convulsa identidad atlántica,” Figura 4 (1984): 24–27. 32. José Antón Castro Fernández, “La mirada atlántica. El arte gallego de los 80,” Tekné 2 (1986): 77. 33. Xosé Antón Castro Fernández, Expresión Atlántica. Arte galega dos 80 (Santiago de Compostela: Follas Novas, 1985), 78. 34. El arte gallego de los ochenta was shown at the New York Lincoln Center in 1984, while Nueva Figuración Gallega travelled through Latin America in 1985. That same year, Imágenes de los 80 desde Galicia compared the work of Galician artists to a sample of international (including Spanish) ones selected by Bonito Oliva himself; a collaboration that recurred in 1989 in Ateliers Roma-Compostela. 35. Kevin Power, “Los colores de la cultura,” Figura 6 (1985): 71. 36. Cf. the seminal texts by Jürgen Habermas, Die Moderne—ein unvollendetes Projekt (1980, with several [diverging] translations and editions); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984, later republished); and Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983) and Recodings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle and Washington: Bay Press, 1985). 37. Joaquín de la Puente, “Tantos como doce artistas manchegos,” in Realismo y fguración de La Mancha (Bilbao: Banco de Bilbao, 1986), 5. In the same catalogue José CorredorMatheos (“Realismo y realistas de La Mancha,” 19–23) carefully tries to avoid such determinism when looking for associations between the territory and the paintings. 38. Kosme de Barañano, “De nuevo los Ibéricos,” in Pintura española de vanguardia, 163. 39. Kosme de Barañano, “Algunas consideraciones sobre el arte vizcaíno,” in Arte Bizkaia (Bilbao: Diputación Foral de Bizkaia, 1987), 16. Ten years later, he insisted that things had only worsened up: “every autonomous region has its own tribe. . . . The native dancers have become protected species in each autonomous reserve,” in “De nuevo los Ibéricos,” 166. See also his criticism of the alleged “Basque aesthetics” (his quotation marks) in “El espacio en devenir,” Diario 16, Supplement Culturas, 19 November 1988, 27. 40. Still on the Basque case, see Javier González de Durana, “A propósito de los tiempos de las intenciones y las intenciones de las palabras,” in Nervión (Bilbao: Caja de Ahorros Municipal, 1986), 6–23; Maya Aguiriano, “Artistas vascos entre el realismo y la fguración (1970–1982). Artistas vascos-arte vasco,” in Artistas vascos entre el realismo y la fguración 1970–1982 (Madrid: Ayuntamiento, 1982), 13–38. It should be noted that in the Basque Country, where the existence of a purported ‘Basque soul’ embodied in a particular artistic and aesthetic tradition could be traced back at least to the early 1960s (the seminal text being Jorge Oteiza’s Quousque Tandem . . .! An Essay on the Aesthetic Interpretation of the Basque Soul, 1963), identity remained nevertheless a very touchy issue even during democracy. This was due to a number of reasons, among them the persistence of an essentialist, even racial element in relevant sectors of the Basque nationalism and the presence of ETA terrorism. This could help explain the reluctance of some Basque critics to associate art with an identitarian reading of their people and territory. 41. Fernando Castro Borrego, “Lo viejo, lo nuevo y lo diferente. La pintura española de los años 80,” in Pintura española de vanguardia (1950–1990), eds. Delfín Rodríguez et al. (Madrid: Visor-Fundación Argentaria, 1998), 145. 42. Castro Fernández, Expresión Atlántica, 84. 43. It is hardly by chance that this approach has recently been revived, parallel to the re-emergence of the far-right in Spanish politics, by a series of highly successful and polemical historical essays. 44. See for instance José Luis Brea, “Antes y después del entusiasmo,” Arena, nº 3 (junio 1989): 26; Mar Villaespesa, “Síndrome de mayoría absoluta,” Arena, nº1 (febrero 1989): 80–83. This chapter was written within the frame of the research project Long Exposure: The Narratives of Spanish Contemporary Art for ‘Wide Audiences’ (HAR2015-67059-P MINECO, FEDER).

12 Offcial Art Becoming Resistance Adopting the Discourse of ‘Dissent’ into Estonian Art History Writings Kädi Talvoja

Introduction According to historian Peter Fritzsche, resistance has become a central motif of historical writing, as it effectively develops an active historical subject and enables delineation of “the particularisms of identity in the shadow of the great homogenizing endeavors of the state.”1 This partially explains the deep entrenchment and broad spread of the discourse of ‘dissent’ in studies of Soviet culture, especially in analyses written after the fall of the Soviet Union.2 In visual arts, the model of dissent (until the 1990s the term ‘unoffcial art’ was preferred) was formed according to Moscow’s art scene, where quite an extensive alternative non-public art life emerged outside the offcial structures around the late 1950s and early 1960s. Furthermore, or even more than the motifs or stylistics of works of art expanding accepted limits—be it religious or erotic subject matter, the disreputable side of Soviet life, the formalist approach, or a similarity to contemporary Western art trends, etc.—this dissent was defned by artists’ non-affliation with offcial art institutions. As a rule, artists considered unoffcial were not members of the fne arts sections of the Artists Union, they did not take part in offcial exhibitions, they were not subsidised by the state, and their works were not purchased for public collections. There has been no notable reason to speak of artistic ‘dissent’ in Estonia’s case, but since Soviet ideology was forced upon the nation by a foreign power,3 images of resistance have had an important function to perform in the country’s (art) history writings since the re-establishment of independence—to function as a means of re-conquering history; of (re)writing it ‘as our own’. Yet, as Fritzsche points out it is also possible to see what resistance itself resists. . . . The concept of resistance overlooks as well the creative and generative potentials of new circumstances, which transform the resisting subject. Likewise, it tends to assume that the acts and gestures of resistance are more true to the identity of the subject than accommodation or collaboration.4 Indeed, one of the most important strategies of history writing on the visual arts of the Soviet era in Estonia as well as in the other Baltic States has been ‘desovietisation’;5 i.e. marginalising the phenomena that could be considered as Soviet, using the vocabulary of opposition to describe the rest. Although starting in the mid-1950s quite remarkable changes took place in Soviet cultural policy, blurring the division of what was permitted and disapproved in culture and obscuring even the notion of

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Socialist Realism itself, as a rule, the evolution of art is primarily associated with the ‘unoffcial’ side of culture. At the same time the ‘offcial’ art and cultural policy is mainly outlined as fxed and undynamic, or ignored altogether. Typically, the development of Estonian visual arts is represented as a narrative of national art, isolated from the larger context of the Soviet Union, especially disregarding any analogies or contacts with Moscow as a power centre. However, the very term ‘unoffcial’—launched in the West in the early 1960s to designate the ‘non-public’ art life in Moscow—was implemented into Estonian art historical writings relatively recently. The vocabulary of discourse on Soviet artistic dissent was initially brought into play in the texts introducing Estonian art to the English reader in the book Art of the Baltics: the Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression under the Soviets, 1945–19916 accompanying an exhibition in 2001 in the US at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, which holds the biggest collection of Baltic art abroad. The works had been donated to the museum in 1991 by American collector Norton Dodge,7 accompanying his huge collection of Russian unoffcial art. Considering the different, more open situation in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (less restrictive exhibition practices, more tolerant membership policy of local artists’ unions, etc.), Dodge himself did not defne the works by Baltic artists as examples of Soviet unoffcial art. The surveys of Estonian art in the book Art of the Baltics, especially the introductory essay by Sirje Helme, “Nationalism and Dissent,” presented a contrasting approach, deriving the arguments from very contextual differences to identify and conceptualise the varieties of dissidence in Estonian art.8 The adjustment with the discourse of Soviet (Russian) dissent can probably be explained as a strategy of ‘marketing’ Estonian cultural heritage to the West. However, moderately revised, similar concepts were adopted into the writings in Estonian for local readers. Although in the last fve to seven years alternative, more ambivalent descriptions of Soviet discourses have been offered by local scholars,9 the narrating strategies of opposition still determine the ‘canon’ of Estonian art history even if, in the Estonian case, this ‘canon’ actually just means a small number of texts. The most infuential interpretations of the art of the Soviet era have been offered by art history books, greatly written in tandem by Jaak Kangilaski and Sirje Helme,10 who both have been holding various high-impact positions since their graduation from the University of Tartu as art historians.11 The frst sections of this chapter offer insight into the background of the conceptualisation of Soviet artistic dissent, the different positioning of Baltic art, and the complicated conditions for reassessing the art history in Estonia in the transitional 1990s. Finally, the last part of the chapter will address the processes of adopting the discourse of ‘dissent’ into Estonian art history writings.

Constructing the Discourse of Soviet (= Russian) Artistic Dissent First, it should be underlined that the concept of Soviet dissent did not emerge as a self-descriptive notion from the Soviet Union but was constructed by Western observers around the early 1960s. Originating in the West, it certainly had a patronising slant and bore the symptoms of the polarity of the Cold War, implying Western liberalism and artistic freedom being the standard and offcial Soviet culture as a deviation from the norm. Hence, the societal conditioning for the rise of Soviet artistic dissent has been ascribed to the most pro-Western leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita

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Khrushchev. According to the author of the study Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective, Marshall S. Shatz: Open criticism of the past and the demand for improvement in the present did not well up spontaneously from below as soon as the heavy hand of the dictator was removed. . . . Instead, criticism fltered down from the very summit of the political structure, initiated by none other than the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, in his secret speech of 1956.12 Indeed, Khrushchev’s condemnation of the “cult of personality and its consequences,” his rhetoric of “friendship with peoples,” and cultural exchange programmes with the West opened a new arena for artistic experimentations.13 Although creative freedom exceeded the accepted limits quite fast, these processes could not be totally reversed anymore. The symbolic end of the cultural ‘thaw’ has been associated with the scandal at the exhibition 30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists in December 1962 in Moscow’s Manege exhibition hall. Attending the art show, Khrushchev already got irritated by the moderately experimental works included in the main exhibition, but his discontent grew into rage arriving at the display of abstract or semi-abstract works by students of Eli Beliutin’s studio and a few other invited artists, including Ernst Neizvestnyi and Ülo Sooster—an Estonian artist working in Moscow—arranged only the night before the leader’s visit.14 Khrushchev’s verbal attacks towards the artists resulted in their display being closed, quite a few of them were expelled from schools and the Artists Union, or they lost their jobs. What’s more, shortly after the wide-ranging campaign against formalism (especially against abstractionism) and Western infuences started, driving the most experimental forms of art out from the public sphere and triggering the spread of the alternative art life of apartment exhibitions—the breeding ground for art forms soon to be defned as ‘unoffcial art’. Mainly these processes affected the art scene in Moscow and initially it was the situation in Moscow that was the basis for constructing the discourse of ‘dissent’ in Soviet visual arts by Western diplomats, scholars, and art collectors. In peripheries the effects of the Manege incident might not have been perceived that clearly. For example, in Estonia on the contrary the Manege event stimulated an unreserved public discussion about art criticism in the cultural weekly Sirp ja Vasar.15 Compared to literature, Soviet unoffcial art in the 1960s was considered as quite a marginal segment of Soviet cultural dissent.16 The breakthrough in recognition of Soviet unoffcial art in the West came with the Bulldozer exhibition in 1974. Organised by artists as an unoffcial open-air exhibition on the outskirts of Moscow, Beliaevo, local civil servants were appointed by the authorities to intervene in the event to disperse the gathering. Their approach was savage: pictures were crushed by bulldozers, and some artists and journalists were beaten up. The brutality of the intervention certainly achieved news relevance in the West. Soon after the event, advocated by the signing of the Final Act of Helsinki (Helsinki Accords) in 1975 declaring that basic human rights should be accepted, a wave of emigration of Soviet artists and other intellectuals followed, bringing along more profound knowledge of the Russian contemporary art scene, as well as their art collections. A poet and translator named Alexander Glezer, one of the organisers of the Bulldozer exhibition, probably had the greatest impact on the feld, as he initiated museum displays of his vast

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Soviet art collection in Europe (Musée Russe en Exile [Russian Museum in Exile] in France in 1976) as well as in the United States (The Museum of Russian Art in 1980 in New Jersey), organised exhibitions, and published catalogues. Especially eventful was the year 1977, when several large exhibitions based on his collection were organised in the Paris Musée de l’Orangerie and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the latter accompanied with a voluminous catalogue.17 Additionally, an extensive show of one of the biggest collections of Soviet unoffcial art, that of American Norton Dodge’s, was held in Washington, also supplemented by a catalogue.18 Most importantly, in Italy in 1977, between ordinary biennial years, a grand festival of alternative culture from Eastern Europe was organised, remembered in history as the ‘Biennale del dissenso’ (Biennial of dissent). Being boycotted by the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the exhibition of visual arts New Art from the Soviet Union. An Unoffcial Perspective was put together on the basis of materials from Western collections, i.e. mainly Russian examples.19 Nevertheless, it is important to point out that before the fall of the Soviet Union, the presentations avoided highly politicised vocabulary, preferring terms like ‘unoffcial art’ or ‘new art’ instead of ‘dissent’ or ‘nonconformism’ and emphasised the aesthetic deviation from Socialist Realism of these works of art instead of stressing the position of the artists as active dissidents.20 More serious changes were brought into the formulations in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the breakup of the USSR gave Soviet-era artistic production a different kind of market value and historical role. Quite abruptly the unoffcial works of art were converted from objects of low monetary value to precious investments and the artists, being previously portrayed as casualties of the system, became the heroes of the struggle against the discriminative regime. So far the unoffcial art market had relied on the private patronage of foreigners and Russian intellectuals (including party members), far from providing artists with suffcient income for living. Starting with perestroika, selling both early avant-garde and works of (by then ex-) ‘unoffcial’ artists21 was stimulated by the Cultural Ministry of the Soviet Union. The outset of acknowledging these works as commercial commodities was Sotheby’s auction in Moscow in 1988, co-organised by the ministry, with recordselling prices.22 The event evoked the Soviet Russian art boom: besides the artists, many local art collectors sold their collections to the West for such sums that left poor Russian museums and galleries out of the competition.23 These changes also manifested themselves in semiotic shifts: the receding of the term ‘unoffcial’ and the rise of the stronger terms ‘nonconformist’ and ‘dissident’,24 which, instead of amplifying the position of the artists as sufferers being suppressed by the Soviet regime, accentuated their agency as active subjects. Furthermore, entering the global art market, the branding of dissident art needed more vigorous and clearer identifcation than “not conforming with Socialist Realism.” These conditions were best answered by the conceptual wing of Moscow artists of the 1970s and 1980s relating to Sots Art, leading to the rise of star artists like the inventors of the term ‘Sots Art’ Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid,25 as well as Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, Grisha Bruskin, and others deconstructing the symbols of Soviet power and lifestyle in their works. Sots Art certainly functioned best in refreshing the Western art market as an exotic ‘other.’ The other directions in Soviet unoffcial art, especially the works by representatives of the modernist trends contributing to individual expression, could not be subjected to commercialisation that well. For example, when Vladimir Nemukhin, whose hallmarks were half-abstract still lifes with playing cards, had one of his frst personal exhibitions in the West after the collapse of the Soviet

216 Kädi Talvoja Union, the confused curator there looked at his works and demanded explanations: “Tell me how you fought.” Nemukhin’s reply is quite telling: “I did not fght. I was fought against.”26 Similarly, the resentment against the over-politicised discourse of ‘dissent’ manifested itself in the book Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika. Answering the standard question of whether they considered themselves dissidents, most of the interviewed artists frankly distanced themselves from the political discourse and the heroic status of dissident, identifying rather with purely aesthetic and cultural objectives.27 By now Soviet unoffcial art has lost much of its appeal, enabling more balanced readings of its varieties and historical roles. In Russia, for example, the efforts to counter Western cultural hegemony in inventing new art trends or ‘discovering’ the unknown could be seen in the distribution of different terms to designate the phenomena—innovative, experimental, underground, non-public, (neo or new) avant-garde, independent, free, non-negotiable, forbidden, alternative, parallel, art of second culture, and other art.28 What’s more, a grand conference “Neoftsial’noe iskusstvo v SSSR: 1950–1980-e gody” (Unoffcial Art in the USSR. 1950s–1980s) held in 2012 in Moscow by the Research Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts of the Russian Academy of Arts indicates the rising interest in the subject in Russia. Presenting quite variegated points of view the conference acknowledged the diffculties in studying unoffcial art and the need to develop research methodologies.29

Collecting Soviet Baltic Art Although the pioneering overview Unoffcial Art in the Soviet Union already mentioned Baltic artists,30 it was not until the publication in 1977 of New Art from the Soviet Union: The Known and the Unknown, compiled on the basis of American Norton Dodge’s collection, that art from the Baltic States was more profoundly analysed.31 Norton Dodge—known for the world’s largest collection of nonconformist Soviet art—also became one of the most systematic Western collectors and acquirers of art from the Baltic States. As a scholar of the Soviet economy, he visited the Soviet Union around a dozen times between 1955 and 1977, including a few trips to Tallinn in the 1970s.32 Dodge’s collection also came to be the intermediary of the discourse of ‘dissent’ to Estonian art history writings. Namely, the texts written on the basis of his collections in particular became the starting point for rewriting the resistance narrative. Even so, it is worth emphasising that Dodge himself refrained from describing the Baltic States’ artists as unoffcial. In truth, however, only works by Estonian artists Tõnis Vint, Leonhard Lapin, Raul Meel, and Malle Leis were represented as examples of art from the Baltic States in the catalogue, “appear[ing] as a refreshing revelation that a creative art movement can exist in the Soviet Union under an ‘offcial’ designation.”33 Of course, one must take into account the fact that by the time this frst catalogue was published, Dodge’s collection from the Baltic States was still quite small and random. By the early 1990s, however, it had grown remarkably thanks to a network of agents involved in collection work, and when Nancy and Norton Dodge donated their collection to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in 1991, the Baltic portion included 1,330 works, 975 of which were Estonian-made.34 Supplementing the collection also continued later,35 although the undertaking might have lost its romance of secrecy and previous missionary motive of rescuing the works from loss.

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In 1990 Zimmerli obtained the collection of Russian art from George Riabov, who helped to pave the way for Dodge as well. As Zimmerli was founded only in 1966, too late to build up a comprehensive collection of Western art trends, Dodge’s donation matched the museum’s goal of fnding its specialty in the museum landscape. The takeover of the collection by the museum certainly changed its status. Additionally, the collection motivated the university to found a new centre for Russian and Eastern European studies. A more serious ‘branding’ of Soviet unoffcial art started in 1995, when the grand exhibition From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union was opened and a comprehensive catalogue and an interview book were published.36 Moreover, in 1997–1998 a travelling exhibition on the collection was curated for Europe by Rudi Fuchs from the Stedelijk Museum and independent scholar Konstantin Akinsha from Washington, being displayed (with an extended proportion of Estonian art, selected by Sirje Helme) in Tallinn, as well.37 As the reception of the exhibition in Estonia shows, the juxtaposition with the Russian works of art didn’t do justice to the Estonian examples, technically masterful but rather muted in the sense of political messages, which greatly applies to the Latvian and Lithuanian works of art as well. Therefore, presenting Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian works separately from a whole collection dominated by Russian artists seems crucial in establishing the brand of nonconformist Baltic art. In 2001 a special exhibition The Baltics: Nonconformist and Modernist Art during the Soviet Era was organised, accompanied with a voluminous book,38 which certainly left its mark on the (re)conceptualisation of Estonian art from the Soviet period internationally as well as at home.

State of Affairs in the 1990s for (Re)writing the Art History of the Soviet Period Although the end of Soviet censorship in the late 1980s and regaining independence in 1991 brought along the possibilities and the necessity to rewrite Estonian art history, the economic and institutional settings, not to mention the insuffcient theoretical and methodological grounds, did not boost such a task instantly.39 In the early 1990s, when Estonia entered the market economy system, state funding for the arts and science dried up. The currency reform of 1992 led to a rise in the level of poverty among the population, hitting institutions, too. At the same time, in 1992, the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Estonia was established with a yearly budget exceeding the sum the Estonian Ministry of Culture assigned for visual arts by several times.40 This discrepancy certainly determined the power lines of the sphere of art for a while. The Estonian Soros Centre belonged to a system of foundations comprising countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union. Financed by Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros (who did not intervene in the policy or the actual activities of the centres), the purpose of the organisation was to encourage the development of contemporary art of these ex-socialist countries and develop international connections. As the focus of the Soros centres was quite narrow, i.e. contributing mainly to new technologies, in Estonia the support system and exhibitions primarily stimulated the careers of younger artists, marginalising the older generations working in more traditional manners and, for the most part, going on with the styles matured during the Soviet period. The changes also manifested themselves spatially, as the curated annual exhibitions of the Soros Centre at the most

218 Kädi Talvoja prominent gallery, Tallinn Art Hall, took over the role of traditional overview exhibitions of the Artists Union.41 Although until the end of the 1990s the reassessment of the Soviet era wasn’t the main issue of art historians, the (re)accentuation also occurred towards Soviet heritage, turning the focus from highly valued technically perfected paintings and prints to the margins of art. The exhibitions from the 1990s mainly mapped the alternative art felds: happenings, experimental works by young artists, groupings, and the self-initiated exhibitions from the 1960s and 1970s.42 These displays were greatly based on private collections as the public collections of the Art Museum of Estonia and Tartu Art Museum responded to the conservative purchase policy of the Soviet Estonian Ministry of Culture. What’s more, moving the Art Museum of Estonia from a popular location of weekend walks in Kadriorg Park to the Rüütelkonna building in Toompea, too small to host a permanent exhibition, left entire generations without the visual knowledge of (Soviet) Estonian art. Additionally, in the early 1990s the third public art collection, that of the Tallinn Art Hall, lost quite a part of its acquisitions. This collection had been purchased by the Art Fund of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was an economic structure supporting the activities of the Artists Union. This collection was regarded as a golden fund of Estonian art during the Soviet times. Compared to the purchase policy of the Ministry of Culture the selection principles of the Art Fund were less ideological, enabling works with experimental character to be purchased. However, during the transition period in 1991–1992 a great part of the collection was lost: many works were sold back to the artists, many disappeared without a trace. The archive and documentations of the fund also went missing along with the information about the deposited works to ministries, party and city committees, hospitals, schools, editorials, etc.43 However, the extent of the loss was acknowledged somewhat later, around the mid-2000s, when the more systematic mapping of Soviet heritage started in relation to the opening of the new building of the Art Museum of Estonia—Kumu—in 2006 with spacious halls for permanent display of the art of the Soviet period as well as a gallery for special exhibitions of the era. The situation of the 1990s was comparably paralysing for art history research. During the reforms in the frst half of the 1990s, the main research centre of the Soviet era, the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, lost its role as an umbrella institution of scholarship and its former institutes were united with universities.44 As many other departments, the art history section under the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History45 had to reduce its staff and activities, in time narrowing its focus to the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. Likewise, due to the lack of funding in the late 1980s and early 1990s the few existing art history periodicals stopped distribution one after another, being issued thereafter under the new titles rather sporadically.46 During this decade, not many articles with theoretical ambitions or analyses leading to generalisations about the art of the Soviet era were published. Here, two of them deserve mentioning: “Modernkunstist Lääne-Ida-vahelises Eestis” (Modern art in Estonia between West and East) by Tamara Luuk47 from 1991 and an article from 1998 “The Change of Paradigm in the Western Art of the 1970s and Its Refection in the Estonian Art World,” by Jaak Kangilaski. Drawing implicitly on the widespread assumption of the Soviet era as an interruption of the ‘normal’ development of culture, i.e. orientation to Western European values, Tamara Luuk and Jaak Kangilaski have both described the dynamics of Estonian

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art in their articles primarily in the context of Western art discourses. Still, neither of them ground their interpretations on the motif of resistance to the Soviet regime that much as they see the different discourses being intertwined. Luuk insists that Estonian art (of a culture of a small nation) has always been oriented to surviving and persisting, and therefore, drastic opposition between offcial and underground art never rose. According to her during the Soviet period the defence mechanisms of Estonian art found expression in the aestheticism and cultivation of technical virtuosity.48 Kangilaski, in his article, outlines three discourses at work in Soviet Estonian art life: occupational power (offcial Soviet discourse), national-conservative forces (whose values were grounded on the traditions of the 1930s), and potencies oriented to Western avant-garde. What’s most important, according to him, is that most of the works of art were adaptable for all three discourses, although each discourse offered a different explanation, evaluation, and position of the works.49 While both Luuk and Kangilaski virtually avoid comparisons with developments in Russian unoffcial art, the weighing of the two schools was made somewhat inevitable by the travelling exhibition of Dodge’s collection from the Zimmerli Museum in Europe, which landed in Estonia at the end of 1997. The show was put on view in Tallinn at the freshly opened contemporary art gallery of the Estonian Art Museum in the Rotermann Salt Storage with an extended selection of Estonian art chosen by the director of the local Soros Centre, Sirje Helme. She was also the author of a TV broadcast about the exhibition, which included a spontaneous, fairly unedited discussion between local art critics about the positioning of Estonian avant-garde in the context of Soviet (Russian) nonconformism.50 As a document of its time the TV show discussion clearly demonstrates that at the end of the 1990s, which still belonged to the heyday of the Soviet nonconformist art market, the temperate mode of Estonian avant-garde could not compete with the Sots Art-type expressions. Instead of establishing its particularities in a comparative context, Estonian art seemed to lack radicalism and political attitude. By all means, after the exhibition the direct comparisons with works by Russian nonconformists were habitually avoided again. What’s more, the frst general overview of Estonian art of the new era, Lühike eesti kunsti ajalugu, published in 1999, was written as a hermetic national narrative with minimal references to the parallels or wider context of the Soviet Union.51 It was a compact study (300 pages) of which more than half were dedicated to the Soviet period. Although the authors, Sirje Helme and Jaak Kangilaski, avoid very constitutive statements, they claim that since the 1960s Estonian art differed from the offcial art of the Soviet Union, being strongly infuenced by Western contemporary art. As these days the knowledge of Western art could only be acquired from reproductions in books and art magazines, the term ‘repro avantgarde’ is launched. The book accentuates the special role of the collectives of young artists (ANK’64, Soup’69, Visarid) and brings out the mild strategies of opposition, emphasising the defence mechanisms of Estonian art: the return to pre-war artistic values, the emphasis on specifc formal features of artworks, the preference for neutral genres as landscape and nature-morte, the urge for (mental) privacy, the distance from social environment, the lack of relation with social reality, the reliance on virtual Western art models, etc. More importantly, the authors assert that dissident art never developed in Estonia: the rebelliousness of young artists was not political but directed against mental and societal stagnation.52 Neither are the terms of international discourse on Soviet ‘other art’ like unoffcial, nonconformist, etc. used.

220 Kädi Talvoja Retrospectively, it seems that the vocabulary of the ‘Western’ discourse needed a Western context, language, and reader before being adopted into art history writings in Estonian.

Adopting the Discourse of ‘Dissent’ Into Estonian Art History Writings The frst overview exhibition of Dodge’s Baltic art collections after the fall of the Soviet Union53 was curated by émigré Estonian Eda Sepp54 in Toronto in 1992, titled Baltic Art during the Brezhnev Era: Nonconformist Art in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In the catalogue, the curator highlights in her introduction the signifcant contributions made by Baltic artists towards the restoration of independence in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, although the portrayal of most of the works of art in the catalogue is fairly formal.55 Still, rare video footage of an interview with Sepp at the exhibition lay open the deeply political interpretations of pictures, pointing to the ‘subtle ways’ of artists reacting to the political demands, the secret language of channelling the disapproval of the regime (Figs. 12.1 and 12.2). What’s more, the confusion of the journalist activates the Stalinist discourse. Explaining the background of the works, Sepp now situates the pictures from the Brezhnev era into the climate of the harshest Stalinist years: “The offcial style of the Soviet Union was Socialist Realism . . . it had to glorify

Figure 12.1 American collector Norton Dodge, Estonian artist Siim-Tanel Annus, curator Eda Sepp, and a local journalist at the exhibition Baltic Art during the Brezhnev Era: Nonconformist Art in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in Toronto 1992. Film still. Source: Film Archives, National Archives of Estonia, collection of Canada Tartu College no. 782, item no. 28401.

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Figure 12.2 Curator Eda Sepp at the exhibition Baltic Art during the Brezhnev Era: Nonconformist Art in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in Toronto 1992. Film still. Source: Film Archives, National Archives of Estonia, collection of Canada Tartu College no. 782, item no. 28401.

the state. . . . Anything of an abstract nature or different nature, anything that did not glorify the state, was not considered offcial by Soviet standards.” The journalist is satisfed: “That’s exactly what I need.”56 More straightforwardly, the discourse of ‘dissent’ established itself in the voluminous book titled Art of the Baltics: the Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression under the Soviets, 1945–1991, published by the Zimmerli Museum ten years later. It is the Estonian introductory text in the book by Sirje Helme that most clearly reveals the desire to represent Estonian art heritage as exceptionally self-suffcient or avantgardist. It becomes especially apparent when compared to the opening essays from Latvian or Lithuanian positions. When the representative of Latvia, an American art historian of Latvian descent, Mark Allen Svede, in his essay addresses the national clichés and ethnic essentialism prevailing in Baltic art historiography,57 the Estonian artists certainly are represented as the most progressive Balts.58 And, when poet and art historian Alfonsas Andriuškevičius fnds that there are no pure nonconformists or conformists in Lithuanian art and the majority of artists who worked during the Soviet period could be called semi-nonconformists,59 the prime importance of the authors of the Estonian chapters appears to be writing Estonian art into the scenery of dissent as being equal to that of Moscow. First, the mediatory role of Ülo Sooster,60 the Estonians’ main alibi to speak of dissent and nonconformism, is magnifed, and texts have been peppered with Estonian artists’ contacts with Russian nonconformist

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artists but again, avoiding the direct juxtaposition of works. In her introduction, Sirje Helme writes: “Because the people of the Baltic republics have different histories, traditions, languages, motivations, and fears, the dissidence in these countries differs from that of Moscow.”61 Consequently, “the national defence mechanisms” of Estonian artists—voluntary silence, conscious isolation, focusing on problems of form, preferring neutral motifs, or other “non-interference” lifestyles—are classifed as dissenting practices. Curiously, a wish to shape the model of dissent into a form that was suitable to Estonia has quite an unorthodox outcome. Paraphrasing Peter Fritzsche: these strategies bring forth the “passive subject,” far too often having lost visibility in history.62 However, publishing a revised version of the text in Estonian under the title “Unoffcial art. Forms of resistance in Estonian art,” the cover term ‘dissent’ was replaced: “I believe that in Estonian circumstances, it is most ftting to use the word ‘unoffcial’ with the meaning of its most important feature—non-adherence to the expectations dictated by art ideology in the Soviet Union.”63 Although Helme refers in a footnote that the frst version of the article has been written at the request of the Zimmerli Museum, her choice to use a different umbrella concept in Estonian is not addressed. Nevertheless, the opening page of the article might give an explanation. Namely, she points out that younger generations do not comprehend the heroisation of one or another historical phenomenon as obvious resistance and have condemned the “oldschool avant-gardists” for having made too many compromises to be esteemed dissidents.64 The milder, politically less charged term ‘unoffcial’ seems to serve here as a concession to avoid confrontation. What’s more, in her interpretation, the designation ‘unoffcial’ enables a great part of Estonian art of the Soviet period to be dignifed (de-sovietised). She explains: “The question is nevertheless not about a single style, for while it is diffcult to defne a style that was not allowed (since there were so many of them), one can always defne a style that was allowed and demanded in all of its changes—from orthodox Socialist Realism through severe style and Soviet Surrealism.”65 With this statement, she literally proclaims the whole of Estonian art made since the end of the 1950s (except the local version of the all-union severe style) to be unoffcial, factually annulling the (original) meaning of the term and draining out its capacity as a critical term of art history writing.

Afterword For today, the signs of the discourse of ‘dissent’ being toned down are evident. The last grand chapter in Estonian art history writing—a project with six volumes of art history—is still a work in progress, and by now four volumes out of six have been published, including the survey of the Soviet era, coming out in two parts (2013, 2016). The project was launched by the Institute of Art History of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 1998 as the frst extensive scholarly undertaking in the feld fnanced in the new funding system of sciences as a project grant by the Estonian Science Foundation. Sirje Helme, being again the main author of the chapters on the visual arts (painting and prints) in the volume on the Soviet period, asserts in the second part of the book: the binary opposition of offcial and unoffcial art in the historical writing of the 1990s was natural, because we were just beginning to perceive a wider context of art history that encompassed phenomena that offcial interpretations hadn’t

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until then allowed us to research or expand on. . . . By now, the need for a stricter binarity is no longer there.66 She is still reluctant to renounce the term ‘unoffcial art,’ but restricts the usage of the expression to the phenomena that were not recorded or analysed during the Soviet period.67 All the same, the approach of the book still overlooks what Fritsche has phrased as “the creative and generative potentials of new circumstances” [of the Soviet cultural policy and reality]. The question of “what resistance itself resists”68 certainly hasn’t exhausted its potential to inspire art historical research, be it the ‘offcial’ generative reliance on innovation in art or ‘offcial’ cultivation of national particularities in culture to name a few.69

Notes 1. Peter Fritzsche, “On the Subjects of Resistance,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (2000): 147. 2. See Vladimir A. Kozlov, Sheila Fitzpatrick et al., eds., Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011); Robert Hornsby, Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 3. Estonia was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. The implementation of Soviet cultural policy and Sovietisation of cultural institutions started shortly after (being disrupted however by the German occupation in 1941–1944). 4. Fritzsche, “On the Subjects,” 147. 5. Skaidra Trilupaitytė, “Totalitarianism and the Problem of Soviet Art Evaluation: The Lithuanian Case,” Studies in East European Thought 59 (2007): 273. 6. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge, eds., Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression under the Soviets, 1945–1991 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 7. Norton Townshend Dodge (1927–2011) was an American economist. He began traveling to the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s as a Harvard doctoral candidate studying the role of tractors in the Soviet economy. Making his frst purchase in 1962, his collection grew immensely during the 1970s and 1980s (especially after inheriting his father’s estate in 1983), making him the leading collector of Soviet unoffcial art abroad. 8. Sirje Helme, “Nationalism and Dissent: Art and Politics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania under the Soviets,” in Art of the Baltics, 6–16. 9. E.g. Andres Kurg has questioned the opposition of unoffcial and offcial art, studying the works of art and architecture of the late 1960s and 1970s in connection with changes in the spatial context. See Andres Kurg, Boundary Disruptions: Late-Soviet Transformations in Art, Space and Subjectivity in Tallinn 1968–1979 (PhD diss., Estonian Academy of Arts, 2014); Mari Laanements, “Kunst kunsti vastu. Kunstniku rolli ja positsiooni ümbermõtestamise katsest eesti kunstis 1970. aastatel,” Kunstiteaduslikke uurimusi/Studies on Art and Architecture 20, no. 1–2 (2011): 59–91. 10. See Sirje Helme and Jaak Kangilaski, Lu hike Eesti kunsti ajalugu (Tallinn: Kunst, 1999); Jaak Kangilaski, ed., Eesti kunsti ajalugu, 1940–1991, Vol. 6, part 1 and 2 (Tallinn: Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, Kultuurileht, 2013, 2016). 11. Jaak Kangilaski (b. 1939) graduated from the University of Tartu as an art historian in 1963 and in 1969 got his degree as a candidate in the sciences (the Soviet equivalent of a doctorate). He made his name in the 1960s for his lectures on 20th-century art history and theories. Later, after moving to Tallinn, he worked as the head of the art history department of the State Art Institute of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (today Estonian Academy of Arts), serving 1989–1995 as the rector of the institute. Since 1995 he has worked as a professor of art history at the University of Tartu (since 2006 Professor

224 Kädi Talvoja

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

Emeritus), 2003–2006 performing as the pro-rector of the University. Sirje Helme (b. 1949) graduated in 1973 from the University of Tartu as an art historian, thereafter worked in the Kunst publishing house (since 1975 as the editor of the Kunst almanac). In 1992 she became the director of Soros Centre, in 2005 director of the branch of the Art Museum of Estonia–Kumu Art Museum and in 2009 the head of the Art Museum of Estonia. Marshall S. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1980]), 98. These programmes embraced the offcial exhibitions of Western art at the end of the 1950s, including contemporary art trends: in 1956 Picasso’s works; in 1958 exhibitions of prints from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico and art from socialist countries; in 1959 the American National Exhibition; in 1960 French art from the second half of the 19th century from the collections of the Soviet Union, painting from Great Britain 1700–1960, Mexican art; in 1961 French art. The programmes of the World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957 in Moscow also included a grand uncensored exhibition of art of different corners of the world and an open studio, where the revelatory show of abstract expressionist dripping technique by American Harry Colman was organised. The fact that the main exhibition had already been open for a while and the section of experimental works by young artists was organised only the night before the leader’s visit has given reason to suspicions that the scandal was deliberately initiated by conservative artists and offcials. “Kõne all on kunstikriitika,” Sirp ja Vasar, 14 December 1962–25 January 1963. The model for visual arts was generated by the example of the dissenting tendencies in Soviet Russian literature of the mid-1950s and early 1960s, especially by the texts distributed as tamizdats (referring to the smuggled manuscripts published abroad (там—there; издат from издательство—publishing house) in Western countries, astonishing Western observers for their open criticism towards the moral decay, hypocrisy, and careerism generated by the Soviet system. Wider resonance was given to the phenomenon by the notorious case of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago. As the frst Western art collectors recall, they knowingly started to inspect if similar trends occurred in visual arts. See Paul Sjeklocha and Igor Mead, Unoffcial Art in the Soviet Union (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), xi–xii; Norton T. Dodge, “Notes on Collecting Nonconformist Soviet Art,” in From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, 1956–1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 9. Igor Golomshtok and Alexander Glezer, Unoffcial Art from the Soviet Union (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977). The same book was also published in the United States: Igor Golomshtok and Alexander Glezer, Soviet Art in Exile (New York: Random House, 1977). Norton Dodge and Alison Hilton, eds., New Art from the Soviet Union: The Known and the Unknown (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1977). For more see: Maria-Kristiina Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions: (Re)writing the History of (Re)presentations,” Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture, 21 no. 3–4 (2012): 106−121. For example, the authors of the frst publication on the subject describe the unoffcial art being “generally non-political.” Sjeklocha and Mead, Unoffcial Art, xiii. Igor Golomshtok and Alexander Glezer point out that these artists are not opposed to the state structure and regime but against the offcial cultural policy. Golomshtock and Glezer, Unoffcial Art, xv–xvi, 85. The duration of Soviet artistic dissent is traditionally periodised between the year 1956 and the beginning of glasnost and perestroika, 1986. See Waltraud Bayer, “The Unoffcial Market: Art and Dissent, 1956–88,” Zimmerli Journal, no. 5 (Fall 2008): 58–83. For an overview of the collections of unoffcial art in Russia and abroad see Z. B. Starodubtseva, “Neoftsial’noe iskusstvo v muzeyakh, chastnykh kollektsiyakh v Rossii i za rubezhom v 1950–2010-e gody,” in Neoftsial’noe iskusstvo v SSSR: 1950–1980-e gody, eds. A. K. Florkovskaya, M. A. Busev et al. (Moskva: Buksmart, 2014), 402–439. E.g. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge, eds., Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience, 1956–1986 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge,

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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

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eds., From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, 1956–1986 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, eds., Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995) etc. “Original” concept of Russian unoffcial art only included works made in the Soviet Union. As the most renowned works by Komar and Melamid were done after emigration from Russia in 1977, their position might be seen as a compromise. Interview with Vladimir Nemukhin, 30.01.2008. Video recording owned by the author. See Baigell and Baigell, Soviet Dissident Artists. ‘Drugoe iskusstvo’: Moskva 1956–1988 (Moskva: Galart, 2005), III. The term ‘other art’ seems to be more prevalent than others, being used as the name of the museum of unoffcial art opened in 2000 in the Russian State University for the Humanities (in 2014 the collection was donated to the State Tretyakov Gallery) as well as in the titles of publications. See Leonid Talotshkin et al., Drugoe Iskusstvo: Moskva, 1956–76; k hronike khudozhestvennoij zhizni (Moskva: Interbuk, 1991); Victor Tupitsyn, ‘Drugoe’ Iskusstvo: besedy s khudozhnikami, kritikami, flosofami 1980–1995 (Moskva: Ad Marginem, 1997); ‘Drugoe iskusstvo,’ etc. See conference compendium A. K. Florkovskaya, M. A. Busev et al., eds., Neoftsial’noe iskusstvo v SSSR: 1950–1980-e gody (Moskva: BuksMArt, 2014). The authors assert it is in the two metropolitan centres, where offcial cultural policy originates, that the unoffcial artists enjoy the greatest freedom . . . in the provinces, away from the watchful eye of the cultural offcials where one might expect unoffcial groups to fourish, local political control is so restrictive that the artists can do little more than echo the approved offcial sentiments emanating from Moscow.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Anyway, the claim is provided with a footnote stating that unlike the other Soviet provinces, groups of unoffcial artists that were small but comparable to their Russian counterparts could be found in the cities of Tallinn and Riga. Nevertheless, the authors do not seem to rely on real evidence, as they do not mention a single name. Sjeklocha and Mead, Unoffcial Art, 104. Accompanying the frst major exhibition of Dodge’s collection at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Washington, D.C., the book was the frst printed record of his collection. Later Dodge’s collection was enhanced with the help of a vast network of agents and mediators. His main agents of Estonian art were his fellow academic Stephen C. Feinstein; émigré art historian living in Toronto, Eda Sepp, who visited Estonia from time to time starting in 1968; and Elena Kornetchuk. In 1978 Elena Kornetchuk had opened the art gallery Russian Images (later International Images) in Pennsylvania. Having an exclusive agreement with the Soviet government, she became the only offcially licensed art dealer from the former USSR in the United States. Stephen C. Feinstein, “The Avant-Garde in Soviet Estonia,” in Dodge and Hilton, New Art, 34. Norton T. Dodge, “Forward: Collecting Baltic Art during the Cold War Period,” in Baltic Art during the Brezhnev Era: Nonconformist Art in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Toronto: John B. Aird gallery, 1992), 5. Today the collection consists of over 20,000 works by more than 1,000 artists, www. zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu/collection/russian-art-soviet-nonconformist-art#.Wec TexOCx-U [Accessed: 15/10/2017]. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton Dodge, eds., Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956– 1986 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Baigell and Baigell, Soviet Dissident Artists. Before Tallinn, the exhibition was shown in Lisbon and Budapest, travelling later to Amsterdam and Antwerp. Rosenfeld and Dodge, Art of the Baltics. In 1986 censorship was limited to state and military secrets, pornography, racism, and war propaganda. Arup Banerji, Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2008), 102.

226 Kädi Talvoja 40. See Sirje Helme, “The Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia in the Extreme Decimal,” in Nosy Nineties: Problems, Themes and Meanings in Estonian art in the 1990s (Tallinn: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, 2001), 35–52. Since 1998 the institution has existed under the name Centre for Contemporary Arts of Estonia, being mainly funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. 41. The concepts of the annual exhibitions—‘Substance-Unsubstance,’ ‘Unexistent Art,’ ‘Biotopia (Biology, Technology, Utopia)’—raised questions about the borders of art. Mirjam Peil, “Jüri Palm: ‘Kunsti piire ei saa enam laiendada’,” Eesti Aeg, 30 March 1994. 42. For example: a retrospective of the artists’ group Soup’69 was held in the Tallinn Art Hall in 1990; in 1995 an exhibition of works of the group ANK’64 and a retrospection of an alternative exhibition of young artists, Harku 1975–1995, could be seen; in 1996 a grand project memorising the friendly contacts of avant-garde artists from Tallinn and Moscow during the Soviet period was organised; in 1997 a show of the artists’ group Visarid from Tartu was arranged, etc. 43. Anu Liivak, “An institutional viewpoint. A look back at the artistic landscape of the 1990s,” in Freedom of Choice. Perspectives on Estonian Art of the 1990s (Tallinn: Tallinna Kunstihoone, 1999), 136–147. According to Liivak, these illicit actions were initiated by the collection keeper, who had heard about forthcoming lay-offs in the institution. No investigation or judgement followed. 44. See: Eesti teadusreform—plussid ja miinused. 5. oktoobri 2001. a konverentsi materjalid (Tallinn: Teaduste Akadeemia kirjastus, 2001); Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia: aastatest Akadeemias (Tallinn: Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia, 2008). 45. During the 1970s the art history section had published two parts of Estonian Art History, by the early 1980s the texts for the next part (1955–1980) were also completed, but for some reason the third volume was never published. 46. Art almanac Kunst, being issued since 1958, was reorganised in 1992 to the quarterly Kunst: Art in Estonia (in reality two numbers were issued in a year), being closed down in 1996 to re-emerge in 2000 as a new Estonian-English magazine, Kunst.ee. The art history journal Töid kunstiteaduse ja -kriitika alalt (Writings on Art History and Criticism) had been established in 1976 (since 1981 bearing the name Kunstiteadus. Kunstikriitika [Art History. Art Criticism]). The last Soviet volume was published in 1986, and the next issue came out only in 1994 (now titled Kunstiteaduslikke uurimusi [Studies on Art and Architecture]). During the 1990s only three volumes were issued. The museums’ yearly scholarly publications under the name Kogude teatmik (Collections’ Guide) stopped in 1991. The new title Eesti Kunstimuuseumi aastaraamat (The Yearbook of the Art Museum of Estonia) also issued only three volumes in the 1990s. The Tartu Art Museum hasn’t managed to establish a new research publication to date. 47. Tamara Luuk (b. 1952) graduated from the University of Tartu as an art historian in 1976. Thereupon she started working at the art history section under the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History. In 1990 she moved to Brussels, and from 1997–2009 she worked there as an Estonian cultural attaché. 48. Tamara Luuk, “Modernkunstist Lääne-Ida-vahelises Eestis,” in Eesti kunstikontaktid läbi sajandite (Tallinn: Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia, 1991), 70. 49. Jaak Kangilaski, “The Change of Paradigm in the Western art of the 1970s and its Refection in the Estonian Art World,” in Rujaline roostevaba maailm / Rocking rust-free world (Tartu: Tartu Kunstimuuseum, 1998), 60–65. 50. Kunstiruum. Nonkonfromistliku kunsti näitus. 19 January 1998. ETV kunstisaated. RR arhiiv. https://arhiiv.err.ee/vaata/kunstiruum-nonkonformistliku-kunsti-naitus [Accessed: 07/07/2018]. 51. Sirje Helme and Jaak Kangilaski, Lühike Eesti kunsti ajalugu (Tallinn: Kunst, 1999). Initially the book was meant to be published in Finnish to introduce Estonian visual culture to neighbours. The frst version (in Estonian) was ready by the early 1990s, but for some reason the project remained unrealised. 52. Kangilaski and Helme, Lühike Eesti kunsti ajalugu. 53. The frst exhibition of Baltic art was held in 1981–1982 at the Contemporary Russian Art Center of America in New York. 54. Eda Sepp was born in 1935 in Estonia. Fleeing the Soviet occupation, the family arrived in 1944 in Stockholm, leaving in 1951 for Toronto, Canada, where the largest and most

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55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

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close-knit community of Estonians abroad appeared. After graduating from the University of Toronto art history department in 1966, Eda Sepp became one of the central fgures in cultural organisations like Friends of Estonian Literature and Kotkajärve Forest University, which were established to counterbalance the conservative nationalism and paranoia towards the Soviet homeland of communities centred around the Estonian House in Toronto. Later, being interested in feminist studies, Eda Sepp was one of the founders of the Estonian Women’s Studies and Resource Centre (ENUT) in 1997 in Tallinn. Eda Sepp, “Preface,” in Baltic Art during the Brezhnev Era: Nonconformist Art in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, 2. This video footage was flmed by an Estonian émigré in Toronto, freelance cameraman Edgar Väär. It is not known for what purposes it was recorded. Film Archives, National Archives of Estonia, collection of Canada Tartu College no. 782, item no. 28401. Mark Allen Svede, “When Worlds Collide. On Comparing Three Baltic Art Scenarios,” in Art of the Baltics, 23. Sirje Helme, “Nationalism and Dissent: Art and Politics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania under the Soviets,” in Art of the Baltics, 8. Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, “The Phenomenon of Nonconformist Art,” in Art of the Baltics, 27–28. Although Ülo Sooster was one of the central fgures in Moscow’s unoffcial art scene, his early death and his widow’s decision to deposit his works and archive in Estonia, the Tartu Art Museum, has resulted in the marginalisation of his role and position in the history (and market) of Moscow’s unoffcial art. Helme, Nationalism and Dissent, 6. Fritzsche, On the Subjects, 147. Factually the text in Estonian was published earlier. Sirje Helme, “Mitteametlik kunst. Vastupanuvormid Eesti Kunstis,” in Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 10 (2000): 255. Helme, Mitteametlik kunst, 253. Helme, Mitteametlik kunst, 255–256. It isn’t understandable what she means by Soviet Surrealism. Sirje Helme, “Paradigmamuutus kümnendivahetusel. Popkunst. Kontseptuaalne ja geomeetriline kunst; Realismi mõiste haljumine ja peavool kunstis” in Eesti kunsti ajalugu, 1940–1991, Vol. 6, Part 2, ed. Jaak Kangilaski (Tallinn: Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, Kultuurileht, 2016), 31. Helme, Paradigmamuutus, 31. Fritzsche, On the Subjects, 147. This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council (grant IUT32-1).

13 Gender and Art History in Poland A Constant Story of Subversion Paweł Leszkowicz

This text deals with the history of gender consciousness in Polish art history and art curating since the 1970s. In the development of a critical gender approach the crucial role has been played not only by art history as an academic feld but especially by art criticism and art curating. Hence, I will focus simultaneously on these intertwined academic and curatorial practices. The impact of culture wars on gender issues will be emphasised, as gender and sexuality-related themes in art and art writing have always functioned in Poland in a very volatile social and political climate determined by patriarchal nationalism and Catholicism. The analysis involves not only art history but also such current social questions as women’s and LGBTQ rights and far right politics in the wake of communism. Thus, the context of democratic transition and its problems is essential here. Critical gender consciousness has always played a subversive role in contemporary Polish culture and politics, therefore related art history discourse has had a socially engaged and often oppositional character. Poland joined the EU in 2004 and since then has hugely benefted in fnancial terms from this merger. Regrettably, the country has never truly embraced European policies on gender, sexual equality, and anti-discrimination. In the 21st century the country still remains deeply conservative and divided when it comes to these issues, having a legal system that criminalises abortion and excludes same-sex partnerships. This regressive context has had an impact on academic discourses in the humanities and the social sciences, which are divided between progressive and conservative wings, ignoring or criticising each other, mostly on ideological grounds. The gendered, mainly feminist approach to art was initiated through curating in the late 1970s. But when it comes to the corpus of Polish art history, the analytical elaborations of art historians/critics started to be published in the 1990s, and gender and sexuality issues in art prompted the rise of a new art history in Poland, breaking through or complementing the traditional iconographic and stylistic approaches. The art historians who took into consideration the importance of gender issues and embraced more social and contextual analysis were sensitive to women’s rights, early post-communist identity politics, cultural studies, and critical theory. Most of those methods that could be identifed with the new art history1 were frst and foremost taken on by art historians of modern and contemporary art, often in relation to current, turbulent art and exhibition practices and to an international art history, the infuences of which will be traced in the text. A Polish professor of art history from Jagiellonian University, Wojciech Bałus, argues that the systemic change which took place in 1989 did not signifcantly infuence Polish art history, which continues with its traditional politically uninvolved

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methodologies of historical sources and stylistic or iconographic/iconological analysis.2 Unfortunately, with this thesis the author not only diagnoses the marginalisation of the discipline in the Polish humanities but contributes signifcantly to its marginalisation. I will show that the opposite is true, by emphasising how art historians reacted to the social and political problems of post-communist transformation by applying the terms of new art history and actively participating in the struggle for democratisation. This new Polish art history has offered a critical engagement with new ideologies of capitalism, religion, nationalism, and gender. These changes and the radicalisation in art discourse corresponded with the resurgence of contemporary Polish feminism energised by the new ban on abortion in 1993 and intellectually inspired by French and American feminist theory. In order to systematise the debates in art history triggered by the introduction of the gender question, I would like to propose three interrelated directions in art research, which I would defne as the feminist, the political, and the queer approach, which will organise this text. Therefore, my art historical/gender genealogy will focus on feminist and queer art and art history and their oppositional and pro-democratic forces. I identify my own methodology as feminist queer art history as theorised in the publication Otherwise. Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver in 2016.3

Feminist Curating and Art History Methodologically, this position in Polish art history can be compared to the publications by such feminist art historians as Linda Nochlin, Whitney Chadwick, and Griselda Pollock, who rediscovered and wrote about the often forgotten history of women in Western art and highlighted the work of many contemporary women artists.4 However, in the Polish context, the pioneering endeavour was initiated not by art historians but by early feminist artists and curators. Hence, for the making of gender conscious art history, the recognition of exhibitions of women artists in the 1970s, which only much later inspired feminist art criticism, is crucial. In this chapter I will focus on the exhibitions that were conceived mainly from the essentialist perspective, bringing together artists who were women. Yet this simple strategy was very revolutionary. The importance of exhibitions of women artists seems to be equally crucial before and after the political transition. In both patriarchal systems, state socialism and Catholic capitalism, women have been marginalised, both culturally and politically. Writing about Polish art after 1989, the art critic Magdalena Ujma5 shockingly reveals that in most group exhibitions, obviously those which are not organised from a feminist point of view, women constitute, at most, 20% of the presented artists.6 One of the ways of counteracting this institutional discrimination is the organisation of themed exhibitions of women’s art. It is a curatorial strategy that has been necessary in the 20th and 21st centuries in Poland. The history of such projects started in 1978, still under communism, in the People’s Republic of Poland. The frst women’s art shows were organised by women artists-curators, not by curators-art historians, as feminist art history emerged much later only after the political transformation of 1989. These early achievements then started to be conceptualised. The feminist conceptualisation emerged only after the political transition, because in the former system the problem of women did not exist as a volatile social or cultural issue. The state

230 Paweł Leszkowicz itself promoted women’s emancipation in both family and work, hence, as part of an offcially imposed ideology, women’s rights were not the most respected subject either for women or for artists. In reality, the diversifcation of a patriarchal society was suppressed; it was just one nation against the power of the party, where the family unit was the main basis of psychological and economic survival. Moreover, in the Polish art world the idiom of conceptualism ruled supreme, with its focus on the language of art and the marginalisation of real-life issues. The party paradoxically supported local conceptualism with its cryptic messages, marginal audience, and social detachment.7 In the People’s Republic of Poland, state socialism stole the idea of modern art, and early feminist exhibitions were small unique gestures of critical engagement in social questions barely recognised by theorists who were blinded by conceptualism. Only in the late 1980s did a new generation of socially oriented critics and theorists (all of them are mentioned in this text) come to power, able to think in more postmodern terms. The Women’s Art exhibition, organised in 1978 by Natalia LL (Lach-Lachowicz) at the experimental Jatki PSP Gallery8 in Wrocław, is considered to be the earliest display of feminist art in Poland. Besides her own art, the curator presented works of Western feminist artists: Noemi Maider, Suzy Lake and Carolee Schneemann. This frst exhibition exemplifes that gender related art and research in Poland had, from the beginning, a strong international anchoring, as the country was one of the most open areas of the Eastern Bloc, where Western culture was accessible and promoted. The curator and artist Natalia LL travelled internationally in the 1970s. She obtained a residency/ Kościuszko fellowship in New York in 1977 and was well connected through mail art with foreign artists, curators, and art centres, participating in Western feminist art exhibitions. Thus, she could invite her friends to a show in Poland at a gallery which she was running. Since the late 1960s, in her photographs and flms, she specialised in the critical media analysis of erotic fgurations of femininity, yet still creating images with a strong erotic quality.9 Her early explorations of female sexuality established a strong line in these types of works in Polish art, which fully blossomed in the 1990s inspiring radical new discussions in art criticism and theory addressing the female body and its liberation/oppression. After 1989, such feminist art historians and critics as Bożena Czubak, Agata Jakubowska, Dorota Jarecka, Izabela Kowalczyk, and Anna Markowska wrote about Natalia LL from a feminist and gender studies perspective. Dorota Jarecka, Agata Jakubowska, and Anna Markowska edited books on Natalia LL, treating her as a ground-breaking artist and curator.10 In the same year—1978—another pioneering new media feminist artist, Izabella Gustowska,11 together with Anna Bednarczyk and Krystyna Piotrowska, organised the exhibition The Three Women at the state BWA Gallery in Poznań. The opening of the exhibition was accompanied by an ironic performance indicating a feminist intention. Models dressed as Playboy bunnies were walking among the audience carrying an impressive pink cake in the shape of a breast made out of pink-coloured cream.12 Moreover, since the end of the 1970s, Izabella Gustowska has consistently realised a series of trailblazing exhibitions and conferences dedicated to the works of Polish women artists: Women’s Art (1980), Encounters—Presence (1987), III Encounters— Presence III (1992), Presence IV—6 Women (1994).13 These events were organised by the ON Gallery, belonging to the Fine Arts Academy in Poznań, where the artist worked.14 This immense project accomplished the earliest documentation of women’s creative work in Poland after 1945. Moreover, it covered modern and contemporary

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artists from various generations in the 20th century, also including some international artists. From today’s perspective this is priceless since many of these artists disappeared from institutional history and their names are forgotten today, even to specialists and are only being recovered in some recent curatorial projects focused on women artists.15 Izabella Gustowska’s exhibitions created the foundations for contemporary feminist art history in Poland by their very focus on women’s art.16 Her projects during that transitional political period were manifestations of freedom and independence, a less obvious kind of social involvement in the process of liberation and human rights. Moreover, Izabella Gustowska curated this group of womenfocused exhibitions, working on her own extended series of multimedia images of femininity Relative Similarities (1979–1990) and establishing her own iconography based on self-portraits and portraits of women. In her art and curating, she imagined an alternative and personal history of women’s solidarity, envisioning the politics of privacy against the offcial male politics. Her women-centred art witnesses a history different from the grand events associated with the anti-communist Solidarity movement, whose patriarchal and religious ethos erased women’s opposition.17 Gustowska created a unique record of the psycho-history of private life, an intimate female story of that decade of systemic changes. Thus, her vision is equally relevant today, when Poland is once again approaching a period when withdrawal into privacy and human intimacy enables survival in a hostile political sphere—this time not communist but fundamentalist—and alternative female-centred shows are sites of the counterculture. In the historiography of gender where the frst focus was on femininity, it is important to emphasise that the frst major museum and historical art exhibition devoted to women artists in the history of Polish art was organised by the National Museum in Warsaw in 1991, soon after the democratic change of 1989. Former pioneering exhibitions were curated in much smaller galleries and art centres by women artists, thus the political transformation towards democracy was necessary to persuade the National Museum to organise a major project on the art of women. Its curator was an art historian, Agnieszka Morawińska, who in the future would become the director of the Zacheta National Gallery of Art and the National Museum in Warsaw.18 It was due to her perseverance, international contacts, scholarly interest, and curatorial position at the museum that the project was possible.19 The exhibition, entitled Polish Women Artists (1991), contributed to the rediscovery of many artists from the 18th century onwards, as it was not only devoted to contemporary art. The informative opening essay by Morawinska is a comprehensive history of Polish women artists, early 20th-century exhibitions, art education for women, and social attitudes towards female independence.20 Morawinska’s catalogue is the frst systematic historical art study on the role of women in Polish art across centuries, thus it inspired further research on women artists. The art works from the exhibition came from the National Museum as well as many other museums and collections in Poland. An initiative comparable to Izabella Gustowska’s projects in the 1980s was the encyclopaedic cycle of exhibitions A Woman about a Woman organised by Agata Smalcerz in the city run BWA Gallery21 in Bielsko-Biała, in 1997, 2000, and 2007. Numerous contemporary artists from different generations were invited to these exhibitions, thus this long-lasting project created an overview of the most important contemporary female Polish artists. Moreover, it established an extremely corporeal perspective. In the catalogue, the curator notes that artists create under the pressure of the patriarchy and that their bodily self-examination and self-representation often

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provoke controversies, which is not the case with men’s images of women. The title itself emphasised a very women-centred approach, with the focus on the portrayal of femininity by women artists.22 The A Woman about a Woman cycle of shows strongly imposed a feminist take on women’s art, but it would be a mistake to identify all the research and curating on women’s art that has been done in Poland with feminism. All of the mentioned exhibitions and publications share some kind of gender essentialism with their diligent focus on women and creativity, but they are not always programmatically feminist, and not all of the Polish artists, curators, or historians involved identifed with feminism as a social or political movement. The early exhibitions from the late 1970s by Natalia LL and Izabella Gustowska can be considered as feminist because they were organised by feminist artists and featured many feminist works. The series of shows A Woman about a Woman (1997–2007) by Agata Smalcerz was an ideologically feminist project but the major exhibition Polish Women Artists (1991) by Agnieszka Morawińska was just a historical survey of women artists in Poland without any social agenda. An eminent and infuential Polish women’s art historian, Maria Poprzęcka,23 contributed to Morawińska’s catalogue.24 She is an expert on 19th-century art, including women artists, but she never wanted to identify herself with feminism as a movement,25 which created a persistent debate and schism in Polish art history over the question of whether studying women’s art requires a feminist methodology and politics. It is a dispute which erupts at historical art conferences to this day, especially due to the rather conservative character of this academic milieu. Yet, a majority of younger art historians and critics writing about women or gender identify with feminism, especially considering the volatile situation around reproductive rights in the country. Today, Polish feminist art history diligently reconstructs the traditions of female creativity, using a variety of methodological approaches. The feminist perspective is the most established among the three gendered approaches discussed here and is only lightly controversial. One recent publication worth mentioning is a comprehensive book edited by a feminist art historian, Agata Jakubowska, entitled Artystki polskie (Polish Women Artists) in homage to the exhibition organised in 1991 by Agnieszka Morawińska at the National Museum in Warsaw. The book is a collection of essays written by the most prominent feminist art historians in Poland, covering their periods of specialisation. Thus, Joanna Sosnowska writes about women artists in the 19th and early 20th century, Ewa Toniak26 about the People’s Republic of Poland, Magdalena Ujma about the period of transition at the end of the 20th century, and Ewa Małgorzata Tatar about contemporary 21st-century culture.27 The editor, Agata Jakubowska,28 consistently publishes on the history of women artists in Poland and curates women’s art exhibitions. She wrote and edited wellknown books on the Polish/Jewish post-war fgurative sculptress Alina Szapocznikow: A Multiple Portrait of Alina Szapocznikow’s Oeuvre (2008), Awkward Objects: Alina Szapocznikow (2011), and on the pioneering feminist artists Natalia LL and Maria Pinińska Bereś.29 Jakubowska’s collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw on Szapocznikow’s exhibitions and reinterpretations of her oeuvre helped her to rediscover this eminent artist, who died of cancer in 1973 and embodied her fnal struggles in sculpture. There have been few monographs about women artists in Poland, so the value of Jakubowska’s study A Multiple Portrait of Alina Szapocznikow’s Oeuvre was of great importance for the future of the monographic feminist

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genre in Polish art history. The author conducted an in-depth analysis of selected pieces, intertwining a close reading of the artist’s sculpture and life seen through a personal female experience of the horrors of 20th-century East European Jewish history. Another of Agata Jakubowska’s studies, On the Mirror’s Margin. Female Body in the Works of Polish Women Artists, inspired by French feminism, particularly Luce Irigaray, offers a psychoanalytical and gender bending reading of the representation of the female and transgender body by major contemporary Polish women artists.30 Her recent research focuses on the history of exhibitions of women artists as exemplifed by a book which she co-edited, All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s (2018).31 The feminist passion for monographs unleashed by Agata Jakubowska has defnitely been continued by Dorota Jarecka. For more than two decades she has been the main art critic of the most infuential liberal daily newspaper in Poland—Gazeta Wyborcza. Since 2011, she has been writing or editing monographs on Polish women artists, connecting the publications to the organisation of accompanying exhibitions in major art institutions. These richly illustrated books present complex, often intertextual interpretations of art by women who have fallen into obscurity. Thus, Jarecka has been accomplishing one of the main tasks of feminist art history—bringing back forgotten women artists. Besides editing a collection of essays on Natalia LL,32 she has managed to publish monographs that have revived interest in two Polish Jewish artists—Krystiana Robb-Narbut and Erna Rosenstein.33 Jarecka often works with archival resources, uncovering unknown historical or biographical data and then using various methodologies, from iconographic and stylistic analysis to psychoanalysis and gender studies; then she and the authors she commissions write new her-stories of artists’ art and lives. The power of Polish feminist art and curating has been additionally strengthened by major international feminist artists who were exhibited and discussed in Warsaw by the art historian and curator Milada Ślizińska. For more than twenty years from 1990 till 2011 she worked as a curator of the international program at the Zamek Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the main institution for contemporary art in Poland at the time. Single-handedly, she introduced the stars of postmodern art to Poland, among them such artists as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Pipilotti Rist, and Kara Walker. Her popular and educational shows at the centre always had excellent catalogues and programmes of lectures, thus mainstreaming feminism and critical art in cultural circles and validating similar developments in Polish art. Without this supportive background created by Milada Ślizińska, Polish feminist and queer art and criticism would not have developed so energetically. Her program helped to place Warsaw/Poland on the international art map, thus opening the door for Polish art shows abroad. I would like to fnish this mostly curatorial chapter with another exhibition of Polish women artists, this time mounted abroad in the United States by the curator Aneta Szyłak. The show of the most infuential contemporary Polish feminist artists confrmed their global status and inspired a deliberation on democracy by Polish-American sociologist Elżbieta Matynia. In her book Performative Democracy (2009), she analyses the exhibition Architecture of Gender: Contemporary Women’s Art in Poland put on in 2003 in the Sculpture Center, New York.34 This show was important for the international recognition of Polish feminist art and its rethinking not only through gender but also architectural theory. On the basis of this project, Matynia argues

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that women’s art should sustain free public space in Poland and that dialogical works of art “contribute to an enGendering—in both senses of the word (as in initiating a debate and raising gender consciousness)—of public discourse, this important principle of democratic politics.”35 Hence, various deliberations on democracy have played a central role in the debates around art, gender, and recent history.

Art History and the Critical Politics of Gender Crucial for the appearance of new gender conscious art history in Poland were the volatile relationships between contemporary art and the new political powers that were established in the early 1990s. Art and offcial politics found themselves on the opposing sides of a culture war between liberal and illiberal perspectives36 in the budding democratic system. Contemporary art as a progressive force against reemergent patriarchal nationalism and religious fundamentalism was singled out by new governmental and political institutions and was openly persecuted and attacked. The feminist artists Alicja Żebrowska, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zofa Kulik, and Dorota Nieznalska, who critically explore sexuality, femininity, and masculinity, were hit particularly hard by criticism and censorship, especially in the years 1998–2004.37 Therefore, the question of gender has become inevitable in artistic and academic debates, quite often in a divisive way, signalling the division between traditionalist and progressive views on art and academia. The new gendered and political turn in art criticism and art history was initially spearheaded by a new art journal Magazyn Sztuki (Art Magazine) published by Ryszard Ziarkiewicz in Gdańsk since 1993.38 Magazyn Sztuki has focused on international contemporary art defned by critical postmodernism or political art as theorised by Hal Foster in Recordings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985).39 Magazyn Sztuki has published many translations of postmodern art history. The new Polish body and new media art was placed in this broader context, moreover Magazyn Sztuki has published art historians, critics, and artists who conceptualise the new developments in art and theory—Bożena Czubak, Jerzy Truszkowski, Artur Żmijewski, Grzegorz Klaman, Robert Rumas, and Pawel Leszkowicz. In this loose group, a special role was played by the late Ewa Mikina, who was both an art critic and a translator of current art theory into the Polish language. Equally important has been an academic hub of new Polish art history—the school of the late Professor Piotr Piotrowski at the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.40 His model of East European art history was socially engaged, based on an active participation in the debates about freedom of expression and related to the new art history. Together with the feminist art historians Izabela Kowalczyk and Agata Jakubowska, I am a representative of the gender division of this school.41 We all received our academic training under Piotrowski’s supervision. Separately, both Magazyn Sztuki and Piotrowski’s school were inspired not only by the previously mentioned artists and art historians but also by the writings of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s books on power, sexuality, and exclusion had a signifcant impact on Polish new art history and art at the time of the political transformation in the 1990s, unsurprisingly, as the Polish systemic transition involved so many conficts over discriminatory sexual and gender politics.42 At the same time, in opposition to this type of critical thinking about art, a new conservative school of art history based on Heidegger and German hermeneutics was established to think in metaphysical and

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philosophical terms, detached from the social realm. Those two tendencies coexist, often ignoring each other; the hermeneutic tendency is mostly academic and has little impact on the contemporary art scene, which was for twenty years dominated by the socially engaged and the contextual new art discourse established by Magazyn Sztuki and Piotrowski’s school. Piotr Piotrowski was an eminent Polish art historian, the author of many publications on Polish and Central East European late modern and contemporary art, and a pioneer of political art history in the region.44 As a modern art historian he followed the example of an eminent Polish art historian, Jan Białostocki, from Warsaw University, who wrote from an iconological perspective on East European art, particularly on East European medieval and early modern art.45 Piotrowski did the same but focused on political analysis of East European modern and contemporary art. His practice of art history encompasses the broader socio-political tensions in postwar Central Eastern Europe, such as the struggle with communist totalitarianism, post-communist nationalism, and religious fundamentalism as well as the defense of democracy, freedom of expression, and human rights in the region after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Politics and state power after 1945 were essential to the making of his art history. He thought and acted in the tradition of East European dissidents in opposition to power. At the same time, his involvement in feminism and queer rights distinguished him from other East European 20th-century dissidents, who tended to neglect issues related to sexual politics. Polish far-right intellectuals and ideologues often criticised and ridiculed him for his strongly progressive gender position. Yet the attacks on Piotrowski have never materialised into a serious or fruitful debate in art history as a discipline, as the critics were mainly right-wing pundits publishing in newspapers, outside academia.46 Piotrowski perfectly understood the importance of the gender context in postcommunist art. His analyses were always sensitive to women’s issues in art and politics and critical towards the East European patriarchy, which he saw as one of the reasons behind the unfulflled democracy after 1989.47 He often collaborated with a feminist curator and art historian from Serbia, Bojana Pejić, and wrote for the catalogue of her ground-breaking 2010 exhibition, Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, that “the male basis of democratic political transformation was characteristic of the whole of the former Eastern Europe, and this may as well be one of the crucial traits of post-communist societies.”48 Thus, in many of his books one can fnd in-depth feminist and political analyses of art works by crucial women artists, among others Milica Tomić, Sanja Iveković, Marina Abramovic, Kai Kaljo, Veronika Bromova, Eglé Rakauskaité, Jana Želibská, Geta Brátescu, Katarzyna Kobro, Alina Szapocznikow, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zofa Kulik, Dorota Nieznalska, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, and Alicja Żebrowska. In general, for Piotrowski, the reaction to body art that dealt with the subject of identity, nationalism, and religion was a test of free speech in new East European democracies. He wrote that censorship of art, no matter the reason (religious, nationalist, cultural, populist), always recalls the functioning of the communist regime and its limitation of the freedom of expression. Hence, the Cold War dynamic between freedom and oppression, totalitarianism and democracy, the East and the West, was always the context that he applied to art analysis. He studied and interpreted signifcant cases of art censorship in Eastern Europe, for example Dorota Nieznalska’s trial in Poland around her installation Passion (2001), to fght against limitations 43

236 Paweł Leszkowicz of freedom in the academic and public spheres.49 Similarly engaged was his introduction of critical masculinity studies in the art historical analysis of Central East European art. One of the chapters of his major book In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avantgarde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 deals with “The Politics of Identity: Male and Female Body Art.”50 His critical analysis of masculinity in the male performance art51 of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Central Eastern Europe was revisionist. Thus, he argues that the privileged position of men in a hetero-patriarchal society was hardly ever questioned by radical body artists in the Eastern Bloc, and their fervent actions only confrmed the traditional male status associated with the active body/subject position. According to Piotrowski, practically the only artist who differed from this socialist, masculine gender conformity in art was the Romanian performer Ion Grigorescu, who feminised his body in flms and photographs.52 One might argue with Piotrowski’s shattering analysis and point out artists not mentioned by him, who dwelt on sexual repression and norms, e.g. the Polish gay performance artist Krzysztof Jung active in the 1970s and 1980s,53 but his criticism shows the author’s courage in tackling all preconceived myths, including the most heroic ethos of the East European male body artists suffering for the sake of freedom. Besides Piotrowski’s books, probably the most infuential publication that came out of his school is Body and Power in Polish Critical Art in the 90s (2002) by Izabela

Figure 13.1 The section “Ganymede” in the exhibition Ars Homo Erotica, The National Museum, Warsaw. The art works: Barbara Falender, Ganymede II (1987) marble sculpture and Barbara Falender/Grzegorz Kowalski, The performance artists Krzysztof Jung posing with Wojtek Piotrowski for the sculpture Ganymede (1984) photography.

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Kowalczyk, a study which strongly infuenced Polish visual culture and many other academic disciplines outside art history.54 In her book she discusses the multiple meanings of body centred art by controversial Polish artists, e.g. Grzegorz Klaman, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zofa Kulik, Zbigniew Libera, Dorota Nieznalska, and Artur Żmijewski. The concept of critical art implies here a subversive take on the questions of identity, representation, and the structures of power; critical art probes marginalised and silenced aspects of reality and existence. The Foucauldian dimension of these interpretations was very strong. In the author’s analysis, the critical body artists who dominated the Polish scene in the years 1990–2010 equally explored femininity and masculinity and did not aim at an erotic affrmation of the body but sought to analyse its systemic entanglement. Hence, the bodies are more traumatic and bound than sensual. On some level, the movement might be compared to American abject art55 with its focus on taboo subjects. Yet the photo and video rendering of gendered embodiments played a more important role, so there is a similarity to the documentation of classical performance art.56 The book highlighted the term ‘critical art’ in relation to contemporary Polish art, which was grappling with various systems of power trying to control sexual/gender identity in a transitional society. Body and Power popularised the refection on art among scholars in the social and political sciences, making art history relevant for other academic disciplines, which does not happen very often, not only in Polish art history. I would suggest that, in general, this is the biggest achievement of the school of art history that deals with the politics of gender, because of the fact that it is socially infuential and inspires other scholars in the humanities and social sciences. The reason behind the impact is the controversial and widely debated feld of contemporary art and the involvement in topical social questions relevant to many disciplines.

Queering the Field of Art The conservative character of the Polish political transition created a very close collaboration between strong feminist and LGBTQ movements, both struggling with regressive legislation against abortion and same-sex unions and the pervasive infuence of religious fundamentalism. A gendered approach to the recent artistic historiography of this country requires a queer feminist methodology. A specifc historical characteristic of modern Polish culture is that the feminist and LGBTQ movements emerged together as a progressive political force in the 1990s in opposition to a new conservative political system. Thus, feminist and queer projects have had the tendency to run parallel to—and coexistent with—the human rights agenda for women and LGBTQ rights. The collaboration of feminist and queer politics still remains necessary in the 21st century; the two are united in a common struggle for democratic rights and participation. Academically, one of the constant and earliest sources of inspiration for queer and feminist artists and intellectuals was the “Transgresje” (Transgressions) series (1980s) of anthologies inspired by Georges Bataille, edited and mostly written by literary scholar Maria Janion—in particular vol. 2 Queers/Changelings published in 1982.57 Even though she is not an art historian, her book full of erudite illustrations, photographs, and flm stills had some infuence on art and art history/cultural studies and precipitated a cultural revolt in Poland during the 1980s. Janion, a forerunner of feminist and queer cultural criticism in Central Eastern Europe, opened people up to new views

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on literary and visual theory and history, generally pushing Poland’s humanities into more inclusive and subversive territories in the process. She has discovered and reclaimed multiple trends and writers for women’s, LGBTQ, and Polish-Jewish history.58 She popularised the Jean Genet persona in Poland, making him a saint of local queer culture up until today. She initiated and signed petitions and has also taken part in Warsaw’s Pride marches during the diffcult Law and Justice periods. In fact, Janion has been a central public intellectual, fghting prejudices such as homophobia and anti-Semitism. Born in 1926, she is now a professor emerita of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.59 This feminist queer partnership also manifested itself quite early in contemporary art, starting already in the 1970s, as many pioneering women artists such as Natalia LL, Izabella Gustowska, Barbara Falender, and later on in the 1990s—Katarzyna Kozyra, Alicja Żebrowska, and at the turn of 21st century—Karolina Breguła, visualised male and female homoeroticism and transgender identity and participated in LGBTQ cultural expression. Therefore, the history of queer art exhibitions is closely connected with feminist art, as refected in my own curatorial and critical work. As an example of oppositional art curating and art history, in 2005 and 2006, I organised two editions of the political and erotic exhibition and research project Love and Democracy in Poznań’s private Old Brewery Business and Art Centre and Gdańsk’s public Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art.60 The show of feminist and gay art was concerned with amorous pluralism and freedom, researching queerness in Polish modern and contemporary art. The multimedia spaces of the exhibition consisted of a mosaic of photographs, flms, videos, melodies, and words, creating a queer visual utopia through contemporary art: it was an alternative amorous reality that was meant to counter the constant heteronormative spectacle in the public media.61 The artists presented two subversive strategies with both a sexual and social dimension.62 On the one hand, they visualised queer relationships and identities, on the other they reinvented and explored the marginal genre of the male nude, imbuing it with feminist and homoerotic perspectives and thus visually redefning the postcommunist patriarchal image and condition of masculinity. The confation of nationalism and masculinity was especially regressive and destructive for the new democracies in Eastern Europe.63 Therefore, a critical rendering of masculinity has a signifcant impact and political force in art and critical discourse. Thus, in my own academic work, I have continued researching artistic and cultural alternative and countercultural forms of masculinity, through publications on the history of gay art and the male nude in Poland. In Art Pride. Gay Art from Poland (2010) I trace three generations of gay artists from the 1960s up till 2010, from Krzysztof Niemczyk and Krzysztof Jung, through Wojciech Ćwiertniewicz, to Karol Radziszewski’s art, all working with the male image.64 Naked Man: the Male Nude in post-1945 Polish Art (published in Polish in 2012) explores the paradoxical status of the male nude which lies in the fact that it constitutes a symbol of power and of opposition alike.65 Another author who has been working on the subject of masculinity in art, including queer masculinity and male performance art, is Anna Markowska, particularly in her Polish language book devoted to feminist and queer readings of late modern and contemporary American art: Comedy of Sublimation. Paradigm Shift and Ethos of the Real in American Art.66 She also wrote about some gay artists from Cracow— e.g. the painter Wojciech Ćwiertniewicz—and worked extensively on feminist artist

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Natalia LL and her milieu in Wrocław. Anna Markowska, who graduated from the Department of Art History at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, is a professor at the Department of Art History, Wrocław University. As a senior academic she supports the research and publications of younger colleagues in gender and queer art history, a role which is very much needed after Piotrowski’s death. The epicentre of queer curating and art history came in the summer of 2010 when the National Museum in Warsaw opened Ars Homo Erotica, a trans-historical and international exhibition devoted to queer art (Fig. 13.1). It was possible because the main proponent of gender and sexuality studies in Polish art history—Professor Piotr Piotrowski—became the director of this National Museum. The year 2010 was a watershed for gender, art, and exhibitions in Poland, as the Zachęta National Gallery68 in Warsaw headed by Agnieszka Morawińska hosted Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe curated by Bojana Pejić and sponsored by Erste Stiftung.69 The exhibition, put on originally in MUMOK Vienna in 2009, travelled to Poland in Spring 2010. Poland as a country was ruled at the time by the pro-European and relatively liberal right wing government of PO—the Civic Platform party, which was not exactly queer friendly but at least not hostile. Therefore, it was a relatively liberal gap in Poland’s 21st-century history that has been dominated by the far right Law and Justice party that took power in 2005 and again in 2015 enforcing its nationalistic natalist sexual politics. For Piotrowski, who commissioned me to curate Ars Homo Erotica, the show was a frst step towards reinventing the National Museum according to his vision of a “critical museum.” He tried to implement the concept, collaborating with vice director Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius. In 2015 they edited a book From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum, and a shot of Ars Homo Erotica is on the cover.70 The critical museum in Piotrowski’s vision is a museum that is an active actor in the public debate around contentious issues. It is a democratic project, a response both to the conservative museum as a temple and the populist museum as entertainment. His frst radical step was to open the National Museum to minorities and to the most controversial social issue in the region at the time—the question of LGBTQ rights and culture, a bone of contention in many East European democracies. Ars Homo Erotica was the main implementation of Piotrowski’s idea as he was a director for only one year.71 The title Ars Homo Erotica referred to the National Museum’s history and its exhibition Ars Erotica from 1994.72 It was an overview of Polish erotic art from the communist period 1945–1989, with a heterosexual perspective and focus on the female nude.73 It took more than ffteen years for homoerotic art to conquer the central stage of the national institution. The exhibition presented artworks from antiquity to the 21st century from the museum’s collection plus contemporary queer art from Central Eastern Europe. In the construction of the show, the historical and contemporary material was equal. Thus, this curatorial strategy combined the cultural history and contemporary sexual politics of the region. The exhibition began in the main hall of the museum with the contemporary section: “The Time of Struggle,” where the artworks and visual campaigns refected the turbulent world of the LGBTQ struggle (Fig. 13.2). Then, in order to systematise the multitude of images and metaphors, the exhibition was divided into thematic sections which juxtaposed historical and contemporary works of art: “Male Nude,” “Archive,” “Transgender,” “Lesbian Imagination,” “Homoerotic Classicism,” and “Saint Sebastian.” This created a narrative with graded politics, erotica, and aesthetics.74 67

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Figure 13.2 The section “Time of Struggle” in the exhibition Ars Homo Erotica, The National Museum, Warsaw 2010. The art works: David Černý, Entropa. The Polish Panel (2009) installation, the image on the wall Harmodius and Aristogeiton (Tyrannicides), reproduction of sculptures from the collection of the National Museum.

The invited contemporary artists came from different countries, including Russia, where sexual diversity and equality sparks cultural tensions, political conficts, or acts of censorship and violence.75 On the other hand, the National Museum, with its extensive collection, was the perfect place for an exhibition about the historic continuity of and differences in homoerotic imagery. The museum’s central cultural status gave it the power of visibility in public debate. The controversies surrounding Ars Homo Erotica put queer culture and journalistic refection on it into the mainstream in a massive way. When, in the autumn of 2009, the museum announced its plans to stage a show on art and homosexuality, far right politicians and pundits protested. Members of the nationalistic Law and Justice party attacked the exhibition in both parliament and the media. In a special letter to the Minister of Culture, they demanded that the show be cancelled. A discussion about the placement and subject of the exhibition swept through the parliament. But the Minister of Culture—Bogdan Zdrojewski—decided that it was ultimately up to the museum’s director to decide on the exhibition program.76 The parliamentary intervention by censors and the ensuing media commentaries opened both highbrow and low brow debate on such issues as the place of queer

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expression in state-sponsored institutions, the role of the National Museum, the situation of LGBTQ rights in Poland, the limits of queer visibility, and even the presence of homosexuality in art history.77 Thus, it was a very successful case of art for social change realised through the National Museum. Therefore, my curatorial endeavours, especially Love and Democracy and Ars Homo Erotica and related publications, played a role in introducing the LGBTQ approach in Polish exhibition practice and art history, with the support of Piotr Piotrowski and such major artists as Izabella Gustowska and Karol Radziszewski, who participated in my projects and have continued with their own queer work.

The Art History of Resistance The anaemic academic art-historical reception of this exhibition in Poland refects a broader problem in Polish art history, as well as the situation for scholars of gender studies. The show has had hundreds of mentions in Polish and international media outlets, yet it has not infuenced signifcant historical art publications. No other museum dared to follow the simple strategy of queering its collection. Besides Dorota Jarecka’s journalistic though erudite art criticism in Gazeta Wyborcza, only Anna Markowska’s text engaged in the project, proposing her own version of this show with David Hockney as a star.78 The few art historians who specialise in the gender approach in art history, whom I have described in the text, are visible public intellectuals/curators/museum professionals, and though scholarly, they function mainly in their own circle, quoting each other. Thus, all the described debates circulate inside this loosely cooperating camp and through strong international connections. Yet they are largely ignored by the conservative or traditional and by those who do not focus—or even neglect—gender in Polish art history, as if this type of research had no value. The main exception is Mariusz Bryl79—one of the main proponents of conservative art history and of the hermeneutic approach. He specialises in methodologies and in his publications he very dutifully and educationally describes and even translates the critical methods of new art history, mainly for the journal Artium Questiones, including feminism, queer, and other current theories, in order to debate them. He identifes those methods inspired by gender studies as part of the balkanisation of art history, politically motivated conficts and divisions which result from pressures of leftist identity politics and threaten the autonomy of the discipline.80 However, this sometimes justifed criticism does not acknowledge his own ideological and political position. This exemplifes how the oppositional conservative school, dominated by men, tends to present itself as truly neutral, hence scientifc. Needless to say, it is an illusion that cannot be sustained in the humanities, on either side. Most Polish art historians who do not specialise in gender/feminist/queer studies do not acknowledge this approach at all. Some infuence can be found mainly among art historians who publish on women artists even outside feminist methodology, such as the already mentioned Maria Poprzęcka in her publications on nude or women painters.81 Yet critical art history has had a major impact on curatorial practice, as many scholars are active curators—and occasionally on other disciplines in the humanities, especially on the historian Ewa Domańska’s books on visual representations of historical events.82 Thus, the contextual situation of the gender approach in Polish art history is paradoxical: on the one hand this school is highly visible, interdisciplinary, and

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international and, on the other, slightly marginalised within the ‘old’ discipline. One might even suggest that the school has created its own successful discipline within local art history represented by a diverse group of women and men! Moreover, currently it is under political and institutional threat and functions almost in a Cold War dualistic ideological framework, due to governmental attacks on gender studies in the humanities. Gender studies are seen as a Western (EU) threat to the native Polish culture! This text is written in 2017, in a dark moment of Polish struggles with democracy and cultural freedom, especially in relation to gender and sexual rights. This troubling political context inevitably colours some of the analysis; it is a bias that I would like to acknowledge. Since the recent election, in 2015, Poland has become an authoritarian country under the rule of a far-right party, paradoxically called Law and Justice. The new regime has monopolised the three pillars of power: legislative, executive, and judicial, as well as jeopardised the Constitutional Tribunal. Under the even more intensifed nationalism and religious fundamentalism, prejudice, together with hate speech, has been aggravated. The concept of a reproductive family has been forcefully promulgated. Populist ethno-nationalism and nativism put civil liberties and democratic cultural pluralism under siege. Gender politics and conficts are at the centre of the current struggles. The English term ‘gender’ is actually used in political and parliamentary debates. For the Polish Catholic far righters in power, so-called ‘gender ideology’ personifes a radical Evil that needs to be eradicated. The term ‘genderism’ has been coined, defned as an anti-Polish ideology promoted by the EU, devised to destroy Poland and Polish traditional family values, with feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism.83 The war against ‘genderism’ played an important role in the successful electoral campaign of the government, just next to xenophobia and inhospitality towards refugees. After the electoral success, an organised attack on broadly understood gender studies as an academic feld followed. As gender studies are taught at many Polish universities in the humanities and social sciences, the academics who work in this area fnd themselves in a diffcult situation. Ultra-conservative foundations and far-right militias have demanded that universities submit a list of gender studies lecturers so they can identify and threaten them. Vice-chancellors of major universities refused to comply, as universities are still independent. Another example of gender obsession is that the current Minister of Higher Education, Jaroslaw Gowin, argues for deleting gay, lesbian, and feminist studies from peer reviewed journal indexes. He also proposed that gender studies publications must not be included in academic evaluations, to make them worthless in the rigorous tenure audits. Moreover, the minister suggested that there are too many humanists employed at universities. For example, he singled out departments of art history and cultural studies as overpopulated and redundant. The far right has always been very suspicious of modern and contemporary art, theatre, and flms as spaces of opposition (not Catholic and not patriotic), and ideas and images that infect national visual culture, hence the repulsion with art history. The current government has implemented authoritarian measures in legal and cultural spheres which are reminiscent of the totalitarian regulations under the People’s Republic of Poland, which aimed at controlling the citizens under one system. The ideology of the ruling party has created a dualistic vision of reality and politics, a strict symbolic division between Poland (Polishes) and the West (the EU), which results in the suppression of pluralistic values and in a culture war between the conservative and the liberal parts of the society. It is an old Cold War dichotomy that controls the

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offcial discourse and tries to rule the society by polarising foreign and internal affairs. Art history, like all the humanities, functions within this ideological framework, but in fact the divisions have been present in this discipline since the 1990s, when some scholars took the progressive, others the conservative outlook. From early feminist curating and publications centred on women’s creativity, through gender focused ideological analysis, to the queer interventions into the archives of knowledge, I have sketched the origins, subjects, proponents, and history of gendered art history. I have summarised the political context to emphasise the volatile and precarious status of this sub-discipline and to explain the subversive current in visual culture and academia. The network of critical art history, where gender methodology plays a crucial role, communicates to the public the role of art in sustaining democracy, thus it fnds itself in a similarly engendered but also endangered position in a country driven by an authoritarian utopia. To conclude, I would like to emphasise that gender focused art history in Poland has been written at the time of fraught political transitions. The frst one of 1989, from state socialism to Catholic capitalism and illiberal democracy, the second one of 2004 from isolated Central East European state with a struggling economy to membership of the EU with all the fnancial benefts. However, because the country has never internalised or legalised democratic and European principles in the area of gender and sexuality, struggles over human rights in this realm continue to be battled in society and at the universities (!) as well. The constant presence and infuence of strong fundamentalist, conservative, or right wing forces in Polish politics, culture, and academia place progressive artists and scholars in a volatile space of ideological conficts. At the same time, the persistence of post-communist religious censorship has created a threatening atmosphere for art and freedom of expression, thus supportive art historians have been fxed in a defensive position. Consequently, this school of art history is an embattled discipline involved in current social debates and vigorously supporting endangered freedoms through curatorial involvement and critical analysis of power systems. Due to their functioning in an antagonistic and often hostile network, feminist and queer art historians have created their own powerful camp with many international connections and pride in their own history and achievements, as traced in this text, despite persisting neglect from traditional and conservative art history. At the same time, gender centred art history has pioneered a new contextual art history in Poland; rediscovered many forgotten or silenced artists and subjects; and initiated the reinterpretations of inherited and solidifed ideologies and images. But most of all its representatives understand their social democratic responsibility and the oppositional role of art and ideas in a changing society prone to new nationalistic totalitarianism. The new art history functions then in a contentious feld and must often take ideological positions and question the unequal gender system. Hence, the scholarly, the curatorial, and the activist achievements and struggles of this sub-discipline seem to be interconnected and quite specifc within a broader European framework.

Notes 1. About new art history see Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2. Wojciech Bałus, “A Marginalised Tradition? Polish Art History,” in Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, eds. Matthew

244 Paweł Leszkowicz

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 439–449. Signifcantly, no female art historians are discussed in the article and very few are mentioned. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, eds., Otherwise. Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). I place the three authors in one group, despite their different methodologies, because mainly they have been quoted by Polish art historians/critics doing feminist or women’s art analysis. Magdalena Ujma is an art historian, art critic, and curator who graduated from the Catholic University, Lublin and Ecole de Commerce, Dijon. She specialises in contemporary art and worked as a curator at the Museum of Art in Łódź, and Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Krakow. With Joanna Zielińska she created a feminist curatorial team EXGIRLS. Magdalena Ujma, “Transformacja: Kobiety tworzące w postkomunistycznej Polsce w latach 1989–2000,” in Artystki polskie, ed. Agata Jakubowska (Warszawa: ParkEdukacja, Wydawnictwo Szkolne PWN, 2011), 129–130. This idea was proposed by Piotr Piotrowski in his controversial book Dekada (Poznan: Obserwator, 1991) about the depoliticisation of the Polish Neo-avant-garde in the 1970s. PSP Gallery means Labs of Fine Art—artistic workshops established by the Minister of Culture and Art in the People’s Republic of Poland. These were experimental spaces sponsored by the state/city, for artists and designers where they could practice so called Neoavant-garde art, which was a mixture of conceptualism, photography, new media art, and performance. Monika Bakke, “Blossoming Sex. Floral Transpositions in the Works of Natalia LL and Zofa Kulik,” in Natalia LL. Consumer Art and Beyond, ed. Agata Jakubowska (Warsaw: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017). Agata Jakubowska, ed., Natalia LL. Consumer Art and Beyond (Warsaw: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, 2017); Anna Markowska, ed., Permafo 1970–1981 (Wrocław: Contemporary Museum & Motto Books, 2013). Permafo is the name of a Neoavant-garde gallery that Natalia Lach Lachowicz ran in Wrocław with her husband, the artist Andrzej Lachowicz. Another contemporary book published from the gender perspective on Natalia LL is Agnieszka Rayzacher and Dorota Jarecka, eds., Natalia LL Doing Gender (Warsaw: Fundacja Lokal Sztuki, 2013). Professor Izabella Gustowska graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Poznań in 1972. She is a professor at the Academy (currently the University of Arts) where she heads a pioneering Multimedia Activity Studio at the Faculty of Multimedia and Communication. She is an early new media and feminist artist in Poland, very active to this day, with numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad. Ania Bednarczyk, Iza Gustowska, Krynia Piotrowska (Poznań: BWA Poznań, Arsenał, 1978). See Ewa Toniak, “Artystki w PRL-u,” in Artystki polskie, ed. Agata Jakubowska (Warszawa: ParkEdukacja, Wydawnictwo Szkolne PWN, 2011), 106. Some of the artists presented in the series of exhibitions were: Zuzanna Baranowska, Agata Michowska, Małgorzata Sufeta, Anna Tyczyńska, Zofa Kulik, Anna Kutera, Natalia LL, Małgorzata Niedzielko, Krystyna Piotrowska, Anna Płotnicka, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Halina Chrostowska, Wanda Gołkowska, Aleksandra Jachtoma, Maria Jarema, Janina Kraupe-Świderska, Ewa Kuryluk, Danuta Leszczyńska, Jadwiga Maziarska, Zuzanna Pawlicka, Teresa Pągowska, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Alina Szapocznikow, Danuta Waberska and Magdalena Więcek-Wnuk, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Aleksandra Hołowina, Joanna Przybyła, Danuta Mączak, and Lidia Zielińska. See Izabella Gustowska and Grzegorz Dziamski, eds., Drobne narracje: XV lat Galerii ON (Poznan: Galeria Miejska Arsenał, Galeria On, 1994). During that period the ON Gallery was run by Izabella Gustowska together with Andrzej Pepłoński and Sławomir Sobczak, under the Socialist Students’ Association. In particular, a private Gallery Piekary in Poznan, run by Cezary Pieczyński, specialises in archival exhibitions of forgotten 20th-century Polish women artists. See www.galeriapiekary.com.pl/ [Accessed: 30/10/2017]. Signifcantly, neither Natalia LL’s nor Gustowska’s exhibitions from the late 1970s or the 1980s inspired feminist art criticism at the time. They were covered, though, by

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17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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sympathetic art critics such as: Alicja Kępińska, Grzegorz Dziamski, Jerzy Ludwiński, Sławomir Magala, and Barbara Baworowska for such art and cultural magazines as “Sztuka,” “Odra,” and “Nurt.” Those texts did not inspire feminist art history at the time. According to Agata Jakubowska, the two proper texts on feminist art that appeared in Polish journals before the collapse of communism were written by male critics. The earliest and most important was an essay published by a philosopher of aesthetics, Stefan Morawski, “Neofeminism in Art” published in 1977. See: “Neofeminizm w sztuce,” Sztuka 4, 1977. Otherwise, feminist ideas were presented in Poland in the 1970s mainly by women artists discovering feminism—Natalia LL and Ewa Partum. Then, in 1988, Grzegorz Dziamski published two articles “Sztuka feministyczna I,” Miesięcznik Literacki 2–3 (1988) and “Sztuka feministyczna 2,” Miesięcznik Literacki 4 (1988). On the reconstruction of this early reception of feminism in Poland see: Agata Jakubowska, “The Circulation of Feminist Ideas in Communist Poland,” in East-Central European Art Histories: Global and Transnational Perspectives, eds. Beáta Hock and Anu Allas (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 135–148. See Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). Agnieszka Morawińska, PhD, graduated from the Department of Art History at Warsaw University. She started working at the National Museum in the 1970s, setting up a permanent Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Painting and authoring many publications about the Polish art of this period. In the 1990s she was Vice-Minister of Culture and Art and then Ambassador of Poland in Australia. After returning to Poland, she was the director of two major art institutions in Warsaw—the Zachęta National Gallery (2001–2010) and the National Museum (2010–2018). She retired in 2018 upon her resignation from the post of the National Museum’s directorship because of conficts with the Law and Justice Ministry of Culture and Heritage. In 1989 Agnieszka Morawińska received a Fulbright Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art and Centre for Advanced Studies in Washington, where she also initiated collaboration with the National Museum of Women in the Arts. This prominent institution was interested in showing a selection from the possible exhibition of Polish women artists that Morawińska had started work on as a curator of the Gallery of Polish Art at the National Museum in Warsaw. The invitation to cooperate with an American institution helped her persuade the Minister of Culture at the time, Izabella Cywińska, who initially was sceptical about the idea, to fnally support it. Therefore, the international and political connections of Agnieszka Morawińska helped in accomplishing this project, which was controversial for the Polish establishment. Moreover, in the middle of it Morawińska became the vice Minister of Culture. Other prominent women who worked on the exhibition were the art critic Kinga Kawalerowicz and the exhibition designer Krystyna Zachwatowicz. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington participated in the publication of the catalogue. See the catalogue Agnieszka Morawińska, ed., Artystki polskie (Warsaw: National Museum, 1991). BWA—the Bureau of Art Exhibitions—is a network of municipal galleries in Poland, which was established in the People’s Republic of Poland and has survived until now in some cases with changed names. Agata Smalcerz and Joanna Ciesielska, eds., Sztuka kobiet (Bielsko-Biała: Galeria Bielska BWA, 2000). Professor Emerita Maria Poprzęcka was the director of the Department of Art History at the University of Warsaw and the head of the Polish Association of Art Historians. Currently she teaches in the Artes Liberales Collegium at the University of Warsaw. Maria Poprzęcka, “Inne? Kobiety I historia sztuki,” in Artystki polskie, ed. Agnieszka Morawińska (Warsaw: National Museum, 1991), 17–20. See Maria Poprzęcka, Pochwała malarstwa. Studia z historii i teorii sztuki (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo słowo/obraz terytoria, 2000). Ewa Toniak also authored a very important and inspirational study of gendered reading of Polish social realism in art, flm, and architecture, see: Ewa Toniak, Olbrzymki. Kobiety i socrealizm (Kraków: Korporacja Halart, 2008). Agata Jakubowska, ed., Artystki polskie (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Szkole PWN, 2011).

246 Paweł Leszkowicz 28. Professor Agata Jakubowska graduated from the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, where she teaches and heads the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Art. She wrote her PhD under the supervision of Piotr Piotrowski and belongs to his school of art history. 29. Agata Jakubowska, Portret wielokrotny dzieła Aliny Szapocznikow (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2008); Agata Jakubowska, ed., Alina Szapocznikow. Awkward Objects (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2011); Agata Jakubowska and Katarzyna Szotkowska-Beylin, eds., Lovely, Human, True, Heartfelt: The Letters of Alina Szapocznikow and Ryszard Stanisławski, 1948–1971, trans. Jennifer Croft (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2012). 30. Agata Jakubowska, Na marginesach lustra. Ciało kobiece w pracach polskich artystek (Kraków: Universitas, 2004). 31. Agata Jakubowska and Katy Deepwell, eds., All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). 32. Dorota Jarecka and Agnieszki Rayzacher, eds., Natalia LL Doing Gender (Warszawa: Lokal Sztuki, 2013). 33. Dorota Jarecka and Wanda Siedlecka, eds., Krystiana Robb-Narbut: Drawings, Objects, Studio (Warsaw: The National Gallery of Art, Zachęta, 2012); Doroty Jareckiej and Barbary Piwowarskiej, eds., Erna Rosenstein. Mogę powtarzać tylko nieświadomie (Warszawa: Fundacji Galerii Foksal i Instytut Awangardy, 2011). 34. The exhibition was curated by Aneta Szyłak, and the artists who participated in it were the most well-known Polish artists: Julita Wójcik, Jadwiga Sawicka, Monika Sosnowska, Anna Płotnicka, Katarzyna Józefowicz, Dominika Szkutnik, Hanna Nowicka, Natalia LL, Dorota Nieznalska, Karolina Wysocka, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Zofa Kulik, Izabella Gustowska, Katarzyna Kozyra, and Paulina Orlowska. 35. Elżbieta Matynia, “EnGendering Democracy. Women Artists and Deliberative Art in a Transnational Society,” in Performative Democracy (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2009), 141. 36. The illiberal approach consists of the introduction of religious values into politics, education, and culture: the reintroduction of censorship, an abortion ban, homophobic governmental policy, the rise of far right nationalism. 37. See Pawel Leszkowicz, “Feminist Revolt: Censorship of Women’s Art in Poland,” Bad Subject (2005), http://bad.eserver.org/reviews/2005/leszkowicz.html [Accessed: 15/11/2016]. 38. Magazyn Sztuki was fnanced by the city of Gdańsk and by the art institution in which Ryszard Ziarkiewicz worked. The journal is still occasionally published by him, but due to the fnancial limitations it functions mainly as online art. It has been a journal widely read by the art world and academics. 39. Hal Foster, “For a Concept of the Political in Contemporary Art,” in Recodings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York: New York Press, 1985), 139–157. Polish translation: Hal Foster, “O idei sztuki politycznej,” trans. Ewa Mikina, Magazyn Sztuki, no. 4 (1994): 124–133. 40. Piotr Piotrowski (1952–2015) studied in the 1970s in the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, where later he taught, became a professor, and held a chair. His academic supervisor was Andrzej Turowski—a Polish/French professor of art history who authored numerous infuential books on Russian constructivism and avant-garde. Piotrowski was a director of the National Museum in Warsaw (2009–2010) and served on many advisory and editorial boards: the National Gallery of Prague, the Slovak Academy of Science, and Art Margins. He was a permanent research fellow at the Graduate School for East and South-East European Studies at the Universities of Munich and Regensburg. In 2010 he received the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. The award honours the exceptional achievements of cultural protagonists who broaden the knowledge about visual art and culture in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. See: Amy Bryzgel, Piotr Piotrowski: In Memoriam, www.collegeart.org/ news/2015/07/22/piotr-piotrowski-in-memoriam/ [Accessed: 01/06/2018]; Anna Brzyski, In Memoriam-Piotr Piotrowski, www.artmargins.com/index.php/featured-articles-sp829273831/761-in-memoriam-piotr-piotrowski-june-14-1952-may-3-2015 [Accessed: 01/06/2018].

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41. Other signifcant members of his school of art history and former students are Magdalena Radomska, who specialises in Eastern European Art from a neo-Marxist perspective; Jakub Dąbrowski, who works on censorship, art, and law; and Małgorzata Lisiewicz, who practices museum/curatorial studies. 42. Before the vibrant reception of Michel Foucault by Magazyn Sztuki’s critics and artists interested in art and power relations in the 1990s, in Polish art history Foucault was quoted very early by the eminent Polish iconologist Jan Białostocki in his methodological book, Historia sztuki wsród nauk humanistycznych (Art history in the Humanities) (Warszawa: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1980). Michel Foucault started to be translated into Polish in the mid-1980s. The frst translated book was Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Folie et déraison published as Historia szaleństwa w dobie klasycyzmu (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1986) and translated by H. Kęszycka. The main Polish translator and interpreter of Foucault has been the literary scholar Tadeusz Komendant. Many excerpts from the works of the French philosopher were published by a literary magazine Literatura na świecie. Thus, initially the reception was stronger in the feld of literary studies. 43. Wojciech Bałus writes about such representatives of German language hermeneutics in Poland as Wojciech Bryl and Wojciech Suchocki, who in the 1990s introduced this way of thinking through publications in a journal Artium Questiones published by the same Department of Art History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań where the school of Piotr Piotrowski was developing. In fact, Piotrowski was the editor of the journal. Hence, Artium Questiones and especially the translations published in it had an important role in the creation of two oppositional branches of new art history—one based on hermeneutics and the other inspired by postmodern critical theory. See Bałus, “A Marginalised Tradition? Polish Art History,” 446. 44. Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). His other major book published in English is Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). 45. See, e.g. Jan Białostocki, The Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe: Hungary Bohemia Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). 46. In the years 1998–2002 a vicious campaign against contemporary art swept through populist and right-wing media. The main newspaper which gave a platform for ridiculing contemporary art was the daily Życie (Life) with such journalists as R. Legutko and C. Michalski. Moreover, because there was plenty of male nudity in new art (genital nudity had been invisible before in visual culture), sometimes it was called “dick art.” The attacks were directed not only at art but also at supportive art criticism and art history. Piotr Piotrowski was often described as the ideologist of a new social realism, since the right wing pundits wrongly considered the new socially involved art as social realism, which of course was always despised in Poland as a Soviet imposition. See C. Michalski, “Gomułka nowoczesności,” Życie 21 June 1999. The whole right-wing discourse of denigration of contemporary art and theory is analysed by Jakub Dąbrowski in his book on censorship in Poland, see: Cenzura w sztuce polskiej po 1989 roku. Artyści, sztuka i polityka (Warszawa: Fundacja Kultury Miejskiej, 2014), 320–331. 47. Similarly, the French/Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva diagnoses the persistent totalitarian residues in Central and Eastern European societies; she even uses the term ‘catastroika,’ which combines ‘catastrophe’ and ‘perestroika.’ Without entering Kristeva’s debate over women, it is worth noting that her warnings against the dangers of the transition in Eastern Europe parallel those of Piotrowski’s. She writes The very recent studies that are beginning to be published on the underlying logic of Soviet society and of the transition period (that is already bitterly called ‘catastroika’) show to what extent a society based on the rudimentary satisfaction of survival needs, to the detriment of the desires for freedom, could encourage the regressive sadomasochistic leanings of women and without emancipating them at all, rely on them to create a stagnation, a parareligious support of the status quo crushing the elementary rights of the human person.

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48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

See Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 34; Most poignantly, Kristeva analyses Eastern Europe’s human rights defciencies in her text “Bulgaria, My Suffering,” in Crisis of the European Subject (New York: Other Press, 2000). Piotr Piotrowski, “Gender after the Wall,” in Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe: A Catalogue, ed. Bojana Pejić, exhibition catalogue MUMOK Vienna (Cologne: Walther Konig Verlag, 2009), 236. Passion (2001) is an exploration of masculinity and suffering and consists of a video close up of the strenuous face of an exercising bodybuilder next to a hanging metal cross with a photograph of male genitalia and a belly. Members of a far-right party, the League of Polish Families, sued the artist for blasphemy. The artist lost the case and for six years tried to overturn the sentence on grounds of freedom of speech. Eventually, in 2009, she was acquitted after a long process and multiple appeals. Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, 363–387. He concentrates on such body artists as: Tibor Hajas, Volker Via Lewandowsky, Micha Brendel, Jan Mlćoch, Petr Śtembera, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, and Jerzy Bereś. Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, 341–360; Piotr Piotrowski, “Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity Politics,” in Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe: A Catalogue, ed. Bojana Pejić, exhibition catalogue MUMOK Vienna (Cologne: Walther Konig Verlag, 2009), 127–136. See: Maryla Sitkowska, ed., Krzysztof Jung (1951–1998) (Warsaw: Muzeum im. Xawerego Dunikowskiego, 2001). Regrettably, the book has not been translated into English; it was published in Polish as Izabela Kowalczyk, Ciało i władza. Polska sztuka krytyczna lat 90 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2002); For some excerpts in English see Izabela Kowalczyk, “Feminist Art in Poland: The Geometry of Power in Zofa Kulik’s Work,” N.paradoxa, online issue 11 (October 1999): 12–26, www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue11_Izabela-Kowalczyk_12-18.pdf [Accessed: 26/11/2016]. See the catalogues Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992); Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993). See Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, eds., Body Art (London, New York: Phaidon, 2000). Maria Janion and Zbigniew Majchrowski, eds., Transgresje, Vol. 2 Odmieńcy (Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1982). See Maria Janion, Hero, Conspiracy, and Death: The Jewish Lectures (Bern: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2014). On Maria Janion’s work see Tomasz Kitlinski, Dream? Democracy! A Philosophy of Horror, Hope & Hospitality in Art & Action (Lublin: Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press, 2014), 34–39. The frst, and smaller version of Love and Democracy took place in May 2005 as part of the public Art Fair in Poznań, sponsored by the Fine Art Academy in Poznań. I was invited to organise it by Izabella Gustowska, who was the artistic director of the fair. Because of the danger of censorship and far right violence in public galleries at the time, my show was located in a well-protected private contemporary art centre—the Old Brewery Business and Art Centre, owned by Grażyna Kulczyk, who is the main female collector of contemporary art in Poland. Thus, the public funds were used for a show located in a private space for security reasons. After a positive reception, a bigger version of the show and its catalogue and conference were produced at the public Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art (‘łaźnia’ means ‘bathhouse’ in Polish, the building was originally the municipal bathhouse) in Gdańsk in 2006 at the invitation of the artist/curator Robert Rumas and the director Jadwiga Charzyńska. Piotr Piotrowski participated in the conference. See the catalogue Paweł Leszkowicz, Love and Democracy (Gdańsk: Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, 2006). Some of the artists who showed their pluralistic visions of sexuality, love, desire, and gender identities were: Katarzyna Korzeniecka, Robert Rumas, Dorota Nieznalska, Zuzanna Janin, Hanna Nowicka, Tomasz Kitliński, Karolina Breguła, Maciej Osika, Bogna Burska, Katarzyna Górna, Karol Radziszewski, Anna Nawrot, Wojciech Gilewicz, Izabella Gustowska, Aleksandra Polisiewicz, Joanna Rajkowska, Ewa Majewska, and Marysia Lewandowska.

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63. Bojana Pejić, “Proletarians of All Countries, Who Washes Your Socks? Equality, Dominance and Differences in Eastern European Art,” in Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe: A Catalogue, ed. Bojana Pejić, exhibition catalogue MUMOK Vienna (Cologne: Walther Konig Verlag, 2009), 4–30. 64. For a full history of post-Second World War Polish gay art see Paweł Leszkowicz, Art Pride. Gay Art from Poland (Warsaw: Abiekt, 2010). The book is bilingual, published in Polish and English. 65. Paweł Leszkowicz, Nagi mężczyzna. Akt męski w sztuce polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012). 66. Anna Markowska, Komedia sublimacji. Granica współczesności a etos rzeczywistości w sztuce amerykańskiej (Warszawa: DiG, 2010). 67. Anna Markowsk, ed., Permafo (Wrocław: Muzeum Narodowe, 2012). 68. Agnieszka Morawińska was the director of the Zachęta National Gallery at the time; she curated the pioneering Polish Women Artists project in 1991 at the National Museum. 69. I presume that is a coincidence, an alignment of the stars, that Ars Homo Erotica and Gender Check were in Warsaw in the same Summer of 2010, but on the other hand Piotr Piotrowski was on the board of Erste Stiftung?! 70. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015). Piotr Piotrowski frst published a book in Polish, where he explained and traced the genealogy of his idea of the critical museum, see Piotr Piotrowski, Muzeum krytyczne (Poznan: Rebis, 2011). 71. He resigned on 28 October 2010 after a confict with the curatorial staff and the board of trustees, which refused to support his radical revision and reform of the museum, even though initially the board accepted it when offering him the position. According to Piotrowski, a more commercially driven and conservative model of the National Museum won over the critical vision, see Piotrowski, Muzeum krytyczne, 132–133. 72. The catalogue was edited by the curators of the show, see Elżbieta Dzikowska and Wiesława Wierzchowska, eds., Ars Erotica (Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe, 1994). 73. See the catalogue Elżbieta Dzikowska and Wiesława Wierzchowska, Ars Erotica (Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe, 1994). 74. See Pawel Leszkowicz, Ars Homo Erotica (Warsaw: CePed, 2010). 75. The contemporary artists from the region who participated in the exhibition were: Igor Grubic, Tanja Ostojić (Croatia), Blue Noses (Russia), Grupa Bergamot (Belarus), David Černý (the Czech Republic), Piotr Nathan, Magdalena von Rudy (Germany), Alex Mirutziu (Romania), Adam Dallos, Robert Szabo Benke, El Kazovskij (Hungary), Yasen Zgurovski, Mirella Karadjova (Bulgaria), Remigijus Venckus, Paulius i Svajone Stanikas, Stasys Eidrigevicius (Lithuania), Anna Daucikova (Slovakia), and Anastasia Mikhno (Ukraine). From Poland: Katarzyna Kozyra, Karolina Breguła, Wojciech Ćwiertniewicz, Tomasz Karabowicz, Paweł Matyszewski, Adam Adach, Tomasz Kawszyn, Łukasz Stokłosa, Barbara Falender, Grzegorz Kowalski, Karol Radziszewski, Laura Pawela, Izabella Gustowska, Hanna Jarząbek, Aleksandra Polisiewicz, Rafalala, Maciej Osika, Lidia Krawczyk/Wojciech Kubiak, Tomek Kitliński, Krzysztof Malec, Mariusz Tarkawian, Zuzanna Krajewska/Bartek Wieczorek, and Beata Sosnowska. 76. Leszkowicz, Ars Homo Erotica, 85–87. 77. The art criticism historian Dorota Jarecka wrote a series of articles in the main progressive newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza about the conficts and debates around Piotrowski’s revision of the National Museum and Ars Homo Erotica see: Gazeta Wyborcza 7 July 2010; 9–10 October 2010; 24 July 2009; 10 September 2009. 78. Anna Markowska, “Ciacho i ofara,” Odra, no. 11 (November 2010). 79. Mariusz Bryl graduated from the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, where he works as a professor. He publishes on the methodology of art history and Polish patriotic art see: Mariusz Bryl, Cykle Artura Grottgera: poetyka i recepcja (Poznan: Wydawnictwo UAM, 1994). 80. See Mariusz Bryl, Suwerenność dyscypliny. Polemiczna historia historii sztuki od 1970 roku (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2008). 81. Maria Poprzęcka, Akt polski (Warszawa: Edipresse, 2006).

250 Paweł Leszkowicz 82. For example, Ewa Domańska, a well-known Polish historian, uses art interpretations and the gender approach in her historiographic and methodological studies, e.g.: Historia egzystencjalna (Warszawa: PWN, 2012); Historie niekonwencjonalne. Refeksja o przeszlosci w nowej humanistyce (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Poznanskie, 2006). 83. For the debate on ‘genderism’ in Poland, see: Weronika Grzebalska, “Poland,” in Gender as Symbolic Glue: The Position and Role of Conservative and Far Right Parties in the AntiGender Mobilizations in Europe, eds. Eszter Kováts Maari Pőim (Budapest: Foundation for European Progressive Studies, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2015), 83–104.

14 Narrating Dissident Art in Spain The Case of Desacuerdos. Sobre Arte, Políticas y Esfera Pública (2003–2005) Alberto López Cuenca For E. and R., who never give up on the conversation.

“The worst trend of the season,” wrote the infuential art critic Juan Manuel Bonet in 1991 about a number of exhibitions featuring works by Marcelo Expósito, Estrujenbank, Agustín Parejo School, and Pedro G. Romero, among others.1 Bonet described the “sad feeling of boredom” that the “accumulation of calls by ‘engaged art’ in Spain” at the time instilled in him. His negative opinion would be of no interest nowadays if not by the fact that Bonet became, from 2000 until 2004, the director of the most prominent institution in Spain devoted to modern and contemporary art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) and that those politicised works previously disparaged by him for their “little aesthetic weight” ended up gaining a proper place in this very museum. They were included in the 2013 exhibition Minimal Resistance. Between Late Modernism and Globalisation: Artistic Practices during the 80s and 90s, that served as a preamble for a reorganisation of the Museum’s permanent collection.2 What has happened in scarcely twenty-two years to have “the worst trend of the season” now parading into the most prestigious museographic narrative of Spanish contemporary art? In what follows, I refect on the construction of a new narrative of what I will call ‘dissident art’ from contemporary Spain. This label refers to artistic practices that unfolded since the 1960s up until the 1990s, which were loosely related to the tactics of conceptual art and social and media activism. Until recently, such practices and tactics were excluded from the hegemonic academic or museographic narratives. By ‘dissident art’ I do not mean to suggest that there is something specifcally confrontational as a common thread to these practices. Although typically the ones considered here did run against or openly avoided the mainstream understanding and procedures of the art system of the time, what concerns me is the emergence of a historiography that invokes them so as to challenge the dominant narrative of Spanish art. I will focus specifcally in Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el estado español (Disagreements. On Art, Politics and Public Sphere in Spain), an interinstitutional research project launched in 2003 that sought to construct a historiographical counter-model in order to explore the links between artistic practices and the public sphere in Spain since the late 1960s.3 Unlike previous attempts to destabilise institutionalised narratives, this ‘dissident’ historiography has been promoted by an unprecedented network of exhibitions, seminars, periodicals, electronic resources, and the work of academic and non-academic research groups. I will relate Desacuerdos to

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previous projects to which it is linked, and I will argue that in view of such links Desacuerdos appears as a complex network of practices that goes beyond the felds of museography, historiography, or academia. The actors Desacuerdos enrolled and the ways in which they interacted would crisscross the traditional boundaries of these institutional forms.4 As I will underline, these disciplinary intersections were the result of a conscious attempt to make Desacuerdos an intervention in the global and local political situation of the time. A key factor contributing to the enactment of this dissident narrative has less to do with art and its institutions than with the antiglobalisation movement and its aftermath— from the 1994 uprising of Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, Zapatista National Liberation Army) in Chiapas in Mexico to its peak and downfall in the Genoa demonstrations of 2001. I will refer to this process as well as to documenta X (1997), the reception of Postmarxist and Italian Post-operaist thinking in Spain and the wave of ‘new institutionalism’ in artistic venues in Europe to characterise the momentum that made Desacuerdos possible. By doing this, I intend to show that a conception of the political implications of artistic practices was invigorated in Spain at the time. As we will see, one of the fgures in this endeavour was Manuel Borja-Villel, who recalls about his tenure as director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in the late 1990s: “some of us felt the necessity to reconsider twentieth-century art history by taking into account the whole of the political history of that century. We thought that we also must relate that way of thinking with the emerging social movements.”5 Thus, producing a new account of Spanish art was not so much a way of recounting past facts as of intervening in a present struggle. Since 1996, a right wing government was in power in Spain, implementing drastic neoliberal economic policies and eventually backing a hugely unpopular military invasion of Iraq in 2003. This decision to join the Iraq war led to a wave of demonstrations all over the country in which different manifestations of social discontent converged. Desacuerdos and its enactment of a counter hegemonic art history should be located within these political tensions. As Borja-Villel adds: “Art history is a space in which a political fght between narratives takes place. Artistic images and the narrative they project are a battlefeld for hegemony.”6 For those involved in Desacuerdos, this meant challenging and modifying the institutions and locations in which art history had traditionally been deployed.

Dissidences Before Disagreements Before Desacuerdos invoked the political commitment of contemporary artistic practices in Spain, there had been several attempts at challenging the conventional wisdom on contemporary Spanish art.7 It is worth paying attention to at least two of these proposals in order to stress the differences with Desacuerdos.8 They present two important points: on the one hand, a chronology to organise Spanish art since the 1970s around its capacity to enact a tension with the institutional environment and, on the other hand, criteria to gather projects whose goal is to intervene in the public sphere. The exhibition Before and After the Enthusiasm. 72–1992 took place at the KunstRai 89 art fair in Amsterdam and was curated by José Luis Brea in 1989. Its narrative assembled artistic practices that had been marginalised by the ‘enthusiastic’ celebration of painting in the 1980s.9 Brea argued for the link between two periods of contemporary Spanish art via “the transmission of fndings in the recent most radicalised

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research in the artistic feld.” He characterised the age of ‘enthusiasm’ (1982–1988) as that of the wrongly understood success of Spanish art in the international arena. It was the golden age of painters and sculptors such as Miquel Barceló, José María Sicilia, and Txomin Badiola, who were heralded by critics such as Juan Manuel Bonet and Francisco Calvo Serraller. In Brea’s view, the ‘success’ of such artists and critics was no more than “the fruit of a conservative, formalist ideology of a return to the order fltered by a localist, aestheticising inheritance.”11 The purpose of his own exhibition was to show how at least two periods in the recent history of Spanish art had avoided the uncritical enthusiasm of the 1980s. The frst period (1972–1979) had “escaped the pure and tedious reiteration of the formula in force internationally.”12 It did so at events such as the Pamplona Encounters of 1972 and the series “Nuevos comportamientos artísticos” (New Artistic Behaviours) organised by Simón Marchán Fiz in 1974 besides works by Eva Lootz, Adolfo Schlosser, and Nacho Criado. The second period, the one ‘after’ the enthusiasm (1987–1992), was one of “an attitude of self-questioning of the very space of the event.”13 Citing works by Pepe Espaliú, Federico Guzmán, Pedro G. Romero, and Rogelio López Cuenca, Brea writes: 10

Set the date around 1987–92, for example, and situate yourself in the slow emergence of a group of new refexive activities which could equally refer to a certain neoconceptual feld, always provided this does not include any kind of narrow stylistic academicism, but instead basically an attitude of self-questioning of the very space of the event: the recognition of a condition of confnement in a complex stage of the representation space, in which all strategy development should contemplate the construction of a refexive tension capable of offering a direction of resistance to the pure systematic effciency of already established enunciative resources.14 These artistic practices Brea is invoking before and after the 1980s were not supposed to be part of recent history.15 There are enough reasons for this and so many other exclusions.16 Among them is the tendency of some of these practices to avoid the institutional framework that legitimised art during that period; their mass media infuenced strategies that made them interact with a public that was not always the narrow and elitist one of the art world and their frequent alignment with social struggles that seemed to dissolve art into everyday life and politics. On the other hand, the narratives that were supposed to give an account of them were either marked by a conceptual blindness from historians and critics or by overtly narrow stances that despised them in favour of more reassuring media such as painting in a supposedly nascent art market. As a general background for this notorious conservativeness, it should be noted that there was a growing perception after Franco’s death in 1975 that culture was just offcial culture—the one sanctioned and promoted by public and private formal institutions—and, as a consequence of this idea, that culture was the location of consensus, not of confict or disagreement in the newly reinstated democratic regime.17 The second curatorial attempt at presenting dissident art in Spain worth mentioning was the 1991 exhibition El sueño imperativo (The Imperative Dream), organised at Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and curated by Mar Villaespesa. Although it presented works by Francesc Torres, Pedro G. Romero, and Rogelio López Cuenca alongside projects by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Nancy Spero, and Chris Burden, among

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others, it did not intend to be a review of recent political art in Spain. Rather, it was an attempt to locate some contemporary Spanish artists within an international framework so as to prove their actual capacity to intervene in a broader social context. This is clearly revealed in most of the texts included in the catalogue—especially in those by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, José María Parreño, and África Vidal. These texts provided historical and wide ranging defnitions of ‘critical art’ within which certain contemporary Spanish art could be reckoned. The featured projects were site-specifc interventions either on the Círculo de Bellas Artes’ building or directly on the streets of Madrid. The idea of art as a vehicle for social change was supposed to be shared by all the artists working in El sueño imperativo. For curator Mar Villaespesa this meant that the exhibition embodied a consciousness of the shortcomings of cultural practices in Spain as well as the urge to act politically: However, the precarious cultural panorama in our country during this century, due to the reasons we pointed out earlier, has robbed Spanish artists of the opportunity to contemplate art that goes beyond the limits of art as objects. They have not had the possibility of developing their work in a variety of fronts or of expanding their interaction with society.18 After mentioning some exceptions such as Equipo Crónica’s work of the 1960s and that of “a group of young Catalan conceptual artists” (i.e. Grup de Treball), Villaespesa concludes that “[n]one of these phenomena has been debated or analysed critically, nor has the role of the artist in our society been discussed.”19 At least part of the critical reception of the exhibition agreed on its relevance. Esteban Pujals considered that the texts included in the catalogue put forward an “extraordinarily honest selfcriticism” when illuminating the problems of today’s art, namely, “[h]ow can critical art be sponsored by the same structures against wich it is adressed?”20 For Pujals this awareness makes it neccesary “to refer to El sueño imperativo as an event literally unprecedented in the artistic history of our country.”21 Although these exhibitions introduced conficting perspectives from that of the mainstream narrative of Spanish contemporary art of the 1980s, their infuence was limited.22 They actually provided institutional spots for emerging and dissenting practices that reclaimed a conceptual and political twist for contemporary art that would remain visible up until today. However, it can hardly be said that they managed to articulate any lasting narrative of contemporary art in Spain. With their proposals they were rejecting widespread views at the time, yet conventional wisdom was not seriously challenged.

The Paved Path Into Desacuerdos In order to construct and disseminate a successful dissident narrative a different set of practices beyond that of the exhibition space and its catalogues had to be developed. It was precisely the question of the institution’s role in this operation that was at the forefront of Desacuerdos since its inception in 2003. It undertook both the task of elaborating a new narrative and of reconfguring the practices that would produce and spread it. Desacuerdos was meant to provide a conceptual grid that organised contemporary Spanish art around the idea of enacting a tension within the institutional environment in order to overfow such an environment and reach a broader

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social arena. As one of the actors in this complex network, Santiago Eraso has noted Desacuerdos was to be seen as an opportunity to modify anachronistic organisational models in the artistic feld that relied on limited notions of exhibition, curator, and workshop.23 “Desacuerdos cannot just be a picture of the situation; it cannot just work to confrm a certain reality. Quite the opposite, it has to be useful in transforming the reality in which we act.”24 The artistic practices reviewed were as dissident as the very demand Desacuerdos posed to the conventional wisdom and, specially, the way it had been established. Desacuerdos was an interinstitutional research project featuring exhibitions, seminars, publications, and a web-based archive seeking to explore the connections between artistic practices and the public sphere since the late 1960s. It was a collaboration between MACBA Arteleku in San Sebastián, and the arteypensamiento (artandthinking) program at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía in Sevilla. For the exhibitions and the public programme of seminars and conferences that would follow in 2005 they were joined by the Centro José Guerrero in Granada. A network of institutions was then temporarily set up to put Desacuerdos in motion.25 The project was not, however, led by either a curator or a precise academic research group. Given the heterogenous realm of practices that were to be mapped—e.g. visual poetry, activism, and the rise of the creative city—it required an unusual strategy.26 As the introduction to Desacuerdos states: In this respect, we believed it was fundamental to develop an investigation process with a decentralised structure and a network of collaborating cultural institutions of various kinds developing projects which went beyond the institutional limits, thus enabling other critical sectors of culture to operate without being subsumed or conditioned.27 That decentralised structure was manifest, frst of all, in the interinstitutional coordination and sponsorship of the research project. It is worth noting the peripheral status of these three institutions with respect to the mainstream discourse and institutional framework of Spanish contemporary art and the markedly different cultural settings of each one of them: Andalucía, Catalunya, and Euskadi.28 Besides, a number of up to 38 independent and academic researchers, activists, and artists were involved covering an extremely wide range of topics. At the centre was “1969- . . . Algunas hipótesis de ruptura para una historia política del arte en el estado español” (1969 . . . A Few Disruptive Hypotheses for a Political History of Art in Spain) a collective research project that, for some time then, artist and activist Marcelo Expósito had been promoting. It was around it that Desacuerdos would originate—yet considerably expanding its original scope.29 The structure of Desacuerdos was so defned around three main axes. The already mentioned “1969- . . . Algunas hipótesis de ruptura para una historia política del arte en el estado español” was coordinated by Marcelo Expósito and constituted by three main areas: prácticas artísticas colectivas (collective practices); globalización desde abajo (globalisation from below); and feminismos (feminisms). Work in each of these three areas were developed by artists, researchers, and activists such as Paloma Blanco, Carmen Navarrete, María Ruido, Fefa Vila, and Montse Romaní, among many others. The second axis was “Líneas de fuerza” (Force Lines)30 that was

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divided in three main topics: banalización (trivialisation), that focused on the late 1970s and early 1980s cultural scene and ‘La movida’ in Madrid (developed by Teresa Vilarós, Cristina Moreiras, and Juan Pablo Wert); mercantiliziación (commodifcation), which took as its main concern the link between art and economy in the 1980s (coordinated by Alberto López Cuenca); and espectacularización (spectacularisation), which looked into the multimedia turn in art of the 1990s (supervised by Gabriel Villota). The third axis was “Casos de estudio” (Case Studies),31 and it called attention to specifc events and strategies that had confgured the artistic scene in Spain since the 1970s up to 2004 that were considered not to have been properly analysed. Some of the topics were cultural policy (taken up by Jorge Luis Marzo and Amparo Lozano), the Pamplona Encounters of 1972 (by José Díaz Cuyás and Carmen Pardo), the digital platform ALEPH as a space for alternative cultural action (by Jesús Carrillo), Spanish visual poetry (by Esteban Pujals), and the branding of cities such as Barcelona (by Mari Paz Balibrea). The results of this complex research network were translated into different media: two exhibitions bearing the name of the project gave a central role to documentation,32 public discussions and conferences,33 a printed journal,34 and a web page35 that made most of the research and documents available. Given its focus and reach Desacuerdos not only required a plural research strategy, but it also needed a way of making those different ways of doing research heterogeneously manifest. As an implication of the ‘decentredness’ of the research process and the ways to make it visible, the subjects of study were supposed to have a saying in that very process—their voices had not only to be recorded but had to transform the very conditions of the conversation. Desacuerdos aimed to tell a story that included the contradictions and antagonisms inherent in the practices being considered. This was a challenge the interinstitutional network had diffculties dealing with. It specially tested the capacities of the institutions involved to translate the singularities of each research into different media. As Jota Gracián wrote: “One of the diffculties is precisely that of representing something that has been born from a vocation of irrepresentability, from the will of breaking up from the given conditions.”36 Disputes arose among researchers and artists and between them and the way their works were presented by the institutions. Notoriously confictive was the way the exhibition at MACBA dealt with visual poetry and feminist strategies.37 Some of the researchers eventually quit the project and artists removed works from the exhibition.38 Criticisms were raised because of the way works were displayed and fetishised.39 This was something that the Desacuerdos’ ‘group of coordinators’ could not but expect because there was a previously paved path into these disagreements. If Manuel Borja-Villel reckons producing a new narrative as a struggle for hegemony then the institution is its battlefeld.40 This bellicose allegory certainly applies to the way Desacuerdos unfolded not only in its relation to the dominant history of contemporary Spanish art at the time but within its own development. However, that experience of artistic practice as a space of social confict was not new. Not at least for some of those directly involved in the production of that “counter-hegemonic historiography” Desacuerdos was seeking to promote. Jorge Ribalta, who became director of Public Programs at MACBA since the arrival of Borja-Villel, was with him and Marcelo Expósito behind a series of initiatives designed to make the museum a confictive space for debate. “Our purpose,” Ribalta wrote, “is pushing the limits and contradictions of the institutional framework.

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A museum is nothing other than what you do with it, the forms in which people appropriate it. This is our contribution to a radically political redefnition of artistic relationality.”41 They pushed the limits of the institutional framework of MACBA at least through three projects that preceded Desacuerdos and made clear that enacting a new narrative of Spanish contemporary art was an issue that reached far beyond historiography, that is, it meant a local political intervention. The frst one was the workshop “De la acción directa como una de las bellas artes” (Direct Action as One of the Fine Arts) in the Fall of 2000, an attempt to get together artistic collectives and local social movements. The workshop invited collectives from around the world (French group Ne pas plier devoted to education and popular struggles, the network of anti-racist Kein Mensch ist illegal from Germany, UK-based media and activist group Reclaim the Streets, the anti-consumerist collective RTMark from the United States, and alternative media Indymedia) with the purpose of connecting them with groups of activists and artists in Barcelona dealing with issues such as precarious labour, migration, gentrifcation, and direct political action. The goal was to “start certain kind of processes or an articulation of local political struggles with artistic methods.”42 This workshop was coordinated by Spanish art and activist group La Fiambrera Obrera. La Fiambrera Obrera organised a more ambitious program at MACBA that sprouted from this workshop a year later, Las Agencias (Agencies). Ribalta recounts: We had been dealing with this notion of ‘agency’ in the museum for a while. It has two meanings for us. One is that of empowerment, of giving agency to the publics according to the idea of the plurality of productive forms of appropriation of the museum I described before. And the other meaning is that of a sort of micro-institution, a kind of mediation organism between the museum and the publics. In order to understand the impact of Las Agencias it is important to keep in mind the context in Barcelona in the months prior to the World Bank meeting, scheduled for June 2001, but fnally cancelled because the organizers feared the possible violence it could generate in the city. . . . In Barcelona this moment was the strongest one for what we call the anti-globalization movement. A countercampaign was organized in Barcelona, and Las Agencias played a central role in it in terms of creating strategies of visibility, which transformed the traditional methods in anti-capitalist movements.43 Needless to say that Las Agencias was not just another workshop about art and activism. It was the direct intervention of a museum to make connections between art and activism happen in a specifc place an time.44 As the then-director of MACBA, BorjaVillel, explains: We agreed that its [Las Agencias’] working was autonomous, the management of the Museum would not interfere in what was happening there, although obviously the idea was to have a shared and continuous monitoring. The point was precisely to experiment in practice how to build this kind of spaces of agency between the institution and civil society.45 At the same time that Las Agencias was in process, the museum opened a ‘traditional’ exhibition that surveyed the relationships between art and political activism since the

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1960s. Antagonismos. Casos de estudio (Antagonisms. Case Studies) presented works by Spanish and international artists such as Harun Farocki, Guerrilla Girls, Grup de Treball, Hans Haacke, Rogelio López Cuenca, Gordon Matta-Clark, Antoni Muntadas, Lygia Pape, and Pedro G. Romero. The thesis was simple and clear: art can also be a tool for social intervention. As the introductory text to the exhibition noted: At a time when museums had lost much of their traditional social credibility as spaces that bring together and legitimate the transformative power of art, Antagonismos explored concepts such as the occupation of the streets as a theatre for spontaneous activities, art as service, fction and the construction of historical memory, the post-functional object, activism and collaboration, the questioning of the concept of authorship, alternative exhibition models, and the function of artistic practice in the ideological domain.46 In different ways, these three projects marked how Desacuerdos would come into existence and evolve. However, they need to be located within a larger context beyond that of the Spanish artistic scene for its motivations to be grasped.

Framing Desacuerdos It is important to frame these three projects organised by MACBA in at least four moments that notably infuenced the 1990s artistic scene that paved the way for the unfolding of Desacuerdos. The frst one was the impact of documenta X, which certainly revived the interest in political art worldwide. This exhibition held at Kassel in 1997 was curated by Catherine David. In the introduction of the exhibition’s guide, David reclaimed the urgency and political import of contemporary art: It may seem paradoxical or deliberately outrageous to envision a critical confrontation with the present in the framework of an institution that over the past twenty years has become a Mecca for tourism and cultural consumption. Yet the pressing issues of today make it equally presumptuous to abandon all ethical and political demands. . . . Overcoming the obstacle means seeking out the current manifestations and underlying conditions of a critical art which does not fall into a precut academic mold or let itself be summed up in a facile label. Such a project cannot ignore the upheavals that have occurred both in documenta’s institutional and geopolitical situation since the inaugural exhibition in 1955 and in the recent developments of aesthetic forms and practices. Nor can it shirk the necessary ruptures and changes in the structure of the event itself.47 The success of David’s project was notable for an endeavour that concerned itself with the relationship between contemporary art and politics.48 The infuence of documenta X on Antagonismos and Desacuerdos is notorious. Actually, it is quite surprising that the frst issue of the journal Desacuerdos, which was entirely devoted to introducing its “counter hegemonic historiography” of Spanish contemporary art, included an interview with her, who was not involved in the project.49 The second moment that frames the impetus of those three projects promoted by MACBA that notably infuenced Desacuerdos was the antiglobalisation movement

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that emerged during the 1990s. Since the insurgency of the EZLN in Chiapas in 1994, the possibility of a global rebellion against neoliberalism started to take shape. The surge of antiglobalisation demonstrations that took place in Madrid in 1994 against the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in Seattle for the World Trade Organisation’s meeting in 1999, in Prague in 2000, and Genoa in 2001 and the origins of the World Social Forum in its frst meeting in 2001 in Porto Alegre all inform the dissident turn in Spanish contemporary art historiography. Both Ribalta and Expósito agree to locate all three projects as strategies to review and make available artistic tools for social activism against globalisation and neoliberal policies.50 In the 1990s several collectives that mixed artistic strategies and social and media activism appeared, most notably, Preiswert Arbeitskollegen, La Fiambrera Obrera, SEAC (Selección de Euskadi de Arte de Concepto), El Grupo Surrealista de Madrid, Galería de arte contestatario, etc.51 Questioning its own institutional perspective, MACBA joined this surge in highly politicised artistic practices. The third moment is the rising infuence of Postmarxism and the revival of Italian operaismo. Paradoxically, the 1990s also saw the birth and popularisation of the discourse of creative industries as a new twist in the cultural logic of neoliberalism that basically resorted to art as an economic expedient.52 In order to understand and contest the expanded social role of culture in its new neoliberal appropriation, there was a turn to the Postmarxist theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau and to the works of thinkers such as Paolo Virno, Toni Negri, and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi.53 Many of those who joined Desacuerdos read, discussed, or translated such works into the artistic feld and back into social activism. In a 1999 MACBA seminar on “Globalización y diferenciación cultural” (Globalisation and Cultural Differentiation), Mouffe delivered a speech entitled “For a democratic identity politics” that would later be used as a text for Antagonismos a concept that was obviously borrowed from Mouffe’s work.54 Both projects, Antagonismos and Desacuerdos—the latter taking its name from Rancière’s Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy—are imbued by a conceptual apparatus derived from the local reception of Postmarxism. However, this connection between radical political philosophy and contemporary art was not something just happening at MACBA. An important initiative in this sense was the Universidad Nómada (The Nomadic University) that since 2000 organised seminars, workshops, and books presentations on these and related topics. In 2001 was published what could be considered a text book for art and activism in Spain: Modos de hacer. Arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa (Ways of Doing. Critical Art, Public Sphere and Direct Action).55 The profles of the authors included in this compilation reveal its ambition: Lucy Lippard, Douglas Crimp, Michel de Certeau, Brian Holmes, Reclaim the streets, Ne pas plier, and La Fiambrera Obrera, among others. Another longterm publishing initiative seeking to take radical political thought into the analysis of contemporary art began in 2002 when Darío Corbeira, Gabriel Villota, and Marcelo Expósito edited the frst issue of the journal Brumaria. Prácticas artísticas, estéticas y políticas (Brumaria. Artistic, Aesthetical and Political Practices), the stated purpose of which was “to contribute to the restitution and strengthening of the links between artistic and cultural practices and social and political practices that around us promote the constitution of spaces of critical rationality, autonomy, and radical democracy.”56 Texts by Maurizio Lazzarato, Gerald Raunig, Brian Holmes, Ana Longoni, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, George Yúdice, and James Petras among so many others have

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been published dealing with topics such as immaterial labour, radical political imagination, art and revolution, or art and the Spanish transition to democracy. As of 2019, this publishing project still carries on. Finally, it is worth mentioning the role of Trafcantes de sueños—a “multifarious project” started in the mid 1990s—devoted to publishing, debates, and social activism in the felds of ecology, feminism, and antiglobalisation. They have been of importance in the circulation of the works of authors such as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Silvia Federici, Toni Negri, and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, all of which besides a now quite large catalogue of contemporary thinkers are available online with a Creative Commons License. The fourth and last moment that helps in framing the three projects mentioned earlier is what has been called ‘new institutionalism.’ This refers to the process of experimenting with the limits of artistic institutions by opening them to civil society and its confict.57 This was not just the case of MACBA but was something that was happening internationally. Lucie Kolb and Gabriel Fluckiger mention the process at MACBA next to the work of directors and curators Maria Lind, Charles Esche, and Jonas Ekeberg and institutions such as the Rooseum in Malmö, Garanti Contemporary Art Centre in Istanbul, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Bergen Kunsthal. As such, [t]he term new institutionalism describes a series of curatorial, art educational as well as administrative practices that from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s endeavored to reorganise the structures of mostly medium-sized, publicly funded contemporary art institutions, and to defne alternatives forms of institutional activity. At least on a discursive level, there occurred a shift away from the institutional framing of an art object as practiced since the 1920s with elements such as the white cube, top-down organization and insider audiences.58 Valentín Roma has called attention to this new institutionalism’s turn as a condition of possibility for the enactment of Desacuerdos.59 It was not just the artist who was expected to be dissident but institutions themselves. The exhibitions that were organised were far more than a display of critical works of art; they had to be sites of resistance against the rationalities of contemporary art history. “This was something that understandably placed the three institutions [MACBA, UNIA arteypensamiento program, and Arteleku] on the fringes and in clear opposition to the predominant trends of the time.”60 Borja-Villel’s position about this point is neat: “What a public museum has to do is to put itself at the service of the real complexity of society, help to radicalise democracy through culture.”61

Is There a Future for Disagreement? In a 2007 article by a key fgure in the trend to institutionalise criticism, Nina Möntmann expressed a gloomy concern regarding the future of this approach: “things have changed dramatically.”62 And Roma seems to agree with her: Within the current Spanish context—a context characterised by the self-absorption of most institutions, almost exclusively concerned with their own fnancial problems and conditions of survival—there is a risk that the critical narratives put forward by ‘Desacuerdos’ might become only a pause, a hiatus in the articulation

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of a critical interaction between museums and antagonistic practices, or perhaps even a hiatus absorbed as part of hegemonic institutional narratives.63 Things have certainly changed since Desacuerdos started in 2003. Most notoriously a ‘fnancial crisis’ has provoked a wave of cuts in public spending that have severely hit cultural institutions. In Spain, many of them have been emptied of any content or public mission and have been reduced to mere tourist attractions.64 On the other hand, since 2011 there has been a tide of civil disobedience and activism around the 15-M movement that has led to the appearance of a political organisation rooted in civil society—Podemos—that seeks to challenge the political order settled in Spain since Franco’s death in 1975. In this situation, what sort of new narrative would be worth devising and how should it be done? Desacuerdos was conceived to critically intervene in the present through a plural research on dissident contemporary art in Spain. The global and local political circumstances in which institutions sponsoring the project were embedded were also at stake. As has already been noted, the artistic practices reviewed were dissident as much as the very demand Desacuerdos posed to the conventional wisdom regarding how to narrate art at the time. That conventional wisdom has certainly changed. And Desacuerdos has played a part in this happening.65 Why and how it managed a change to come about in the narrative of Spanish contemporary art have been expounded earlier. There are, however, some lessons for the present that can be drawn from the construction of Desacuerdos’ counter hegemonic narrative. One of the key aspects of the working of Desacuerdos certainly was its decentred research groups. This is something that has been continued in a larger scale in MNCARS, where Borja-Villel moved in 2008, and UNIA arteypensamiento and seems to be having some interesting outcomes, although they are quite often just comfortably located within the artistic institutions, lacking a clear outreach. It is worth mentioning the creation of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network) in 2007. This is an international group made up by researchers from Latin America—Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, etc.—devoted to critically map and analyse practices related to conceptual art practices and social activism in the region. Among its results, there are exhibitions, conferences, and publications.66 In 2009, L’Internationale, a new interinstitutional network, was created as “a space for art within a non-hierarchical and decentralised internationalism, based on the value of difference and horizontal exchange among a constellation of cultural agents, locally rooted and globally connected.”67 This network includes the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, SALT in Istanbul, MNCARS in Madrid, MACBA in Barcelona, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp (MHKA). Among their activities, there are exhibitions, seminars, and a digital database.68 What it is not always clear is how this network relates to larger groups of civil society and in what terms. At frst glance disputes and controversies arising within Desacuerdos can be seen as a failure—history, after all, is still supposed to provide us with sound and unquestionable stories. However, the debates and disagreements regarding the process and narrative Desacuerdos enacted are probably its biggest success. It inaugurated a space for discussion on contemporary Spanish art and its political impulses that did not previously exist. This has no doubt shaken the mainstream narrative and made sense of other sorts of artistic practices. Desacuerdos has certainly had a discernible impact

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on curatorial discourses. However, one of its weaker points has precisely been the translation of the research project into exhibitions. A surprisingly fetishistic approach to works and also the inability to properly put them into context have sometimes resulted in a trivialisation of many practices, as a 2016 solo exhibition about collective Agustín Parejo School (APS) dishearteningly proved.69 APS featured centrally in the 1980s narrative of Antagonismos and Desacuerdos for its public performances, graffti, and media interventions. After the visibility gained for being included in those exhibitions, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla organised a show with more than a hundred items—collages, video, installations, paintings, etc. The display basically focused on objects without any discernible discourse articulating them. There was a scarce and vague introduction to the show, absolutely no debate or public presentation to discuss what all that was about, nor even a publication. Probably none of these could have helped much since the triumphalist curatorial approach to APS was summarised as “el gusto es nuestro” (that can be translated as both “taste belongs to us” and also “we are pleased”),70 meaning that it was victory time for APS since its once dissident works were now sanctioned by a formal artistic institution. This is obviously an unwanted side effect of Desacuerdos, which has made it possible to expand some institutions’ narrative to include dissident art without the slightest consideration of its social role being raised. Finally, a quite signifcant implication of Desacuerdos has been to introduce topics for a political approach to contemporary art history in Spain that were previously inaccessible for research and educative programs at universities.71 The contents and strategies of Desacuerdos have been closely related to the development of the Programa de Estudios Independientes (PEI, Program of Independent Studies) at MACBA since 2006 and the interinstitutional Master Program on Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at MNCARS since 2010.72 Researchers, courses, and dissertations related to the topics dealt with by Desacuerdos have become more frequent for the last few years in these academic programs. In this sense, despite the fact that Desacuerdos originated outside the university, there certainly has been a Desacuerdos’ effect in recent academic historiography. Yet, it can hardly be said that its reception has meant a relevant challenge to the way research is generally undertaken in the academia. There has been no new institutionalism’s turn happening at the university because of the topics put on the table by Desacuerdos. Actually, a proper scrutiny of Desacuerdos’ impact in scholarly publications is still to be developed. A notoriously weak point in this scholarly literature is the lack of in depth research on Desacuerdos produced by academics unrelated to it.73 Nevertheless a monumental recent book on Spanish art between 1939 and 2015 by Patricia Mayayo and Jorge Luis Marzo presents itself as a “deepening” in the work developed by Desacuerdos.74 One can make sense of Desacuerdos only if it is properly located within the political and cultural struggles griping contemporary art institutions and its discourses in Spain and globally at the time. Doing this has been the point of this chapter. Desacuerdos certainly challenged the conventional wisdom regarding the history of contemporary Spanish art. And more signifcantly, it showed that any other history worth the name should be narrated by means of a pluralistic and antagonistic undertaking. All things considered, the most lasting lesson from Desacuerdos for Spanish art historiography may have been proving in practice that producing any counter-narrative also requires devising new institutional forms.75

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Notes 1. Juan Manuel Bonet, “El nuevo realismo social,” CYAN. Revista internacional de arte contemporáneo, no. 20 (1991): 9. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are made by the author. 2. Iker Seisdedos, “El Reina Sofía acaba con el arte del siglo XX,” El País, 13 October 2013. 3. Desacuerdos was sponsored by Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Arteleku-Diputación foral de Gipuzkoa and the arteypensamiento programme at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA) from 2003 to 2005, while the exhibition and the public programme of seminars and conferences were organised by these institutions and Centro José Guerrero. For more details of the project and access to some resources see http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=141&Itemid= 141 [Accessed: 07/07/2018]. 4. Iñaki Estella has convincingly pictured the struggle between the academia and the museum in defning the historiography of contemporary Spanish art. For him, the museum took the lead in that confict in the 1980s. His argument fgures out the role of Desacuerdos in that historiographic struggle and concludes that “the historiographic reconstruction [of Desacuerdos’] did not speak to the academia” but was seeking to provoke a turn in the institutional landscape by means of a parallel academic research [investigación paraacadémica]. “Dispositivos historiográfcos entre la universidad y el museo,” in La Historia del Arte en España. Devenir, discursos y propuestas, ed. Álvaro Molina (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo/UAM, 2016), 536–537. 5. Marcelo Expósito, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel (Madrid: Turpial, 2015), 115. 6. Expósito, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel, 103. 7. It is important to note that the hegemonic stance was not epitomised by one person’s or institution’s historiographic discourse but by a ‘conventional wisdom.’ That conventional wisdom in the 1980s was characterised by a certain vocabulary (‘painting,’ ‘solo show,’ ‘artist,’ ‘art gallery,’ ‘success,’ ‘young,’ ‘sales’) that was common currency for spheres that ranged from Art History to art criticism and art fairs and the media. Noemí de Haro García has suggestively described how by the early 1980s other possible vocabularies and the struggle between them were being put aside in a “general amnesty in Art History.” Noemí de Haro García, “La historia del arte español de la transición: consecuencias políticas de una representación,” in Arte y transición, ed. Juan Albarrán (Madrid: Brumaria, 2012), 245. The hegemonic stance that resulted from this amnesty is manifest in books such as Francisco Calvo Serraller, España, medio siglo de arte de vanguardia, 1939–1985 (Madrid: Santillana, 1985). As well as in exhibitions, especially those organised by the Centro Nacional de Exposiones (National Centre for Exhibitions) under the management of Carmen Giménez devoted to Spanish painters such as Miquel Barceló (1985), José María Sicilia (1988), and Ferrán García Sevilla (1989). Also the Programa Español de Acción Cultural en el Exterior (PEACE, Spanish Program for Cultural Activities Abroad) organised several exhibitions to promote what was considered to be the most representative of contemporary Spanish art, basically painting and sculpture, such as Art Espagnol Actuel (Current Spanish Art) that was shown in France in 1984 or Spanisches Kaleidoskop (Spanish Kaleidoscope) that went to Germany in 1984, among others. For a general picture of the period see Anna María Guasch, “El arte español en la era del entusiasmo,” in Arte último del siglo XX. Del posminimalismo a lo multicultural (Madrid: Alianza forma, 2000), 297–340. In my view, a powerful aspect in the construction of this conventional wisdom was the hugely promoted Feria de Arte Contemporáneo (ARCO) in the mass media. For this, see Alberto López Cuenca, “ARCO en la distancia: posfordismo, internacionalismo e imaginario mediático,” in Panorama. New Economy, edited Mira Bernabeú (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2011). It is worth mentioning that Juan Albarrán has called attention to the process of oblivion of certain practices related to conceptual art and the rise of a triumphant and depoliticised narrative related to the boom of painting in the 1980s in Juan Albarrán, “Del ‘desarrollismo’ al ‘entusiasmo’: notas sobre el arte español en tiempos de transición,” Foro de Educación, no. 10 (2008): 167–184. For Albarrán, Juan Manuel Bonet was responsible for burying the memory of conceptualist strategies from the 1970s: “Bonet purposely distorted, trivialised and simplifed the true aesthetic, political and social

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8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

goals of conceptual art.” (Albarrán, “Del ‘desarrollismo’ al ‘entusiasmo’,” 175). For a consideration of how this conventional wisdom was still preponderant when Desacuerdos was under way see Valentín Roma, “A Critical Approach to the Project Desacuerdos,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 33 (2013): 122–126. There have obviously been other exhibitions and publications that in one way or another have surveyed artistic practices that had been either out of the mainstream or overtly political. Since Fuera de formato that took place at the Centro cultural de la Villa de Madrid in 1983 and was curated by Concha Jerez, Teresa Camps and Nacho Criado devoted to conceptual art from the 1970s to Art concepte: la década de los setenta en Cataluña, curated by Glòria Picazo at Galería Alfonso Alcolea in 1990; Cambio de sentido, curated by Dionisio Cañas in the village of Cinco Casas, Ciudad Real, in 1991; Idees i actituds. En torn de l’art conceptual a Catalunya, 1964–1980, Centro de Arte Santa Mónica, 1992, curated by Pilar Parcerisas; Los 90: cambio de marcha en el arte español, curated by José Luis Brea at Galería Juana Mordó, Madrid, in 1993. Brea would devote other exhibitions to review or contextualise contemporary Spanish art beyond the pictorial horizon that dominated the 1980s: Los últimos días (Salas del Arenal, 1992), Iluminaciones profanas (Arteleku, 1993), Anys 90. Distància zero (Centro de arte Santa Mónica, 1994), and El punto ciego. Arte español de los años 90 (Kunstraum Innsbruck, 1999). However, Before and After the Enthusiasm was the only exhibition inspired by a more ambitious historical scope. José Luis Brea, “The Walls of My Homeland,” in Before and After the Enthusiasm 72 1992 (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1989), 48. Brea, “The Walls of My Homeland,” 52. Brea, “The Walls of My Homeland,” 49. Brea, “The Walls of My Homeland,” 52. Brea, “The Walls of My Homeland,” 52. Patricia Mayayo and Jorge Luis Marzo suggest that Brea does not really put forward a historiographic argument in this exhibition since the works chosen seem to be mentioned just to “‘illustrate a previously elaborated theory.” Patricia Mayayo and Jorge Luis Marzo, Arte en España (1939–2015). Ideas, prácticas, políticas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2015), 666. I agree with the arguments Jesús Carrillo puts forward in “Amnesia y Desacuerdos. Notas acerca de los lugares de la memoria de las prácticas artístico-críticas del tardofranquismo,” Arte y políticas de identidad, no. 1 (2009) regarding the reasons for this exclusion and the different processes initiated to get them back into the centre of Spanish contemporary Art History. However, departing from Carrillo’s more descriptive perspective, I will concentrate on the complex performative dimension and institutional challenges of this historiographic overhaul by Desacuerdos that connects academic, museographic, and activist strategies. For a development of this argument see Teresa M. Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973–1993) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998); Alberto López Cuenca, “El traje del emperador. La mercantilización del arte en la España de los 80,” Revista de Occidente, no. 273 (2004): 29–41; Jorge Luis Marzo, “El concepto de ciudadanía como motor de la política artística española,” last modifed 2011, www. soymenos.net/ciudadania.pdf [Accessed: 07/07/2018]; Guillem Martínez, “El concepto CT,” en CT o la Cultura de la Transición (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2012). Mar Villaespesa, “The Imperative Dream,” in El sueño imperativo, trans. Cynthia Miguélez (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 1991), 112. Villaespesa, “The Imperative Dream,”112. Esteban Pujals, “Marcos, molduras, espejismos,” Subrosa, no. 2 (1991–1992): 68. Pujals, “Marcos, molduras, espejismos,” 68. It is worth noting that the work of Brea and Villaespesa was not deployed just in the gallery space. Both of them (alongside critic and curator Kevin Power) had worked together as directors of Arena internacional del arte, a short-lived journal that lasted just the year 1989 during which six issues were printed. Arena was a platform for the review of practices loosely related to conceptual art and a testing ground for a generation of new younger critics. Revealing of its stance is that in its very frst issue from January 1989, works by Eva Lootz, Agustín Parejo School, and Pedro G. Romero were featured.

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23. Montse Romaní, “Entrevista con Santiago Eraso,” unpublished. 24. Romaní, “Entrevista con Santiago Eraso.” 25. The initiative, although institutionally originated in MACBA, gained a stronger and ampler dimension once the other institutions joined the project—regarding topics, researchers, venues, and economic resources. A very important actor in coordinating, producing, and discussing contents was the cultural mediation agency BNV Producciones from Sevilla. 26. There certainly was a group of coordinators but it did not directly engage in research: Pedro G. Romero from UNIA, Santiago Eraso from Arteleku, Manuel Borja-Villel from MACBA, and Yolanda Romero from Centro José Guerrero (Expósito, Conversación con Manuel Borja-Villel, 268). Their work had more to do with supervising the articulation of the different lines of research and making sure that it “put into question some of their inner working structures” (Romaní, “Entrevista a Santi Eraso”). Nonetheless, they did play a very active role in the selection of works and materials to be included in the exhibitions in 2005. 27. UNIA, “Disagreements,” http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=503 [Accessed: 07/07/2018]. 28. The institutional decentering for an antagonistic project such as this did not seem to happen by chance: the Spanish government and the regional and local governments in Madrid had been for years controlled by conservative Partido Popular, a right wing pro-neoliberal policies party. As noted earlier, MNCARS, for instance, was directed in the 2000–2004 period by a notoriously conservative fgure, Juan Manuel Bonet. Desacuerdos can hardly not be seen as a challenge to this status quo invigorated from peripheral institutions. As Eraso has noted, this interinstitutional collaboration had a political motivation: “the creation of an also different cartography of the [Spanish] State.” Romaní, “Entrevista con Santi Eraso.” 29. Carrillo, “Amnesia y Desacuerdos,” 17. Pedro G. Romero states that the original project 1969- . . . was “signed by Marcelo Expósito and Jorge Ribalta.” Jota Gracián, “Archivos, capítulos, crisis, antagonismos, desacuerdos . . .,” unpublished interview with Pedro G. Romero. 30. Líneas de fuerza were devoted to “the axial lines relating to trivialisation, commercialisation and theatricalisation; the descriptors specifying key mechanisms to be able to understand, from within cultural hegemony, its motive powers.” UNIA, “Study Workshop.” 31. Case studies were devoted to “exceptions that mark paradoxes with which to critically redirect the design of research and draw a map of impelling forces to complete ideological currents and the instruments of previous felds of work.” UNIA, “Study Workshop.” 32. The exhibitions were held at MACBA from 4 March until 29 May 2005 and at Centro José Guerrero from 9 March until 29 May 2005. 33. There were two previous general working meetings with many of the researchers in Arteleku in October 2003 and at UNIA in December of 2003. The public presentation of Desacuerdos was made at MACBA with a series of fourteen round tables by the general name of La línea de sombra (The Shadow Line) between October and December 2003. It dealt with topics such as “Política y cultura en la Transición” (Politics and Culture during the Transition), “Caso Guggenheim” (The Guggenheim Case), and “El nacimiento de Arco” (The Birth of Arco). Public courses and conferences were organised that spanned some of the research areas revised: “Las nuevas relaciones entre arte y economía” (New Relations Betweeen Art and the Economy), MACBA, February 2005; “Mutaciones del feminismo: genealogías y prácticas artísticas” (Mutations of Feminism: Genealogies and Artistic Practices), Arteleku, April 2005; “Redes: modos de acción y producción en la sociedad global” (Networks: Ways of Acting and Production in a Global Society), MACBA, April–May 2005; “Medios de masas, multitud y prácticas antagónicas” (Mass Media, Multitude and Antagonistic Practices), José Guerrero, April 2005. 34. Eight issues of a journal have been published since 2005 with a Creative Commons License. The frst three of them were devoted to make public the results of the research axes mentioned above. The following ones were edited on specifc topics—alternative cinema, education, popular culture, art criticism—and are fully available online. See www. museoreinasofa.es/publicaciones/desacuerdos [Accessed: 07/07/2018]. 35. www.desacuerdos.org was made available with plenty of information, video and audio fles, and resources that had been used for the research. Quite surprisingly, the URL is

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36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

not operative as of July 2016. According to Iñaki Estella the web page suffered hacking attacks and eventually was shot down (“Dispositivos historiográfcos,” 339, note 33). Some information is still accessible at the arteypensamiento programme at UNIA’s web page (http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=503), MACBA’s (www.macba.cat/en/desacuerdos), and Centro José Guerrero’s (www.centroguerrero.es/ desacuerdos/) [All accessed: 07/07/2016]. Gracián, “Archivos, capítulos, crisis, antagonismos, desacuerdos . . .” One of the researchers on feminisms, artist María Ruido, complained that Desacuerdos was not up to her expectations and that she found her research on feminism to be just a complement for the project, especially regarding the exhibition. “Agendas diversas y colaboraciones complejas: feminismos, representaciones y prácticas políticas durante los 90 (y algunos años más) en el estado español,” workandwords, (2006): 2, 18–19, www. workandwords.net/uploads/fles/post-Desacuerdos06.pdf— [Accessed: 27/09/2017]. Jota Gracián, “Archivos, capítulos, crisis, antagonismos, desacuerdos . . . ” Joan Casellas is too harsh when saying that Desacuerdos as a whole was an “exhibitionary absurdity,” provided he does not put forward any sustained argument to back his assertion. Joan Casellas, “¿Desacuerdos? Sobre arte, política y esfera pública en el estado español,” El Viejo Topo, no. 21 (2005): 81. “Historiographic narratives, although they are based on facts, work as fctions. The stories that one builds as historian, with the mediation of institutions, are statements that have effects on the reality of the present. They also modify the collective perception that we have of the past. Fictions and discourse not only refect the power structure but they constitute the very power one fghts for, especially today. We see, for instance, that the relevance that politics has gained in our society takes the form of a dispute around which story about the current situation manages to be hegemonic.” Expósito, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel, 104. Jorge Ribalta, “Mediation and Construction of Publics. The MACBA Experience,” Transversal (2004). Ribalta, “Mediation,” 4. Ribalta, “Mediation,” 5. Jaime Vindel has analysed the overlappings of Las Agencias between art and activism in “Desplazamientos de la crítica: instituciones culturales y movimientos sociales entre fnales de los noventa y la actualidad,” Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública, no. 8 (2014): 290–307. Expósito, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel, 153. The police investigated the activities of Las Agencias and the director of the Museum was repeatedly contacted by the authorities to cancel the involvement of MACBA in the project. “I explained to them,” Borja-Villel recounts, “that I considered those activities of Las Agencias related to the education program of MACBA. If you see, leaving aside the issue of the legality or illegality of what Las Agencias were doing, there was in that discussion a confict about what the functions of a museum are.” Expósito, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel, 155. Due to these conficts with the police and other disagreements between the museum and some of the collectives gathered for Agencies the collaboration between them came to an end. MACBA, “Antagonisms. Case studies,” www.macba.cat/en/exhibition-antagonisms [Accessed: 07/07/2016]. Catherine David, “Introduction,” www.universes-in-universe.de/doc/e_press.htm [Accessed: 07/07/2016]. “documenta X was the frst megaexhibition that explicitly created a dialogue between critical theory and desires for artistic social intervention by making possible a constellation of parallel events consisting of lectures, publications and performances exploring and problematising processes related to economic globalisation and social inequality.” Panos Kompatsiaris, “Curating Resistances. Crisis and the limits of the political turn in contemporary art biennials” (PhD Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2015), 2. Jesús Carrillo, “Entrevista. Catherine David,” Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública, no. 1 (2005). Borja-Villel notes his closeness to Catherine David’s work: “documenta X proposed both a review of the political history of the 20th Century through art and a new form to think the relations between culture and politics at the end of the

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51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

267

Century. The beginning of my directorship at MACBA was closely related to all that.” Expósito, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel, 114–115. Ribalta, “Mediation and Construction of Publics,” 5; Marcelo Expósito, “Lecciones de historia. El arte, entre la experimentación institucional y las políticas de movimiento,” Paper at VII Simposio Internacional de Teoría sobre Arte Contemporáneo, México D.F., 30 January 2009. Borja-Villel also agrees on this point (Expósito, Entrevista con Manuel Borja-Villel, 163–164). See Paloma Blanco, “Prácticas artísticas colaborativas en la España de los noventa,” Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, política y esfera pública en el estado español, no. 2 (2005): 188–205. See George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). It is not a coincidence the wave of publications that appeared during those years: Mouffe’s The Return of the Political was published in 1993 (Spanish translation 1999 in Paidós) and The Democratic Paradox in 2000 (translated into Spanish in 2003 in Gedisa). La mésentente by Jacques Rancière came out in 1995 (in Spanish in 1996 in Nueva Visión) and Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique in 2000 (Spanish translation dates from 2002 in Centro de arte de Salamanca). Negri’s Arte e multitudo is published in 1990 (in Spanish in 2000 in Trotta) and Michael Hardt and Negri’s Empire was released in 2000 (the Spanish edition dates from 2002 in Paidós) as well as Paolo Virno’s Gramática de la multitud (Grammar of the Multitude) in 2003 (in Trafcantes de sueños). Expósito, Entrevista Manuel Borja-Villel, 124. Mouffe, Rancière, Negri, Virno plus a long list of Postmarxist and ‘radical left’ thinkers were invited at MACBA during Borja-Villel’s tenure: Angela Davis, Gayatri C. Spivak, Immanuel Wallerstein, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, Brian Holmes, etc. Jesús Carrillo, Jordi Claramonte, Marcelo Expósito and Paloma Blanco, eds., Modos de hacer. Arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2001). Jordi Claramonte, Paloma Blanco and Marcelo Expósito were in charge of Las Agencias at MACBA in 2000. Blanco, Expósito and Jesús Carrillo were part of the Desacuerdo’s team of researchers. According to Carrillo, this book came out as a way to theorise public art strategies developed against the gentrifcation process that was taking place in the area of Lavapiés in Madrid since the late 1990s (Jesús Carrillo, “Lavapiés-Atocha, arte público y política municipal,” in Arte en el espacio público: barrios artísticos y revitalización urbana, eds. Blanca Fernández and Jesús Pedro Lorente [Zaragoza: Prensas universitarias de Zaragoza, 2009], 199) See also Jesús Carrillo, Space Invaders. Intervenciones estético-políticas en un territorio en disputa: Lavapiés (1997–2004) (Madrid: Brumaria, 2018). Brumaria, “A modo de introducción. Arte, estética y política: un trípode sobre la esfera de lo real,” Brumaria. Prácticas artísticas, estéticas y políticas, no. 1 (2002): 7. Jorge Ribalta wrote a text which title was quite revealing: “Experimentos para una nueva institucionalidad” (Experiments for a new institutionality). He described in detail that all that happened at MACBA between 2000 and 2008 was an institutional experiment of regeneration. “What has come to be labelled ‘MACBA model’ has constituted a singular understanding of the museum as a space of debate and confict, a critical reinterpretation of the modern tradition that has articulated artistic strategies, social knowledge and interventions in the social sphere as methods to reinvent the artistic feld and provide it with a new meaning and social legitimacy.” Jorge Ribalta, “Experimentos para una nueva institucionalidad,” in Objetos relacionales. Colección MACBA 2002–2007 (Barcelona: MACBA, 2010), 225. This concern about the crisis and new possibilities of the Museum was certainly one of Borja-Villel’s, who in 1995 as director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies had sponsored the exhibition and seminar Los límites del museo (The Limits of the Museum) that dealt with this topic and was curated by John G. Hanhardt and Thomas Keenan. Lucie Kolb and Gabriel Flückiger, “New Institutionalism Revisited,” OnCurating, no. 21 (2013): 6. Roma, “A Critical Approach to the Project Desacuerdos,” 122. Roma, “A Critical Approach to the Project Desacuerdos,” 123. Expósito, Entrevista a Manuel Borja-Villel, 133. “[A]lthough [new institutionalism has been] successful in terms of opening up to new local publics and gaining international recognition in the art world, have been cut down to size

268 Alberto López Cuenca

63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

and things have changed dramatically.” Nina Möntmann, “The Rise and Fall of New Institutionalism. Perspectives on a Possible Future,” Transversal (2007). Roma, “A Critical Approach to the Project Desacuerdos,” 132. See Alberto López Cuenca and Noemí de Haro García, “Arte contemporáneo, infraestructura y territorio en el estado de las autonomías,” in Por el Centro Guerrero (2009–2011). Política cultural, crisis institucional y compromiso ciudadano, ed. Antonio Collados (Granada: Ciengramos, 2014), 11–18. It is uncertain, however that, as Iñaki Estella asserts, the narrative put forward by Desacuerdos has become ‘hegemonic’ (“Dispositivos historiográfcos entre la universidad y el museo,” 518, 522, 537, 546) to the point that it has ‘toppled’ previous discourses on contemporary art (546). This needs to be convincingly argued showing that there are substantial researches, dissertations, exhibitions, catalogues, conferences and media representations that have taken the work done in Desacuerdos as a starting point. In this regard, the assertion that Desacuerdos’ narrative has become hegemonic still needs to be substantiated. A quite different point is whether the decentered and collective working process undertaken by Desacuerdos has been infuential in the ways art history is produced in Spain. On the Red Conceptualismos del Sur see https://redcsur.net [Accessed: 07/07/2016]. About L’Internationale on the MNCARS website see www.museoreinasofia.es/en/ linternationale [Accessed: 07/07/2016]. About the activities of L’Internationale see www.internationaleonline.org [Accessed: 07/07/2016]. Agustín Parejo School, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, 30 January to 22 May 2016. Jesús Alcaide, “El gusto es nuestro,” Diario Sur, 3 January 2016, 57. “For those of us who studied in the late 1990s, it was impossible to imagine something like this [the feld of research developed in Desacuerdos] before it appeared. It was impossible because before Desacuerdos Spanish art of the late Franco’s period was in a no man’s land that very few researchers were reclaiming.” Iñaki Estella, “Dispositivos historiográfcos entre la universidad y el museo,” 511. Máster en Historia del arte contemporáneo y cultura visual, promoted by the Universidad Complutense, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The works mentioned here by Jesús Carrillo, Marcelo Expósito, Pedro G. Romero, Valentín Roma, Iñaki Estella and myself are undertaken by people related in different degrees to Desacuerdos. As it is also the case with the recent work of Juan Albarrán, Disputas sobre lo contemporáneo. Arte español entre el antifranquismo y la posmodernidad (Madrid: Exit Books, 2019). After stressing that Desacuerdos had meant a “turning point” in the process of revising contemporary art history in Spain and that the critical works of young art historians have been related to it, they state that their “[b]ook aims at better publicising these works . . . and deepening the historical revision undertaken by them,” Patricia Mayayo and Jorge Luis Marzo, Arte en España (1939–2015). Ideas, prácticas, políticas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2015), 14. This chapter was written within the framework of the research project Long Exposure: the Narratives of Spanish Contemporary Art for ‘Wide Audiences’ (HAR2015-67059-P MINECO, FEDER).

Index

15-M movement (Spain) 261 Abramovic, Marina 235 Abstract Expressionism 9, 32, 162, 167, 169–171, 176n7, 181–182 Academy of Sciences of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic 218, 226n47 Ackermann, Anton 30–31 Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznan, Poland) 234, 246n28, 246n40, 247n43, 249n79 Adamson, Natalie 54 agency 11–12, 14, 167–168, 171, 173–174, 175n4, 215, 257 Agustín Parejo School (APS) (art collective, Spain) 251, 262, 264n22 Aizpuru, Juana de 209n8 Akinsha, Konstantin 217 Albarrán, Juan 263n7 Albini, Franco 75, 86, 98n14 Allan, Douglas A. 76 Allas, Anu 168 Alloway, Lawrence 91 Americanisation 183–184; see also lifestyle American School of Classical Studies (Athens, Greece) 154 American way of life see lifestyle Amiet, Cuno 56 Anderson, Benedict 45 András, Edit 15 Andrejević Kun, Đorđe 147nn38–39 Andrejević Kun, Nada 147n38 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 18n20 Andriuškevičius, Alfonsas 221 Andronikos, Manolis 160, 162, 164n16 Angeli Radovani, Kosta 115, 116, 118 ANK’64 (art collective, Estonia) 219, 226n42 Antić, Ivan 132 anti-communism 10, 36, 104, 180, 231 anti-fascism 8, 25–26, 36, 94–96, 105, 113, 117, 127, 180–181 Antifascist Women’s Front of Croatia (AFŽ) 117, 118

antiglobalisation movement 252, 257–260, 266n48 Antonini, Otto 112 Antunac, Grga 112, 123n57 ARCO (art fair, Madrid Spain) 198, 209n8, 263n7, 265n33 Argan, Giulio Carlo 85–86 Arias Navarro, Carlos 197 Arnoux, Mathilde 10, 18n28 Arteleku (San Sebastián, Spain) 255, 260, 263n3, 265n26, 265n33 Art Fund of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic 218 art history: canon/s 6–7, 10, 13, 31–32, 56, 58, 59, 65n90, 88–89, 98n17, 104, 163, 168, 181, 183, 186, 188, 213; East European 234; (West) European 5, 25–26, 31, 35–36; feminist 228–235, 237–238, 241–243, 244n4, 244n16, 256; horizontal 10; narrative/s (see narrative/s); queer/ queering 229, 233, 237–241, 243; socialist 3; vertical 10, 56, 168 Art Museum of Estonia (Tallinn, Estonia) 218, 223n11 Ashton, Leigh 75 Ashworth, Gregory J. 5 Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA, International Association of Art Critics) 147n39, 156, 157, 166n36, 171 Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA, Greece) 151–152, 158, 164n10 Atlántica (group of artists, Spain) 204–206 Auer, Robert 112 Augustinčić, Antun 108 Babić, Ljubo 112, 132 Badiola, Txomin 253 Badovinac, Zdenka 14 BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht, the Netherlands) 19n30 Bakić, Vojin 118 Balibrea, Mari Paz 256

270 Index Bałus, Wojciech 228, 247n43 Barbantini, Nino 86–89 Barceló, Miquel 198, 200, 202, 209n8, 253, 263n7 Bardot, Brigitte 185 Baroque art 58, 121, 150–152, 160, 205 Barr Jr., Alfred H. 140–141 Barry, Edward M. 71 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 201 Bataille, Georges 237 Bauch, Jan 56 Bauer, Rudolf 56 Bauhaus 56 Baumeister, Willi 34, 36 Bazin, Germain 42, 51 Bazin, Jérôme 11 Bednarczyk, Anna 230 Behne, Adolf 32, 39n32 Beliutin, Eli 214 Bellew, Peter 49, 57, 62n39 Bellini, Giovanni 73 Bellows, George 56 Belting, Hans 15, 32–33, 39n36, 57 Benjamin, Walter 49, 62n36, 65n87 Bennett, Tony 78, 80n43 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 259–260 Bergen Kunsthal (Bergen, Norway) 260 Berger, Otti 108 Berlinguer, Enrico 93, 96 Bertos, Nikos 160, 165n17 Bettini, Sergio 85–86, 98n11 Białostocki, Jan 235, 247n42 Bihalji Merin, Oto 147nn38–39 Blagojević, Ljiljana 134 Blanco, Paloma 255, 267n55 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste 124n71 Boatca, Manuela 6 Bodnarov, Stevan 147n39 Bombois, Camille 56 Bonet, Juan Manuel 251, 253, 263n7, 265n28 Bonet Correa, Antonio 1, 16n3 Bonito Oliva, Achille 199, 204–205, 209n10, 211n34 Bonnard, Pierre 44, 48, 51 Borja-Villel, Manuel 252, 256–257, 260–261, 265n26, 266n45, 266n49, 267n50, 267n57 Bourdieu, Pierre 58–59, 65n97 Bouret, Jean 45 Brancusi, Constantin 157 Braque, Georges 34, 44, 48, 66n106, 87 Brátescu, Geta 235 Brea, José Luis 252–253, 264n9, 264n15, 264n22 Breguła, Karolina 238, 248n62, 249n75 Breker, Arno 27

Brezhnev era 220 Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades, Italy) 97 British Council (Athens, Greece) 154 Bromova, Veronika 235 Bronzino 71, 80n37 Brouillette, Sarah 45, 61n28 Broz, Josip see Tito Broz, Jovanka 136–137 Bruskin, Grisha 215 Bryl, Mariusz 241, 249n79 Bryl, Wojciech 247n43 Brzyski, Anna 6 Bulatov, Eric 215 Burden, Chris 253 Butler, Judith 267n54 Byzantine and Christian Museum (Athens, Greece) 157 Calder, Alexander 157 Calvo Serraller, Francisco 1, 16n3, 200–201, 253, 263n7 Cameron, Dan 209n12, 210n25 Camille, Michael 58 Campanella, Tommaso 118 Campano, Miguel Ángel 200 capitalism 12, 29, 31, 45, 90, 181, 191, 191n4, 192n28, 229, 243; see also liberalism Caravaggio 71, 154 Cardão, Marcos 182–183 Cardinale, Claudia 185 Carrà, Carlo 86–87 Carter, Charles 70 Carvalho, Maria Judite de 186–187 Casa d’Italia (Athens, Greece) 154 Casorati, Felice 86 Cassou, Jean 41–45, 47, 49–54, 59, 63n56, 141 Castro Fernández, José Antonio (later Xosé Antón) 204, 206 Catholic Youth Organization (Portugal) 185 Celant, Germano 95 Čelebonović, Aleksa 147n39 Čelebonović, Marko 147n38 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 9, 31 Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Sevilla, Spain) 262 Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago de Compostela, Spain) 205 Centro José Guerrero (Granada, Spain) 255, 263n3, 265n33 Centro Nacional de Exposiciones (National Centre for Exhibitions, Spain) 198, 263n7 Certeau, Michel de 126, 259 Cézanne, Paul 44, 47–48, 51, 55, 90, 99n28 Chadwick, Whitney 229 Chagall, Marc 34, 48, 56, 66n106, 87 Chamorro, Paloma 1–2, 15n2

Index Chatzidakis, Manolis 157, 165n17 Chevalier, Denys 158 Chiarini, Luigi 92, 99n41 Chopin, Frédéric 124n71 Christian Democracy Party (DC, Italy) 84, 92–93 Christou, Chrysanthos 153, 160 Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, Spain) 253–254 Clark, Kenneth 68–69, 72, 76 Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA, USA) 17n20 Clemens, Gabriele 26 Čolaković, Rodoljub 107 Cold War 5, 7, 9–10, 12–13, 19n31, 53–54, 84, 89, 103–104, 149, 154, 159–161, 163, 167, 176n15; art 10, 167, 167, 169; art historiography 9, 13, 167–175, 179–180, 186, 191; culture 158, 167; divisions/ dichotomies/dualisms 3, 7, 11, 15, 176n15, 179–180, 190, 213, 235, 242; ideologies 149; politics and policies 10, 20n51, 29–35, 40n44, 163, 165n29; rhetoric 103–105; tensions 8, 10, 12, 15, 84, 86 colonial/ism 180, 182–189; dynamics 14; Other 183; processes 14; territories 49; wars 180, 182, 184–185 Coluna (football player) 183 communism 12, 29, 31, 33, 104, 159, 168, 180–181, 190, 228–229, 244n16 communist parties: Communist Party of the Soviet Union 214; Communist Party of Yugoslavia 103–104, 106, 108, 113, 128, 130, 146n24; French Communist Party 65n86; Greek Communist Party 149, 159, 161–162; Italian Communist Party (PCI) 84, 89–90, 92–93, 96–98n8, 98n18; League of Communists of Yugoslavia 103–104, 112, 125, 127, 133–134, 145; Portuguese Communist Party 181; Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unifed Party of Germany) 29–31 Concha (singer, Portugal) 190 Conekin, Becky 74 Congress for Cultural Freedom 9, 31, 171 Constitution: Spain (1978) 9, 21n59, 195–197, 207, 208n1; Yugoslavia (1953) 128; Yugoslavia (1963) 142 contemporary art 5–6, 8, 10–12, 19n30, 27–28, 35, 68, 83, 88–90, 94, 119, 125–145, 154–163, 196, 198–200, 202, 205, 212, 214, 217, 219, 224n13, 228–231, 233–235, 237–242, 247n46, 248n60, 249n75, 251–252, 254–262, 263n7, 264n9, 268n65, 268n74 Contemporary Russian Art Center of America (New York, USA) 226n53

271

Corbeira, Darío 259 Corredor-Matheos, José 211n37 Ćosić, Dobrica 147n39 Cossiga, Francesco 97 Council for Education, Science and Culture of the People’s Republic of Serbia 131–132 Council for Education and Culture of the People’s committee of the City of Belgrade 132 Council for Science and Culture of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia 131 Courbet, Gustave 35 Cranach, Lucas 33 Craxi, Bettino 93, 96–97, 99n47 Creative Europe programme 6 Criado, Nacho 253, 264n8 Crimp, Douglas 259 Croatian Association of Fine Artists (Udruženje likovnih umjetnika Hrvatske, ULUH) 109, 112–113 Croatian Association of Visual Artists (Hrvatsko društvo likovnih umjetnika, HDLU) 112, 123n57 Croatian National Theatre (HNK, Zagreb, Yugoslavia) 119 Cultura de la Transición (Culture of the Transition, Spain) 21n60, 209n6 Cunhal, Álvaro 181 Cutting, James 58, 65n90 Ćwiertniewicz, Wojciech 238, 249n75 Czubak, Bożena 230, 234 DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas 17n18 Dainotto, Roberto 15 Danton, Georges 124n71 Daumier, Honoré 61n21 David, Catherine 258, 266n49 Davis, Angela 267n54 De Chirico, Giorgio 87 decolonisation 12, 53, 172–173, 183–185 Defrance, Corine 26 Degas, Edgar 48, 99n28 de Gaulle, Charles 52, 55, 63n55 degenerate art (entartete Kunst) 27–28, 32 de Hoogh, Pieter 71 Delon, Alain 185 Del Puppo, Alessandro 89 democratisation 1–2, 8, 11, 25, 27, 45, 69, 72, 82n104, 94–96, 105, 120–121, 182, 190–191, 198, 202, 229 denazifcation 25–26, 29, 37n5 Denegri, Jerko 144 De Pisis, Filippo 87 Derain, André 56 Derrida, Jacques 57 desovietisation 212 Despot, Ante 112

272 Index De Stijl 56 Detoni, Marijan 108, 112 d’Harnoncourt, René 42, 74, 141 Díaz Cuyás, José 256 Didi-Huberman, Georges 61n36 Discourses of the Visible. National and International Perspectives (research network) 18n25, 18n29 dissident art 13–14, 215, 219, 224n21, 251, 253, 262; see also other art; unoffcial art Dix, Otto 27 Dobrović, Nikola 128, 130 Doce (Sweet, pop band, Portugal) 190 documenta (Kassel, Germany) 7, 32–34, 171, 198, 252, 258, 266n48, 267n49 Dodge, Norton 213, 215–217, 219, 220, 223n7, 225nn31–32 Domańska, Ewa 241, 250n82 Dom kulture (Houses of Culture, Yugoslavia) 11, 116–117, 120 Domnick, Ottomar 32 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 124n71 Dove, Arthur 56 Dubourg Glatigny, Pascal 11 Dufy, Raoul 44, 51 Dürer, Albrecht 33 Dymschitz, Alexander 29 Eakins, Thomas 56 Eastlake, Sir Charles Lock 72 EEC (European Economic Community) 171, 198 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, Zapatista National Liberation Army, Mexico) 252, 259 Ekeberg, Jonas 260 El Greco 71, 196 Elkins, James 15, 18n24 El Paso (group of artists, Spain) 196 Engels, Friedrich 124n71, 192n23 Equipo Crónica (art collective, Spain) 254 Eraso, Santiago 255, 265n26, 265n28 Ernst, Max 158 Erste Stiftung 239, 249n69 Esche, Charles 260 Espaliú, Pepe 253 Estella, Iñaki 263n4, 268n65, 268n73 Estonian House (Toronto, Canada) 227n54 Estonian Science Foundation 222 Estonian Women’s Studies and Resource Centre (ENUT, Tallinn, Estonia) 227n54 Estrujenbank (art colletive, Spain) 251 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Liberty) 196, 211n40 European Centre for Culture 171 Europeanisation 152, 189 European Science Foundation 5

European Society of Culture 171, 18n25, 18n29 European Union (EU) 6, 171, 173, 198, 228, 242–243 European values and identity (as civilised, modern, unifed, universal, Western . . .) 5–8, 10, 12, 28, 41–59, 75, 78, 87, 126, 149–165, 181, 185, 239–243 Euroscepticism 15 Eusébio (football player) 183 Evangelidis, Dimitrios 151, 160, 164n16, 165n17 exoticism 182, 185, 202, 210nn22–23, 215 Expósito, Marcelo 251, 255–256, 259, 265n26, 267n55, 268n73 Falange Española (Spanish Fascist Party) 196, 208n3 Falender, Barbara 236, 238, 249n75 Falla, Manuel de 204 Farocki, Harun 258 fascism 15, 31, 33, 84, 88–91, 104, 171, 180–181, 201n3 Fascist dictatorship (Italy) 84, 88 Fascist National Confederation of Professionals and Artists (Italy) 85 Fascist National Party (Italy) 85, 98n10 Fautrier, Jean 51, 54, 63n56, 63n66 Favaretto Fisca, Giovanni 91 Federici, Silvia 260 Feinstein, Stephen C. 225n32 feminism 15, 190, 227n54, 228, 229–238, 241–243, 244n4, 244n11, 244–245n16, 255–256, 260, 266n37 Ferguson, Bruce W. 4–5 Filson, Andrew 73 First World War 67, 121n5, 125, 127, 146n15, 206 Fisca, Favaretto 91 Fluckiger, Gabriel 260 Focillon, Henri 160 Former West (transnational research, education, publishing, and exhibition project) 6, 19n30 Foster, Hal 62n36, 206, 234 Foucault, Michael 234, 247n42 Fowkes, Maja 13, 21n57 Fowkes, Reuben 13, 21n57 Franco, Francisco 13, 16n2, 95, 195–198, 201, 203, 205, 207, 208, 208nn3–4, 209n6, 210nn20–22, 253, 261, 268n71 Francoism/Franco regime 1, 3, 9, 13, 16n2, 20n51, 196–199, 200, 202–203, 207, 208nn3–4, 209n18, 268n71 François-Poncet, André 29 Frascina, Francis 176n7 Freyre, Gilberto 180

Index

273

Friends of Estonian Literature 227n54 Fritzsche, Peter 212, 222, 223n1, 227n62 Fuchs, Rudi 217 Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, Spain) 267n57 Fyfe, Gordon 65n97

Guerrilla Girls (group of artists, USA) 258 Guilbaut, Serge 9 Gustowska, Izabella 230–232, 238, 241, 244n11, 244n14, 244n16, 246n34, 248n60, 248n62, 249n75 Guzmán, Federico 253

Galasso, Giuseppe 97 Gambetti, Giacomo 94 Gamulin, Grgo 104, 112, 132 Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia) 21n62 Garanti Contemporary Art Centre (Istanbul, Turkey) 260 García Lorca, Federico 16n16, 204 García Sevilla, Ferrán 200, 263n7 Gargallo, Pablo 158 Gauguin, Paul 48, 90, 9n28 Generalić, Ivan 108 Genet, Jean 238 Gentile, Giovanni 99n41 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 61n20 Gerson, Horst 60n20, 65n95 Giacometti, Alberto 157 Giedion, Sigfried 73 Gillen, Eckhart 38n22 Gilman, Benjamin Ives 69, 76 Giménez, Carmen 198, 200, 263n7 glasnost 217, 224n21 Glezer, Alexander 214, 224n20 globalisation 3, 13, 202–203, 206, 209n10, 251, 255, 259, 266n48 Goeltzer, Wolf 36 Goethe Institute (Athens, Greece) 154 Goldin, Nan 233 Gombrich, Ernst 8 Gómez Redondo, Ramón 1 Gonçalves, Rui Mário 182 González, Felipe 198 Gorky, Maxim 114 Goupil, Adolph 61n20 Gowin, Jaroslaw 242 Goya, Francisco de 35, 154, 196, 204 Gracián, Jota 256 Graetz, René 30, 39n29 Graham, Brian 5 Greek Civil War 149–150, 163n3 Greek National Tourism Organisation 157 Greenberg, Clement 160, 176n7 Greenberg, Reesa 4–5 Gregotti, Vittorio 94–96 Grigorescu, Ion 236, 248n51 Gris, Juan 34, 56 Grohmann, Will 32 Grout, Catherine 201 Groys, Boris 12, 135 Grup de Treball (group of artists, Spain) 254, 258

Haacke, Hans 258 Habermas, Jürgen 206 Haftmann, Werner 32, 36, 40n58 Halbertsma, Marlite 17n16 Hallyday, Johnny 185 Hartmann, Werner 32 Hartung, Karl 28 Haskell, Francis 83, 98n23 Hatt, Michael 168 Haus der Kunst (Munich, Germany) 34 Haxthausen, Charles W. 4 Hegedušić, Krsto 107–108, 122n21 Hegedušić, Željko 108 Heidegger, Martin 234 Hellenic-American Union 154 Helme, Sirje 213, 217, 219, 221–222, 224n11 Hendy, Philip 8, 67–78, 79n14 Henke, Klaus Dietmar 26, 37n9 Hepworth, Barbara 157 history: of ideas 169, 170; institutional 11, 170–171, 174–175, 231; intellectual 10, 169–170 Hitler, Adolf 32, 39n33 Hlavajova, Maria 19n30 Hochschule für bildende Künste (College for arts, Berlin, Germany) 30 Hock, Béata 168, 176n12 Hodler, Ferdinand 56 Hofer, Karl 30, 35 Holbein, Hans 71, 80n37 Holmes, Brian 259, 267n54 Holzer, Jenny 233 Homer, Winslow 56 Horvat Međimurec, Josip 112 human rights 171, 195, 214, 231, 235, 237, 243, 248n47 Huyghe, René 41, 47–48, 50, 52, 54–55 identity: cultural 12, 149, 165n26, 208; gender 237; national 12, 127, 142, 144, 145n12, 150, 152–153, 161, 180, 182–184, 186, 196, 199–202, 207, 248n52; regional 13, 202–207, 211n40; transgender 238 Imaginary Museum see Museum Without Walls Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 77 Institute of Art History of the Estonian Academy of Arts (Tallinn, Estonia) 222

274 Index Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK) 215 Institut Français (Athens, Greece) 154 Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM, Valencia, Spain) 9, 19n35 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 41–42, 45, 47, 50, 54, 58, 60n17, 61n30, 62n33, 65n92, 67, 69, 73–74, 81n58 International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (IIC) 67, 79n2 Irigaray, Luce 233 Iron Curtain 10–12, 18n29, 105, 163 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, USA) 69 Iveković, Sanja 235 Jagiellonian University (Cracow, Poland) 239 Jakubowska, Agata 244n6 Jameson, Fredric 206 Janion, Maria 237 Jardot, Maurice 34 Jarecka, Dorota 230 Jdanov, Andrei 29 Jõekalda, Kristina 16n12 Jones, Amelia 229 Juan Carlos I, King 197 Jung, Krzysztof 236, 238 Junger Westen (group of artists, Germany) 32 Kabakov, Ilya 215 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 34 Kaiser, Wolfram 173–174 Kaljo, Kai 235 Kalligas, Marinos 160, 165n17 Kandinsky, Wassily 27, 56, 64n78 Kangilaski, Jaak 213, 218–219, 223n11 Karađorđević dynasty 105 Karamanlis, Konstantinos 149 Karouzos, Christos 165n17 Kästner, Erich 27, 37n15 Kauzlarić, Veljko 130 Khrushchev, Nikita 214 Kiefer, Anselm 201 Kiossev, Alexander 12 Klaman, Grzegorz 234, 237 Klee, Paul 56, 87 Klein, Naomi 267n54 Klonk, Charlotte 168, 171 Knežević, Zlata 104 Kobro, Katarzyna 235 Kodres, Krista 16n12 Kokoschka, Oskar 27, 56, 87 Kolb, Lucie 260 Kolešnik, Ljiljana 105 Kollwitz, Käthe 35, 40n53 Komar, Vitaly 215, 225n25 Konjović, Milan 147n38

Kornetchuk, Elena 225n32 Kos, Petar 113–114 Kowalczyk, Izabela 230, 234, 237 Kozyra, Katarzyna 234–235, 237–238, 246n34, 249n75 Kramer, Mark 172 Krekovčić, Kristijan 112 Kristeva, Julia 247n47 Krleža, Miroslav 103 Kruger, Barbara 233 Kulik, Zofa 234–235, 237, 244n13, 246n34 Kulturbund zur Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany) 29, 32 Lach-Lachowicz, Natalia see Natalia LL Lachnit, Wilhelm 30 Laclau, Ernesto 259 La Fiambrera Obrera (group of cultural activists, Spain) 257, 259 Lamas, Menchu 200, 205 Lamazares, Antón 205 Lasić, Stanko 104 Laurencin, Marie 48 Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk, Poland) 238, 248n60 Lazzarato, Maurizio 259–260 League of Communists of Yugoslavia 125, 145 Leček, Suzana 109, 122n39 Le Corbusier 128 Lefebvre, Henry 183 Léger, Fernand 34, 48, 154 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 158 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) 29, 119 Leninism 33 Leone, Giovanni 91 Leucht, Brigitte 173–175 Leymarie, Jean 52, 56, 59, 63n49, 63n53 LGBTQ rights 228, 237, 239, 241 liberalism 29, 181, 213; see also neoliberal/ ism Liebknecht, Karl 124n71 lifestyle: American way of life 162; EuroAmerican lifestyle of consumption 150, 163, 185; Soviet lifestyle 215; urban lifestyle/s 188, 190 Likan, Gustav 112 Lind, Maria 260 L’Internationale (confederation of museums of contemporary art) 6, 19n30, 261, 268nn67–68 Lippard, Lucy 259 Llorens, Tomás 201 Longhi, Roberto 86, 89–90, 99n26 Longoni, Ana 259 Lootz, Eva 253, 264n22 López Cuenca, Rogelio 253, 258

Index Losurdo, Domenico 105 Lozano, Amparo 256 Lubarda, Petar 147n38 luso-tropicalism 180, 182–184 Luuk, Tamara 218–219, 226n47 Luxemburg, Rosa 124n71 Macedonian Art Society “Techni” (Art) 156 Machiedo, Jakov 112 Maćukatin, Velibor 112, 123n57 Macura, Milorad 146n29 Mađarić, Vlado 147n39 Maider, Noemi 230 Maillol, Aristide 34 Malraux, André 41, 52–58, 59n4, 59n11, 61n36, 62n49, 63n53, 63n55, 63n66, 63n69, 64n85, 65n86, 66n108, 74–75 Mandić, Stanko 147n42 Manet, Édouard 48, 51 Mansfeld, Elisabeth C. 4–5 Maraini, Antonio 88–89, 98n21 Marat, Jean-Paul 124n71 Marc, Franz 56 Marchán Fiz, Simón 1–2, 16n3, 253 Marchiori, Giuseppe 158 Marčić, Rudolf 112 Marcks, Gerhard 30 Marek, Michaela 16n12, 19n31 Marin, John 56 Marini, Marino 86 market 12, 13, 55, 103, 105, 109, 121n5, 153, 156, 182, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 215, 217, 227n60; art 13, 163, 199, 209n10, 215, 219, 253 Markowska, Anna 230, 238–239 Marshall Plan 50, 62n42, 150, 185 Martin, Kurt 34 Martínez, Guillem 21n60 Martini, Arturo 87 Marwick, Arthur 186, 192n20 Marx, Karl 29, 124n71, 192n22 Marxism 127, 188, 191n3 Marxism-Leninism 29–30, 35–36 Marzo, Jorge Luis 12, 209, 256, 262, 264n15 masses 10–11, 45, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111–113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123 mass media 45, 253, 265n33 Masson, André 34 Matisse, Henri 34, 44, 48, 81n67 Matta-Clark, Gordon 258 Matynia, Elżbieta 233 Maxer, Franjo 112 McClellan, Andrew 68, 74 McMahon, Darrin 170, 174, 178n44 Melamid, Alexander 215, 225n25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 55

275

Metaxas regime 151, 162 migration 15, 170, 257 Mikina, Ewa 234 Milosavljević, Predrag 147nn38–39, 147n42 Milunović, Milo 147nn38–39 Minić, Oliver 147n42 Ministry of Culture 172; Estonia 217–211, 226n40; France 55, 63n68; Poland 245n18; Spain 16n8, 198, 205 Miró, Joan 56, 158 Mitrović, Mitra 131 Moderna Galerija (Ljubljana, Slovenia) 14, 21n62, 261 Modern Gallery (Belgrade, Yugoslavia) 126, 131–134, 144 modernisation 69, 113, 121, 160, 185, 198, 202, 207, 209n8 modernism/modern art 6–8, 11, 20n51, 26–36, 38n16, 48, 53–55, 58–59, 63n51, 65n100, 72, 84, 86–87, 89, 112, 125–126, 129–132, 134–136, 138, 140–142, 145, 147n38, 152–161, 181, 188, 201, 205, 215, 217–218, 228, 230, 235, 238, 242, 251, 267n57 Modigliani, Amedeo 56 Modigliani, Jeanne 57, 65n86 Mohr, Arno 30, 39n29 Monet, Claude 48, 99n28 Möntmann, Nina 260 Moore, Henry 56, 87, 154–155, 158–159 Morandi, Giorgio 86–87 Morawińska, Agnieszka 231–232, 239, 245nn18–19, 249n68 Moreiras, Cristina 256 Morley, Grace 67 Moro, Aldo 96 Mouffe, Chantal 259, 267n54 Moure, Gloria 204–205, 210n28 Movida madrileña (cultural movement, Spain) 198, 256 Moyn, Samuel 170, 174, 178n44 Mraz, Franjo 108–109 MUMOK (Vienna, Austria) 239 Muntadas, Antoni 258 Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna 239 Murtić, Edo 112, 123n57 Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris, France) 42, 51 Musée de l’Orangerie (Paris, France) 215 Musée du Louvre (Paris, France) 42 Museo Correr (Venice, Italy) 45 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain) 9, 19n35, 251, 261–262, 265n28, 268n72 Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Spain) 252, 255–262, 265nn25–26, 265nn32–33, 266n35, 266n41, 266nn45–46, 267n49, 267nn54–55, 267n57

276 Index Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia) 126 Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MoCAB, Yugoslavia) 10, 11, 125–127, 129, 131, 133–135, 141, 143, 145, 145n12, 147 Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA) 69 Museum of Grenoble (France) 52 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York, USA) 21n57, 40n58, 74, 140 Museum of Non-Objective Painting (New York, USA) 56 Museums Association 73–74, 76 Museum Without Walls 52, 57, 63n53, 74 Mussolini, Benito 83, 88, 92, 98n22 Nairne, Sandy 4–5 narrative/s 2, 6–7, 10–11, 13–14, 17n20, 20n51, 53, 76, 87, 105, 182–184, 186, 188–189, 191, 196, 198–199, 213, 216, 219, 239, 251–254, 256–257, 260–263, 263n7, 266n40, 268n65; counternarrative/s 13, 188, 262; dominant 11, 12, 251; institutionalised 251; master 6, 12, 125, 179, 180, 181–186, 188, 191n2; of resistance 182; self-colonising 12 Nascimento, Eduardo 183 Natalia LL 230, 232–233, 235, 238–239, 244n9, 244n13, 244n16, 246n34 National Association of Filmmakers (ANAC) 91–92 National Bureau for the Documentation of Art History (The Hague, the Netherlands) 60n20 National Gallery (Athens, Greece) 151, 156 National Gallery (London, United Kingdom) 8, 67–82 nationalism 4, 17n16, 58, 72, 74, 134, 175, 176n15, 180–181, 183–184, 190, 202–203, 206, 211n40, 213, 227n54, 228–229, 234–235, 238, 242, 246n36 National Liberation Front (NLF, Greece) 149 National Museum (Warsaw, Poland) 231–232, 236, 239–241, 245nn18–19, 246n40, 249n69, 249n71, 249n77 National Technical University of Athens (NTUA, Greece) 151–152, 160 Navarrete, Carmen 255 Nazi regime 25, 31–32 Nazism 7, 25, 27–29, 33, 38n21 Negri, Toni 259–260, 267nn53–54 Nehemias, Ilse 28, 38n18 Neizvestnyi, Ernst 214 Nelson, Ricky 184 Nemukhin, Vladimir 215–216 neoliberal/ism 259, 265n28, 180; economic policies 252

Neo-realism 180–182, 187, 191n5 Ne pas plier (group of cultural activists, France) 257, 259 Nerlinger, Oskar 35 network theory or network analysis 11, 170, 173–175 new institutionalism 252, 260, 262, 267n62 New York Graphic Society 64n76, 64n84 Nicholson, Ben 56 Niemczyk, Krzysztof 238 Nieznalska, Dorota 234–235, 237, 246n34, 248n62 Nikolajević, Miloje 147n38 Nochlin, Linda 229 Non-Aligned Movement 10 nonconformist art 217, 219–221 normalisation 13–14, 36, 136, 197 North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 171, 180, 185 Norton-Westbrook, Halona 68 occupation 91, 191, 258; of Estonia (by the Axis powers) 223n3; of Estonia (by the Soviet Union) 226n53; of Germany (by the Allies) 25–26, 34–35, 37n6; of Greece (by the Axis powers) 149; of Paris (by the Axis powers) 53; of Yugoslavia (by the Axis powers) 109, 111 Old Brewery Business and Art Centre (Poznań, Poland) 238, 248n60 Oliveira, Simone de 197n27 Orozco, Gabriel 56 Oteiza, Jorge 211n40 other art 216, 219, 225n28; see also dissident art; unoffcial art Palace of the Federal Executive Council of Yugoslavia, initially called the Palace of the Presidency of the Federal Government of Yugoslavia 128–130, 133, 145 Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France) 260 Palazzo Bianco (Genoa, Italy) 75 Pallucchini, Rodolfo 84–91, 98n8, 98n17, 99nn26–30 Panić Surep, Milorad 147n42 Papanastasiou, Alexandros 160 Papantoniou, Zacharias 151 Pape, Lygia 258 Pardo, Carmen 256 Parreño, José María 254 Partum, Ewa 235, 245n16 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 91, 97 Pasternak, Boris 224n16 Patiño, Antón 205 Pavle Karađorđević, Prince 126 Pearson, Catherine 68 Peggy Guggenheim Collection 90

Index Pejić, Bojana 235, 239 People’s Liberation Front (Yugoslavia) 113 People’s Liberation Movement (Yugoslavia) 117 perestroika 215, 224n21, 247n47 Petras, James 259 Petričić, Branko 130, 147n12 Petris, Yiorgos (nom de plume for Yiorgos Simos) 161–162 Petrović, Veljko 147n39 Peurifoy, John E. 162 Pevsner, Nikolaus 73 Pfsterer, Ulrich 17n16 Picasso, Pablo 28, 34, 44, 48, 55–56, 64n79, 87, 154, 158, 198, 204, 224n13 Pijade, Moša 107 Pike, David 26 Pinder, Wilhelm 160 Pinharanda, João 182 Pinińska Bereś, Maria 232, 244n13 Pinto dos Santos, Mariana 181–182 Piotrowska, Krystyna 230, 244n13 Piotrowski, Piotr 10–11, 56, 234–236, 239, 241, 244n7, 246n40, 247nn43–47, 248n60, 249nn69–71 Pissarro, Camille 44, 51, 99n28 Plančić, Juraj 106, 122n24 Platon, Nikolaos 153 Plekhanov, Georgi 104 Pluhařová-Grigienė, Eva 19n31 Podemos (political party, Spain) 261 Política do Espírito (Policy of the Spirit, Portugal) 180 political prisoner/s 106–107 Pollock, Griselda 229 Ponti, Giovanni 84–86, 88 pop culture 183 Poprzęcka, Maria 232, 241, 245n23 Popular Front (Yugoslavia) 112–113 post-colonial studies 182 post-communist: art 235; (religious) censorship 243; identity politics 228, 238; nationalism 235; transformation 229 Postmarxist thinking 252, 259, 267n54 postmodernism 181, 202, 205, 234 Post-operaist thinking 252 post-revolutionary: desire (Yugoslavia) 126, 130, 133–135, 141, 145; Portugal 189–191; Soviet praxis 118 Postružnik, Oton 109 Poussin, Nicolas 71 Power, Kevin 205, 209n12, 264n22 Preiswert Arbeitskollegen (cultural social movement, Spain) 259 Prevelakis, Pantelis 151, 160, 164n10 Prica, Zlatko 123n57 Prigov, Dmitri 215

277

Primo de Rivera, José Antonio 208n3 Programa de Estudios Independientes (PEI, Program of Independent Studies, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain) 262 Programa Español de Acción Cultural en el Extranjero (PEACE, Spanish Program for Cultural Activities Abroad) 199, 201, 263n7 Prokopiou, Angelos 151, 162–163 propaganda 8, 26–27, 29, 32, 34, 36, 54, 84, 88, 92, 98n14, 104, 112–113, 118, 120, 124n71, 168–169, 180, 225n39 Protić, Miodrag B. 11, 125–126, 132, 135–144, 147n37, 148n57 Pujals, Esteban 254, 256 purges 37 Quadriga (group of artists, Germany) 32 Quaggio, Giulia 2, 16n8, 198 Radojčić, Svetozar 147nn38–39 Radomska, Magdalena 147n41 Raduš, Vanja 109 Radziszewski, Karol 238, 241, 248n62, 249n75 Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico 86 Rakauskaité, Eglé 235 Ramírez, Juan Antonio 16n3 Rancière, Jacques 259, 267nn53–54 Rasmussen, Morten 173–175 Raspopović, Ivanka 132 Raunig, Gerald 259 Raušević, Danilo 108 Ravnikar, Edvard 130, 147n32 rayonnement culturel (cultural national projection) 33–35, 40n50, 54 Read, Herbert 73, 76, 160 realism 11, 26, 32, 35, 89–90, 138–139, 196, 247n46 Rebay, Hilla von 56, 64n78 Reclaim the Streets (activist group) 257, 259 Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network) 261, 268n66 religious fundamentalism 234–235, 237, 242 Renaissance art 58, 70, 118, 150–153, 156, 160, 163, 205 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 44, 48, 51, 55, 99n28, 158 repro avant-garde 219 reproduction/s 7, 41–45, 47–59, 59n1, 59n11, 60n13, 61nn20–21, 62n36, 62n39, 62n41, 63n53, 63n56, 64n76, 65n90, 65n95, 65n97, 66nn106–107, 76, 115, 219, 240; see also repro avant-garde revolution 9, 32, 35, 39n34, 103, 105, 112, 117–121, 124n71, 125–127, 129–130, 133–136, 141–142, 145, 207, 229, 260;

278 Index 1974–1975 revolution (Portugal) 180, 184, 189–191, 191n4; industrial 207; socialist 117, 127 Riabov, George 217 Ribalta, Jorge 256–257, 259, 265n29, 267n57 Richard, Cliff 186 Riegl, Alois 160 Ripa di Meana, Carlo 93–94, 96–97 Rist, Pipilotti 233 Rivas, Francisco (‘Quico’) 204 Rivera, Diego 56 Robb-Narbut, Krystiana 233 Robespierre, Maximilien 124n71 Rocha, Paulo 188 Rockefeller Foundation 154 rock’n’roll 185 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis 209n18 Roh, Franz 32 Roma, Valentín 260, 268n63, 268n73 Romaní, Montse 255 Romanticism 151, 166, 181, 184, 204 Romero, Pedro G. 251, 253, 258, 264n22, 265n26, 265n29, 268n73 Ronconi, Luca 94, 96 Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art (Malmö, Sweden) 260 Rosenberg, Harold 54 Rosenstein, Erna 233 Rosler, Martha 233 Ross, Kristin 183–184 Ross, Ludwig 164n7 Rouault, Georges 34, 44, 51, 87 Rowell, Margit 200, 209n12 RTMark (activist collective, USA) 257 Rubens, Peter Paul 71, 73 Rubio Aróstegui, Juan Arturo 198 Rubira, Sergio 19n35 Ruido, María 255, 266n37 Rumas, Robert 234, 248n60, 248n62 Rumor, Mariano 93 Russian Civil War 119 Ryder, Albert Pinkham 56 Salazar, António de Oliveira 181 Salazarism/Salazar regime 181–182, 184, 188, 191n4, 192n16 Salinas, Pedro 15n2 Salles, Georges 51 Santos, Alberto Seixas 188–189 Santos, Boaventura Sousa 182 São Paulo Biennial 147n39 Sarfatti, Margherita 88–89 Sargent, John Singer 56 Scarpa, Carlo 75, 86–87, 98n14, 98n19 Schaaf, Gabriela 190 Schiele, Egon 87

Schlosser, Adolf 253 Schneemann, Carolee 230 Schoell-Glass, Charlotte 17n14 School of Philosophy of the University of Athens (Greece) 151, 153, 164n7 School of Philosophy of the University of Thessaloniki (Greece) 151–153, 164n10, 164n14, 164n16, 165n22 Schuman, Robert 29, 35 Sculpture Center (New York, USA) 233 Se7e (TV cultural weekly, Portugal) 189–190 SEAC (Selección de Euskadi de Arte de Concepto) 259 Sebba, Jean-Louis 30 Second World War 2–3, 6, 8, 62n42, 67–69, 72, 74, 78, 79n6, 83–84, 86–87, 98nn14–15, 103, 105, 109, 120, 125, 127–128, 133, 145n12, 149–150, 152, 159, 167, 171, 206, 208n3, 249n64 Sedlmayr, Hans 27 self-colonisation 12, 14, 202 self-exoticism 14 Selvatico, Riccardo 87 Semeghini, Pio 86 Sepp, Eda 220–221, 225n32, 226n54 Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) 141 Seurat, Georges 48, 90, 99n28 Sewter, Albert Charles 70 Shatz, Marshall S. 214 Sherman, Cindy 233 Sicilia, José María 200, 202, 253, 263n7 Signac, Paul 44 Simos, Yorgos see Petris, Yiorgos Šimunović, Sava 106 Sisley, Alfred 44, 51, 99n28 Skira, Albert 59n11 Ślizińska, Milada 233 Smalcerz, Agata 231–232 Smith, Bernard 58 Smith, Charles Saumarez 72 Smith, Matthew 56 socialism 10–11, 103–104, 112–113, 120, 126–129, 134, 189, 229–230, 243 socialist party: Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, Spain) 21n59, 197–198; Socialist Party (PSI, Italy) 9, 84, 93, 96, 99n47 Socialist Realism 11, 29–32, 35–36, 40n54, 103–105, 112, 125, 129, 141, 147n38, 213, 215, 220, 222 Solidarity movement (Poland) 231 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA) 56, 200 Sooster, Ülo 214, 221, 227n60 Soros, Georges 217

Index Soros Centre for Contemporary Art (Tallinn, Estonia) 217, 219, 223n11, 226n40 Soros Foundation 14 Sosnowska, Joanna 232 Sotheby’s 215 Šotra, Branko 147n38 Sots Art 215, 219 Soup’69 (group of artists, Estonia) 219, 226n42 Soviet art historiography 3, 16n12 Soviet Military Government 29–31, 35 Soviet Russian art boom 10, 215 Spadolini, Giovanni 97 Spanish Civil War 13, 195, 203–204, 209n18 Spartacus 124n71 Spengler, Oswald 160 Spero, Nancy 253 Spiteris, Tonis 153, 157–159 Spivak, Gayatri C. 267n54 Sprehnjak, Katarina 104 Spyropoulos, Yiannis 159 Standen, Edith 28, 34 Staniszewski, Mary-Anne 74 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 57, 217 Steichen, Edward 61n26, 74 Stele, France 132 Stevanović, Momčilo 147n42 Stijović, Risto 147n42 Stojanović, Sreten 147n38 Stomps, Louise 28 Stonard, John-Paul 26, 33 Strempel, Horst 30, 39n29 Suárez, Adolfo 197 Sultan, Donald 200, 209n12 Svečnjak, Vilim 110–111 Svede, Marc Allen 221 Szapocznikow, Alina 232, 235, 244n13 Szyłak, Aneta 233, 246n34 Tabaković, Ivan 122n21 Taine, Hippolyte 206 Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia) 218, 226n42 Tàpies, Antoni 196 Tartu Art Museum (Estonia) 218, 226n46, 227n60 Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata 232 Telles, António da Cunha 188 Temple Newsam (Leeds, United Kingdom) 69 Thaw 16n12, 214 Third Reich 33 Tiljak, Đuro 109, 112, 123n57 Titian 71 Tito 10–11, 103, 112, 127, 131–132, 135–138, 146n19, 148n47 Tito-Stalin split 103, 112, 129 Tkalčić Koščević, Antonija 106

279

Tolstoy, Leo 124n71 Tomić, Milica 235 Toniak, Ewa 232, 245n26 Topolčić, Ivan 112 Torres, Francesc 253 totalitarianism/s 3, 11, 33, 104–105, 120, 162, 180–181, 190, 235, 242–243, 247n47 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 48, 99n28 transition 3, 13–14, 247; Estonia 14, 213, 218; Poland 228–229, 231–232, 234, 237, 243; Portugal 191; Spain 2, 9, 12–14, 16n20, 19n35, 95, 196–202, 260, 265n33 Trazos (Strokes, TV cultural weekly, Spain) 1–2, 15n2, 16n9 Trökes, Heinz 28, 34 Truman, Harry S. 29 Truszkowski, Jerzy 234 Turnbridge, John E. 5 Turner, J.M.W. 87 Ujma, Magdalena 229, 232, 244n5 Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD, Union of the Democratic Centre, Spain) 2, 197–198 United Nations (UN) 41, 59n5, 176n15, 180, 185 United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 7, 41–59, 59n1, 59n5, 59n9, 59n11, 60n15, 60n17, 60n20, 61n21, 61n26, 61n28, 62n33, 62n39, 62n41, 63n53, 64n78, 64n84, 65n90, 66nn105–106, 67, 73–74, 79n2, 159, 171 United States Information Agency (USIA) 154, 165n29 United States Information Service (USIS) 154 universalism 3–4, 7–8, 41–79, 141, 182 Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) 1, 268n72 Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA, International University of Andalusia, Sevilla, Spain) 260–261, 263n3, 265n26, 265n33, 265n35 Universidad Internacional de Verano de Santander (Spain) 15n2 Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (Santander, Spain) 1–2, 15n2 Universidad Nómada (The Nomadic University) 259 University of Athens (Greece) 150–151, 164n7 University of Bologna (Italy) 86 University of Padova (Italy) 84 University of Pisa (Italy) 86 University of Rome (Italy) 86 University of Tartu (Estonia) 213, 223n11, 226n47

280 Index University of Thessaloniki (Greece) 151–153, 160, 164n10, 165n18 unoffcial art 212–217, 219, 222, 223n7, 223n9, 224n20, 224n23, 225n25, 225n28, 225n30, 227n60; see also dissident art; other art Urban Planning Institute of Belgrade 133 Urban Planning Institute of Serbia 128 Ustaše (Ustaša Croatian Revolutionary Movement) 106, 108 Utrillo, Maurice 44 Väär, Edgar 227n56 Vaillant, Jérôme 26 Valéry, Paul 58, 65n101 Valle de los Caídos (Spain) 196 van der Weyden, Rogier 73 van Dongen, Kees 56 Van Gogh, Theo 60n20 Van Gogh, Vincent 44, 48, 55, 58, 64n79, 90, 99n28 Vasarian cycle 152 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 254 Velázquez, Diego 71, 196, 204 Venice Biennale (Italy) 8–9, 19n35, 83–97, 97n2, 98n9, 98n15, 98n19, 98n21, 98n23, 99n28, 159, 169, 171, 215 Venizelos, Eleftherios 160 Venturi, Lionello 55, 59, 63n51, 63n53, 86, 89–90 Veronese, Paolo 98n17 Veselinov, Stanka 147n39 Victoria and Albert Museum (London, United Kingdom) 75 Vidal, África 254 Vienna School 17n16 Vila, Fefa 255 Vilarós, Teresa 256 Villaespesa, Mar 14, 21n59, 253–254, 264n22 Villota, Gabriel 256, 259 Vindel, Jaime 266n44 Virno, Paolo 259–260, 267nn53–54 Visarid (group of artists, Estonia) 219, 226n42

Walker, Kara 233 Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool, United Kingdom) 70 Wallerstein, Immanuel 267n54 Wert, Juan Pablo 256 Westad, Odd Arne 167–168, 171, 174–175, 175n1, 175n4, 175n15 Westernisation 149–150, 154–156 Wheeler, Monroe 42 Whitehead, Christopher 72 Wickhoff, Franz 160 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 253 Wölffin, Heinrich 73 World Peace Council 171 Wotruba, Fritz 87 xenophobia 19n30, 144, 242 Youth Labour Actions (Yugoslavia) 113–114 Yúdice, George 259 Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU) 141 Yugoslav wars 3 Zabel, Igor 14; award 246n40 Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland) 231, 239, 245n18, 249n68 Zamek Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland) 233 Zappeion Megaron (Athens, Greece) 154–156 Zdrojewski, Bogdan 240 Żebrowska, Alicja 234–235, 238 Želibská, Jana 235 Zemlja (Earth) (art group, Zagreb, Yugoslavia) 105, 107–108, 122n21 ZEN 49 (group of artists, Germany) 32 Ziarkiewicz, Ryszard 234, 246n38 Ziegler, Adolf 27 Ziegler, Ulrike 26 Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ, USA) 213, 216–217, 219, 221–222, 225n35 Żmijewski, Artur 234, 237