'Ambassadors of Good Will': The Museum of Modern Art's "Three Centuries of American Art" in 1930s Europe and the United States (original) (raw)
Related papers
Book Review: Caroline M. Riley "MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938: Building and Politicizing American Art"
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art , 2023
Reviewed by: Antje Gamble The interdisciplinary nature of museum studies has often relegated the study of art exhibitions outside of the field of art history. Yet, as Caroline M. Riley clearly lays out in her book MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938: Building and Politicizing American Art, by repositioning the study of art exhibitions "at the center of American art history," scholars can make visible "manifestations of canon formation and the institutionalization of art history within the public sphere of the museum" (3). Riley's indepth analysis of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)'s exhibition Three Centuries of American Art, on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1938, highlights how artworks gain art-historical significance, political soft power, and market value when displayed to the public. https://journalpanorama.org/article/moma-goes-to-paris/
BUILDING ART DIPLOMACY: THE CASE OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ART EXHIBITION IN LATIN AMERICA, 1941
Granthaalayah Publications and Printers, 2022
This article analyzes the construction of the visual narrative expressed in the exhibition Contemporary North American Painting in 1941. During the II World War, the U.S. government recovered the initiative to build a strong tight with Latin American countries by relaunching the Good Neighbor Policy. Cultural diplomacy was an important branch of this policy. With the purpose of winning friends in the continent, the government created the Office of Inter-American Affairs, led by Nelson Rockefeller, and he sent artists, intellectuals, and exhibitions to make North America known in the other Americas. The Contemporary North American Painting projected an image of the United States as a modern and industrialized society to South Americans. This narrative was one of the devices developed by the U.S. government as part of the soft diplomacy carried out in the 1940s. In this article, we delve into the construction of the visual narrative about the U.S as part of the Good Neighbor exhibition complex, and we will analyze how the exhibition process was thought of as part of representational and ideological machinery. The article was based on reading, analysis, and cataloging of primary sources. The sources were letters, catalogs, photos, and notes from the main characters of the Office of Inter-American Affairs. Likewise, the exhibited works of art were operationalized.
How did industrial museums cross the Atlantic? When the first American museums of science and industry were created in the 1920s, they looked to Europe in order to import what was seen at that time as a burgeoning cultural institution. In this article, I look at this process of appropriation through an analysis of the changing perceptions of European industrial museums as expressed in the reports, surveys and books written by the curators, directors and trustees of the New York Museum of Science and Industry. I will pay particular attention to the 1927 film Museums of the New Age, documenting the main national industrial museums in Europe, and to a 1937 report on the techniques of display at the Palais de la Découverte. I will argue that their contrasting assessment of European industrial museums, which in only ten years ceased to be seen as cathedrals of a new age to become old-fashioned storehouses, is symptomatic of the significant transformation of museums of science and industry as cultural institutions during the 1930s in the United States.
Marshalling American Art: Exhibiting Ideology in the Cold War
In 1948, under the economic recovery programme known as the Marshall Plan, Europe was the recipient of some $17 billion in aid from the United States. Ostensibly aimed at spurring economic growth, the initiative also sought to cement American political influence in the region, in line with the Truman administration’s wider policy of containment to prevent the spread of communism. In the decades ahead, and especially as the politics of the Cold War intensified, the cultural influence of the United States emerged as an increasingly visible and contested issue across Europe and the United Kingdom. Exhibitions provided one crucial medium for the advancement of this strategy and a forum to debate its legitimacy. Whether in response to large and high-profile touring shows, or to smaller displays at commercial galleries, the reception of post-war American art was frequently refracted through the prism of cultural imperialism and ‘Coca-colonisation’. Beyond art exhibitions, these were debates that found further visual expression in the wide range of fairs and trade events through which Cold War ideology was put on public display. This workshop brought together a range of papers that represent new research into exhibitions of American art and visual culture during the Cold War.
Athanor, 2015
Given the complexity embedded in the process of categorizing artworks, the period terms of "folk" and "popular" as well as the current use of "vernacular" must be defined before inserting the artworks into these categories with the artistic and political motivations of the American and French curators, critics, and diplomats. To differentiate period references from current discussion the all-encompassing "ver-nacular" applies to all forty-three works of art and incorporates both period categories. To Barr, American vernacular art could represent the cultural values of small communities or constitute a national ethos. Fundamentally, vernacular art, as an aesthetic style, did not align with a specific period; rather, it extended throughout the history of the United States. Despite the slippage of these terms, Barr's "popular" underscored the object's perceived ubiquitous quality and suffused it with rhetoric that promoted the emerging middle class art market as worthy of study. For instance, the widely distributed Currier & Ives prints, including American Forest Scene, Maple Sugaring (Figure 2), functioned as examples of this category. In contrast, Barr aligned "folk" with assumed idiosyncratic, isolated artists whose names had often been lost to the art historical record thus permitting a type of cultural recovery as evidenced by Barr's choice of Portrait of Henry Ward Beecher (Figure 3) for the show. Even within his own designations, Barr demonstrated the flexibility of his categories, for example, choosing to capstone the entrance to the vernacular art section with the label "Art Populaire" at the Musée du Jeu de Paume (Figure 1) thereby sublimating the folk category and connoting a decidedly political subtext to the French given the widespread circulation of the weekly politically left-leaning publication, Populaire. Alfred Barr, Jr., "Painting and Sculpture in the United States," in Trois Siecles d'Art
This paper considers the so-called triumph of American art from the perspective of what Western Europeans could actually see and know of American art at the time. Relying on a database of exhibitions, purchases, and publications of American art in Western Europe from 1945 to 1970 created in the framework of ARTL@S, it reconstructs the precise chain of events and circulations that marked the dissemination and reception of American art in Europe. It consequently draws a more refined and complex understanding of postwar artistic exchanges out of the entangled historical perspectives of the European peripheries, which challenges the retrospectively dominating position of American Abstract Expressionism.
Advancing American Art and Intercultural Confrontations in Germany, 1945-1948
International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity
This article critically addresses the multivalent function of American art exhibitions in the period of de-Nazification and re-democratization. What kind of cultural and political parameters shaped the perception of American Art in Germany during the early postwar years? I investigate intercultural confrontations surrounding the project of advancing American art and the critical response of German audiences by first looking at the exhibition Advancing American Art from 1947. I then analyze the role of the transatlantic cultural mediator Hilla von Rebay to understand developments in the German perspective on American art. The German-born artist von Rebay emigrated in 1927 to the United States and organized the German tour of Zeitgenössische Kunst und Kunstpflege in U.S.A. (Contemporary Art and the Promotion of Arts in the U.S.A.) authorized by the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in 1948. The project of 'advancing American art' resembles a struggle with many setbacks due to lack of official support and finding a larger public in the early years after World War II.