Greg Barnhisel. Cold War Modernists

In 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon famously sparred with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as they walked through the American exhibition in Moscow. They disagreed on much of what they observed, especially as they paused at the display of American kitchen appliances, but they agreed on at least one thing: a common distaste for jazz. Although Nixon was not a fan, his daughters were, and he realized that foreign audiences had also clearly embraced the modern American musical form. As Greg Barnhisel shows in his superb work, many ardent anticommunists had appropriated modernism by the late 1950s as a weapon in the Cold War because the artistic movement served as a convenient vehicle to celebrate free expression in American painting, literature, music, dance, architecture, even consumer-product design. In the half century since the famed 1913 Armory Show had introduced modernism to Americans, an innovative cultural style often identified with rebellion and radicalism had been translated to Cold War audiences worldwide as the essence of American freedom and individualism. That style later ossified in the 1960s. Barnhisel explores this process in a far-reaching and engaging study of modernism as propaganda.

American literature · Art · Art history · Cold war · Diplomacy · Individualism · Jazz · Literature · Modernism (music) · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Style (visual arts) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies