Aesthetic Strategist: Albert Wohlstetter, the Cold War, and a Theory of Mid-Century Modernism

Abstract

OCTOBER 138, Fall 2011, pp. 15–36. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each morning, as I walk to my office on the campus of Stanford University, I find my path crossed by the shadow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. This is not a metaphor. Founded in 1919, the university’s residential think tank sits yards away from the Department of Art and Art History, its famous tower looming vertiginously over the humanist proceedings down below. The Hoover is so close to the art building, in fact, that one can glimpse the movements of its various fellows—among them, Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz—while holding forth on matters of aesthetics and politics in the seminar room. The workaday proximity to this think tank never fails to startle: its collective influence has shaped public policy for decades, providing Cold War analyses of the Gulag and the nuclear arms race, position papers on the liberalizing of markets, and media dispatches on the “War on Terror.” But other adjacencies are equally as startling. For what has always struck artists and art historians mining the archives of the Hoover is its astonishingly modernist source material, including, to take just a few examples, letters between Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo, rich supplies of Soviet broadsides, and photographs by Tina Modotti. These documents draw a decidedly mixed audience in the reading room, a place where artist-veterans of 1968 sit cheek-by-jowl with Reagan-era functionaries. While this description is meant to dramatize a disquieting tension between the institutional culture of the think tank and its artistic holdings, it is also meant to introduce the topic of the think tank’s modernist