Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 322 pp. $40.00

Abstract

A term like “modernism” exudes the sort of elasticity that is bound to attract scholars eager to parse its various meanings, no matter how elusive. An entire journal now exists that is devoted to the classification of modernism and to studies in relevant works of literature in particular. Because the standard experimentalist works emerged at roughly the same time as the rise of fascism and Nazism, modernism ought to be a good candidate to set off against the despotisms of the right. The key episode in this regard was the notorious exhibition of Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) that the Nazis mounted in Munich in 1937. And yet Ezra Pound, a supremely modernist poet (“Make it new!”) who championed T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, broadcast so many dreadful speeches from Fascist Italy that only a clinical diagnosis of his madness spared him from a postwar conviction for treason. That a tyranny of the left, in the Stalinist USSR, also impugned and outlawed modernism, and exalted the style of socialist realism instead, suggests how tempting it is to define modernism—at least in part—by its incompatibility with totalitarianism. Yet, in 1947, when Harry Truman came across Circus Girl Resting, a painting by the Japanese-American Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the president exclaimed: “If this is art, I’m a Hottentot” (p. 55). Perhaps no artistic movement ever provoked so varied a spectrum of political resistance. But in the United States, hostile Fair Dealers like Truman tended to be outnumbered by conservatives, who were typically members of Congress of conventional aesthetic taste, insofar as they thought about the sublimity of painting or music at all. In the name of commonplace opinion and the thrift that taxpayers expected, such foes snapped at a visionary effort in public diplomacy that helped win the Cold War in the art galleries and in the little magazines. Calculations of the throw-weight of missiles were not enough; Abstract Expressionism could be enlisted to defeat Communism as well. What Greg Barnhisel crisply labels “Cold War modernism” constituted a claim that American culture could trump its Soviet counterpart, because the United States promoted individuality of expression and the freedom to be as creative as one’s talent might permit. America meant the right to paint a model who has three eyes and a body that could be blocked out into cubes, or to compose a piece of music that may reveal a beginning and middle and end—but not necessarily in that order. Such works demonstrated the autonomy of art in a democratic society at a time when the exemplars of the avant-garde elsewhere were imprisoned and even executed. Ideas are weapons,