Cold War Modern Symposium

Cold War Modern: Art & Design in a Divided World 1945-70. Closed International Research Symposium, University of Brighton at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 4-5 January, 2007

This closed invitational research seminar, planned by the University of Brighton in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum, represented an interim stage of the Cold War Modern exhibition planning process, bringing together a range of international researchers with a particular interest in World’s Fairs and Exhibitions in the post Second World War period. The two-day symposium was chaired by Professor Jonathan Woodham (University of Brighton), Jane Pavitt (University Brighton Research Fellow at the V&A), David Crowley (Royal College of Art) and Professor Bruce Brown (University of Brighton).

The event was organised in order to test out the ideas and rationale for the for the exhibition as conceived by its curator Jane Pavitt (University of Brighton Research Fellow at the V&A) and consultant curator David Crowley (Royal College of Art). This was presented at the outset of the event and is summarised below:

The Cold War Modern: Art & Design in a Divided World Exhibition: Overview

This exhibition will bring together remarkable works of art and design from across the world to explore the major themes of the period. It will be the first show to examine late modernism in a wide international context, uniting painting and sculpture with architecture, design, film, fashion and other popular media. It will feature major public art commissions (such as the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner), key international exhibitions (including Brussels Expo '58,  Montreal Expo '67 and Osaka Expo '70), and the designed objects of everyday life (kitchens and household furnishings, cars and clothing). It will include film (both avant-garde and mainstream, such as the James Bond films) and photography (as documentary witness and as works of art). It will place the works of internationally renowned artists and designers (Pablo Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Charles Eames) along side the marginalised or forgotten figures of the Cold War era. This exhibition will, for instance, introduce the public to the exceptional glass art of Czechoslovakia, Polish and Hungarian textile art, Yugoslav modern architecture and fashion, and Soviet non-conformist art.

It is anticipated that the exhibition will address the broad ranging geography of the Cold War, incorporating Europe, America and the Far and Near East. The inclusion of China and Japan, for example, would significantly add to any assessment of the visual arts of the period. We might, should suitable exhibits be found, also explore ways in which the themes explored in the exhibition affected or were affected by the particular experiences of nations such as Greece, Egypt and Israel in the period.

Proposed exhibition sections and themes

Section One: Anxiety and Hope in the Aftermath of War

• Existential anxieties
• The Legacy of the Modern Movement
• The Socialist Agenda for the Arts
• Rebuilding and reconstruction

Section Two: Cold War Modern 

• Brussels Expo’58
• Domesticity and the Modern Home
• Thaw Modern: art and the applied arts in Eastern Europe after 1956
• The Third Way: Scandinavia
• Harnessing the Future
• Corporate Modernism

Section Three: Vision and Critique

• New Fronts on the Cold War
• Technocracy and its discontents
• Living the Revolution
• The Last Visionaries
• Osaka Expo ‘70

Exhibition sections and themes

The exhibition will explore the period 1945-1970 thematically, whilst maintaining a broad chronology to guide the visitor through this complex and eventful epoch. At this early stage, we fully expect the themes and structure of the exhibition to change. However, for the purposes of discussion we propose the following structure, based upon three broad sections:

Section One: Anxiety and Hope in the Aftermath of War
This section will explore the shift from total war to cold war and its consequences for art, design and architecture. Reconstruction promised opportunities not only to realise the urban and artistic visions of inter-war period but also for social renewal and even moral rehabilitation. However, hopes for the post-war era - often expressed as a faith in progress, social justice and the promise of modern technology – were shadowed by anxiety, whether in broadly existentialist terms about the human condition, or more explicitly ideological terms about the menace of communism or capitalism.

Themes which might be addressed in this section include:

• Memorialising Conflict: Conflicts over Memorials. This period was characterised by searches for new ways of memorialising, breaking with the conventions of public sculpture (and often distancing the idea of the monument from its socialist realist counterpart). The holocaust was the subject of some remarkable abstract conceptions in the 1940s and 1950s. And whilst The International Competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, organised by the ICA, London, 1953, remained unbuilt, it sparked a hugely controversial debate about the form and nature of modern public art with political undertones.
• Existential anxieties. The uncertainties of the peace and the trauma of conflict had a clear impact on artists who addressed 'Existenzfragen' in their works of the 1940s and 1950s. Whilst these preoccupations have been subject to sophisticated analysis in the field of painting, they can also be traced through the applied arts and architecture (not least in the symbolic, defensive forms of influential buildings like Corbusier’s 1947 Unité d’habitation in Marseilles).
• The Legacy of the Modern Movement. Claims to the legacy of the interwar avant-garde were often politicised in the post-war period. Pre-war biographies were rewritten to conform to Cold War realities and the interests of institutions like MOMA. The legacy of the Bauhaus was, for instance, the subject of strong debate in Europe and America, with the founding of the Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung in 1950 and the relocation of many former Bauhaus staff and students to the US. At the same time, prominent figures from the avant-garde in Eastern Europe were being persecuted by the new communist regimes, sometimes producing remarkable and poignant art despite the harsh circumstances in which they worked.
• The Socialist Agenda for the Arts. Debates about the appropriate language of artistic and architectural expression on the left were brought into sharp focus by the Cold War. Soviet models had considerable authority throughout Europe (and in fact elsewhere, such as in China) and were the cause of a great deal of controversy and anxiety in the fine arts and architecture. The exhibition will represent official socialist realist art as well the work of ‘progressive’ artists who sought to accommodate the demand for political engagement with their own existential and aesthetic concerns. In architectural terms this ‘agenda’ was materialised in schemes to reconstruct cities ravaged by war (see below).
• Rebuilding and reconstruction. The rebuilding of European cities after the war offered the opportunity to put into practice the visionary urban schemes of the pre-war generation. New building types were proposed for social housing, buildings for industry, state and social functions and public monuments. Berlin might, for instance, be regarded as the physical embodiment of European division, and provides rich examples of competing visions of the post-war city. Italy, Germany and Japan were all beneficiaries of US-funded initiatives to rebuild and revitalise industry, thus assigning a key cultural and political role to design and manufacture in the post-war era.

Section Two: Cold War Modern
This section represents the argument at the heart of the exhibition, i.e. that the Cold War might be conceived as a conflict between differing visions of modern life. It will show not only how art, architecture and design were drawn opportunistically into political discourse, but that the form of even quite commonplace objects might be read in ideological terms. It will also map the connections between ostensibly diverse and distinct categories of things, for instance, by tracing the formal and technical relations between military technology and domestic design or between art and consumerism.

The following themes might be addressed in this section:

• Brussels Expo’58. The section opens with the seminal international exhibition of the post-war era, the Exposition in Brussels in 1958. Based upon the themes of humanism, peace, technology and progress, with participating nations from both sides of the Iron Curtain, the exposition exemplified many of the themes of the era. The USA and USSR both built pavilions that were competing shows of cultural and technological superiority, but it was those of smaller nations, such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, that garnered the greatest acclaim for the quality of the artistic goods on display.
• Domesticity and the Modern Home. The theme of domesticity runs like a thread throughout this period, from the conventions of popular advertising and design to the sci-fi visions of progressive designers. A touchstone for this theme, which firmly locates it in terms of the Cold War, is the American National Exhibition, held in Moscow in 1959. But, of course, the model home was a universal concern of the period and, alongside such familiar images, the exhibition could include relatively unknown designs such as those from Japan in the early 1950s and other non-European locations. Consumer goods will also play a key role in this section: modern products, particularly cars, refrigerators, washing machines, radios and televisions, took on a symbolic importance as markers of progress in both the planned and capitalist economies. The home, therefore, became the major site of political interest and investment.
• Thaw Modern: art and the applied arts in Eastern Europe after 1956. After the death of Stalin and the ensuing crisis, communists in Eastern Bloc societies sought to renew their project by improving the standard of living of ordinary citizens and adopting what Khrushchev labelled a stance of ‘peaceful competition’ with the West. Great investment and ideological energy was poured into modernising the material world. Artists and designers were given official blessing to return to the kinds of avant-garde positions of the 1920s (at least in some countries). Whilst many of the new high rise buildings and consumer goods, abstract paintings and expressive sculptures were clearly indebted to precedents in the West, some innovations were remarkable and constituted entirely new departures in modern art and design. This section of the exhibition will introduce the visitor to rarely seen works by artists and designers from the Eastern Bloc during the period.
• The Third Way: Scandinavia. Maintaining an careful political distance from the superpowers, Sweden, Finland, Norway and the Low Countries allied their commitment to modernism with the social-democratic ideals of the State. This version of modern design was palatable to both Socialist East and Capitalist West, who could absorb its influence without any feeling of political compromise.
• Harnessing the Future. Science and technology in both East and West provided the materials, products, forms and inspiration for a new visual language in art and design. The atom, with both benign and alarming connotations, became a symbol of progress, as did the products of the Space Race. Both also had a remarkable impact on the fine arts and the exhibition could create a space for the display of innovative technological forms alongside the artistic responses that they generated. Cinema, too, provides an important avenue for exploration of this theme, from the James Bond films to the dystopian visions of Stanley Kubrick. Other archetypal symbols of technological modernism included the computer, which was turned into a form of spectacle by IBM at national and international exhibitions. Plastics, too, served an ideological purpose from the Trabant (the first all plastic-body car) to the experimental ‘plastic’ homes of the period.
• Corporate Modernism. The imperative to be modern was given further impetus by the activities of the international corporations of the age. The rationalist principles of the Ulm school found favour with progressive corporations such as Braun and Lufthansa. Companies such as IBM, the Container Corporation of America and Hilton International Hotels used a form of international modernism to assert their ‘global’ and ‘democratic’ ideals in the face of communism. These corporate medicis of the 1950s, also sought to appear disinterested patrons of experimental art and film.

Section Three: Vision and Critique
The core theme in the final and smaller section of the exhibition addresses the critiques made of capitalist and socialist modernity (as represented in the preceding sections), particularly during the 1960s. Whilst critique might be understood in terms of protest and dissent, whether in the form of politically engaged art or graphic design, it will also be presented in terms of the last expression of utopian modernism. It is our contention that the homogenising effects of consumerism, the destructive capacities of technology and the loss of personal freedom inflicted by social and political systems – all of them key issues in Cold War culture – formed the context for the last critical phase of the Modern Movement.

Themes could include:

• New Fronts on the Cold War. This section will open with a broadening of its geographical boundaries to consider the shifts in Cold War politics in the course of the late 1950s and the 1960s, found most perhaps most clearly in China (in terms of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the mid 1960s) and in Cuba. Further research needs to made to see if this turn can be well represented in terms of the aesthetic and political developments in the countries concerned (such as the rise of the Cuban Poster School).
• Technocracy and its discontents. Anxiety over the social and political effects of technological modernism is a theme of increasing relevance throughout the post war era, and it coalesced into a central building block of 1960s counter-culture. Grass roots political movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament found many supporters in the arts. Expressions of anti-technocracy are evident in the applied arts, architecture and various manifestations of alternative lifestyles, such as Stewart Brand’s 1969 ‘Whole Earth Catalogue’.
• Living the Revolution. With both Mao and Che popular icons in the West, this section will represent the ‘romance’ of revolution for Western radicals and the kitsch appeal of what was latter dubbed ‘guerilla chic’. The ‘discovery’ of the ‘third world’ and the rejection of the technological and material signs of modernity might also be represented by the interest in temporary housing in the developing world and the growth of communes exploring alternative ways of living in new architectural forms such as geodesic domes.
• The Last Visionaries. This section will examine the utopian visions of well known avant-garde groups such as Archigram and Archizoom and Utopie  as well as lesser known phenomena such as radical Austrian and Finnish design and (even perhaps even some expressions of Soviet non-conformist art and design). Urban visions which focussed on the idea of habitats and regenerative or disposable architectural forms were given new, often fantastical forms. Rather than view such practices as expressions of post-modernism, we will emphasise their utopian aspirations/rhetoric.
• Osaka Expo '70. Given the event-full character of the era it may be appropriate to close with the final world’s fair of our period, held in Osaka in 1970. Organised around the theme of ‘Progress and Harmony for Mankind’, the Expo was marked by Cold War antagonisms. The show gave built expression to the aspirations and concerns of radical architects, such as the Japanese metabolists, who put into practice their vision of buildings as living organisms.

Programme and speakers

Thursday, 4 January 2007

• 'Cold War Modern: Art and Design in a Divided World, 1945-1975: An Introduction'. Curator Jane Pavitt (University of Brighton Research Fellow at the V&A) and David Crowley, Consultant Curator (Royal College of Art)
• 'The Curious Case of Frank Lloyd Wright and American Cultural Diplomacy in the Early Cold War Era'. Dennis Doordan, University of Notre Dame, Indiana and Visiting Professor, University of Brighton
• 'Cold War ‘Genius’: The 1954 Rome Festival and the Apotheosis of Elliot Carter'. Martin Brody, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
• 'Spectral Banalities: American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959'. Ben Highmore, University of the West of England, Bristol
• 'The Exhibition of the Lands Regained, Wroclaw 1948'. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Birkbeck College, London
• 'Exhibiting the Good Life: Fifties Domestic Design in Divided Berlin'. Greg Castillo, University of Sydney
• 'Refreshing the Cold War: Italia 61 Exhibition in Turin'. Patrizia Bonifazio and Sandro di Magitris, Politechnico di Milano

Friday, 5 January 2007

• 'Creative America: The US pavilion at Expo ‘67'. Rebecca Dalvesco, School of Art Institute of Chicago
• 'Culture and Conflict Among the Caribou: Geopolitics and the Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo ‘67'. Irena Murray, British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects
• 'Domesticating the Atom? Detecting Cold War Debate in the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibitions'. Harriet Atkinson, Royal College of Art, London
• 'Haltung der Zuruckhaltung: The German Pavilion at Expo 58'. Rika Devos, Ghent University, the Netherlands
• 'Pleasure Domes with Caves of ?, Bucky in Kabul'. Conway Lloyd Morgan, University of Wales
• 'Cold War Exhibition Intrigue in Indo-China: Laos’ That Luang Fair in the 1960s'. Jonathan Sweet and Colin Long, Deakin University, Melbourne
• 'Osaka Expo '70: Constructing National Identity through Media Art'. Toshino Iguchi, Saitama University, Japan
• 'Staging Creativity at Expo ’70: Art, Technology and Cold War Politics'. Anne Collins Goodyear, National Portrait Gallery, Washington