Cold War Modern: Art & Design in a Divided World 1945-70
At this early stage of the exhibition's conception Curator Jane Pavitt (University of Brighton Research Fellow at the V&A) and consultant curator David Crowley (Royal College of Art) proposed mounting the exhibition in three key sections, Anxiety and Hope in the Aftermath of War, Cold War Modern and Vision and Critique, a number of potential themes having been proposed for each section. At this early stage Section One was planned to comprise Memorialising Conflict: Conflicts over Memorials, Existential Anxieties, The Legacy of the Modern Movement, The Socialist Agenda for the Arts, and Rebuilding and Reconstruction. In Section Two the themes under consideration were Domesticity and the Modern Home, Thaw Modern: art and the applied arts in Eastern Europe after 1956, and The Third Way: Scandinavia, Harnessing the Future and Corporate Modernism, whilst in Section Three they were envisaged as New Fronts on the Cold War, Technocracy and its Discontents, Living the Revolution, The Last Visionaries, and Osaka Expo '70.
The first of a series of round table discussions was mounted in mid-October 2004 at the V&A with eighteen invited participants whose research interests relate in some ways to the envisaged exhibition themes. Pavitt and Crowley introduced their conception of the exhibition’s purpose and rationale before opening up discussion with researchers from a range of leading institutions in art and design history and related fields (the Universities of Brighton (Professor Jonathan Woodham), Kingston, Middlesex, Sheffield, Sussex and Warwick, as well as Birkbeck College, the Courtauld Institute, the London College of Fashion, Manchester Metropolitan University, Oxford Brookes University, the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum). These participants also made brief presentations in order to stimulate further discussion about the possible scope and content of the exhibition.
