recentlyShown: { } }); A new book by John J. Curley sheds light on the role that images played in the Cold War. A painter introduced one of the Cold War’s most enduring, powerful, and popular metaphors: the Iron Curtain. As the Cold War and its popular culture recede into the past-as the era blurs—it is helpful to have books like this not just to illuminate theoretical concerns but to make us aware of the larger social and visual context, particularly the things taken for granted at the time but nearly invisible now. It has been turned from light into paint. And in the Western half of Europe, the nations of France, Great Britain, Italy, and the future West Germany aligned themselves with the United States and at least the basics of its capitalist economic system. Thus even small flare-ups evoked existential questions of life and death on the scale of the human species itself. aggressive: true, Cold War factions required certainty in their messages, and yet such clarity, whether visual or ideological, was impossible to achieve. var $form = $(formElement);
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' The British Pop artist Gerald Laing addressed the very issue of ideological blindness in an important painting from late 1962 entitled Souvenir (of the Cuban Missile Crisis Oct 16–28 1962), featuring both protagonists of the global showdown over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba: John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.
All Rights reserved. In addition to mapping Cold War sides onto physical space, determined by the viewer’s position in the gallery, Souvenir dramatizes how viewers can interpret the same painting in radically different ways: Once one understands how the painting works, one can choose to see Kennedy or Khrushchev. Despite the apparent certainty of Churchill’s anti-communist political position—which divided the world between absolute good and absolute evil—his theory of art works against such binary conviction. } + '
' } Politics What the Cold War Can Teach Us About How Art Shapes Politics in Times of Conflict. Although they had ostensibly abandoned their earlier artistic practices, both Warhol and Richter not only retained certain outward forms and interests from their past but also embodied the stresses and contradictions of having made a major shift, of experiencing things from both sides. } } Excerpted by permission of Laurence King Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Curley points out that a key Cold War strategy on either side of the political divide was containment: both self and other had to be clearly defined and kept within distinct borders. Clichés parading as truth lay at the heart of both advertising and propaganda, and the two artists, steeped as they were in those cultures, were able to take clichés, the toxic banalities of mid-century print culture, and render them unsettlingly absurd, thereby intentionally corrupting any straightforward message. var ouibounceScript = '