The Cold War Art Archives presented in Los Angeles

At the major international Art Historian Convention, Matteo Bertelé, researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, presided over a session he devised and dedicated to the cultural history of artistic practices in Europe during the Cold War.

The starting point in this study was the archives of art in the convention host city, Los Angeles. It was here that the academic begun his studies and archival research to be conducted in a three year project funded by the European Commission with a Marie Skłodowska Curie Global fellowship.

The project entitled GYSIART - A Cultural History of Comparative Art Practices and Receptions in Cold War Europe (1945-1991) includes two years at the University of California Santa Barbara and a third year in Europe at the University of Hamburg and at Ca’ Foscari, winner of the project and university in which Bertelè obtained his doctorate. The overseer of the project is Professor Silvia Burini, also from the department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage.

The session, entitled ‘Cold War Archives, Collections and Exhibitions: Starting from Los Angeles’, was attended by four speakers representing the institutions involved in the three year research project: John E. Bowlt, emeritus professor and Director of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of California, Joes Segal and Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, respectively head curator and historical consultant at the Wende Museum of the Cold War, and Isotta Poggi, curator of the Getty Research institute.

Since the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, the history of the Cold War has been widely studied in the light of an increasing quantity of archive sources that have become accessible. While the cultural dimension of the Cold War has been analysed in terms of literature, performing arts, design and architecture, the field of figurative arts remains significantly unheard of to this day. As a consequence. The traces of a binary and conventional narration can still be found in contemporary artistic discourse, generating distorted perceptions of art from the countries on both sides of the former iron curtain.

The main objective of the session was therefore to launch the establishment of comparative and multidisciplinary research on the history and the artistic practices during the Cold War, starting from the primary sources, mostly unpublished, preserved in institutions and museums in Los Angeles. In the last few years, the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, the Getty Research Institute and the Wende Museum of the Cold War have dedicated archives and collections to the visual arts produced in a divided Europe. The invited speakers, coming from the aforementioned institutions, illustrated the criteria adopted in putting together their own collections and outlined the strategies and methodologies adopted to preserve, research and finally visualise the history of the art in the period, on the basis of past and future exhibitions.  

The College Art Association (CAA) is the largest global organisation for the History of Art. Its annual conference, organised each year in February in the United States, is a major gathering of academics and experts in the sector. The 2018 conference will host 300 sessions attended by 5,000 art academics.