Cold War Modernists.

• Author: Brown, John H.
• Position: Book review

Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, ISBN: 978-0-231-16230-2, Hardcover, 336 pp., $40.00

The volume under review, by Duquesne University professor of English Greg Barnhisel, is two books in one. The first is a fact-based, meticulously researched narrative of early Cold War international outreach--informational, cultural, and educational--undertaken by the U.S. government and the American private sector, often in close collaboration.

The second book is an intellectually challenging effort to explain United States cultural diplomacy in the late 1940s and early 50s as an expression of "Cold War modernism" that "used modernism for pro-Western propaganda."

First book first. This is an impressive achievement, based on extensive archival research, a close reading of the most important secondary literature, and some key interviews. Barnhisel's slice of history is not new to specialists; but he does disclose elucidating details on the tensions and controversies involving U.S. overseas outreach programs (my term, not his) during the 15 years after World War II. He wisely notes that these programs, run by agencies ranging from the CIA to USIA (United States Information Agency, 1953-1999), were

a large, diverse, and messy set of official and nongovernmental programs ... [I]n a government as complex as that of the United States, numerous overlapping offices and agencies and officials collaborate or even work at cross-purposes to achieve the same aims; some bureaucracies die, while others arise from their ashes, and personal rivalries and fiefdoms affect particular programs' and agencies' direction and priority. What this means is that there no "government" per se ... Barnhisel's chapter headings provide an overview of the vast scope of his research: "'Advancing American Art': Modernist Painting and Public-Private Partnerships" (about the controversial overseas State Department exhibit held in the late 1940s that was terminated by the USG in large part because its non-representational displays offended some U.S. media, Congress and President Harry Truman, who famously said, "If this is art, I'm a Hottentot"); "Cold Warriors of the Book: American Book Programs in the 1950s," containing a revealing, at times amusing, account of an often tipsy William Faulkner's cultural activities overseas on behalf of the USG; "Encounter Magazine and the Twilight of Modernism"...