Melting the Cold War: Politics of Exhibition-Making

Dear Colleagues,

The implementation of cultural policies ‘from above’ by Cold War governments was long deemed consistent in its aesthetic and ideological message. Numerous high-profile cases of artists excluded from exhibitions for violating Socialist Realist principles reinforced the view of restrictive cultural hegemony under Communism. Early scholarship on this period emphasised the process of exhibition-making, studying the convoluted path artists faced, culminating in either formal acceptance or rejection by the Ministries of Culture. Nonetheless, new research has started to challenge this view of homogenous exhibition content and curatorial values in the Eastern Bloc. Recent analysis has shown the variety and divergence of aesthetic approaches on display in galleries during the second half of the twentieth century, many of which went beyond the rigid parameters of officially sanctioned communist aesthetics.

Drawing on previously unexamined documents consisting of textual, photographic, state archival records, and interviews, the aim of this Issue is to look for new perspectives explaining the transnational exchanges in exhibition-making, which lead to the questioning or negation of the official political rhetorics. What were the challenges that art historians and curators encountered during the material-gathering, and what was their motivation in undertaking the risk of defying propaganda?

The topic is not solely limited to the reactionary exhibition design under Communist rule, but also seeks to uncover the histories of Social Realist exhibitions in the West, which were initially planned but ultimately did not take place. What were the artistic channels between countries and continents, what was the role of modernism’s revival in the historiography that contributed to the soft power play of the Cold War, and what are the challenges for contemporary researchers working in the archives in providing documentation about the exhibition-making processes of such a politically-loaded period? 

Dr. Maria Anna Rogucka
Dr. Wiktor Komorowski 
Guest Editors

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• reassessing socialist realism
• cold War politics of exhibition-making
• propaganda in exhibitions design
• censorship in the national narratives of exhibitions
• role of art historians, theorists, and curators in political exhibitions
• archival methods in the documentation of exhibitions