Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (review)

In 1967, as a college student and an art major, I was lucky enough to visit the World's Fair in Montreal. In one of the most memorable aesthetic confrontations in modern architectural history, the pavilions of the Soviet Union and the United States seemingly glowered at one another in a fine demonstration of what the Cold War was all about. The Soviet building was dark, squared off, and sinister, approachable only by a ramp that appeared suitable for the surprise emergence of heavy armaments. By contrast, the U.S. building was not really a building at all in any conventional sense. It was a huge, geodesic dome designed by the visionary thinker Buckminster Fuller— light, airy, ethereal, insouciant, and a bit flippant. Inside, too, the contrast could not have been starker. The Soviet pavilion contained models of hydroelectric plants, space capsules, and an exhibit of huge Social Realist paintings, including a wonderful image of gymnasts dressed all in white posed against a flat backdrop of pure, intense red. The U.S. pavilion contained escalators to the top of the dome. I remember less about the interior contents of the American pavilion, perhaps because it seemed familiar and unforeign. I do remember at least one very large teddy bear.

The face-off between the block and the sphere is more or less what Michael Krenn's Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit is all about—how Americans tried, unsuccessfully for the most part, to use art as a propaganda weapon during the Cold War era. The book's title comes from a 1962 document in which Lloyd Goodrich, the distinguished director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, called on the U.S. government to counter Nikita Khrushchev's threats of nuclear annihilation with the spiritual uplift provided by the arts, those "fall-out shelters for the human spirit vastly more essential . . . than those for the human body." (p. 1) Goodrich's argument is debatable but his idealism, shared by many in the visual arts, led to some twenty years of vicious bickering over the use of paintings to create a favorable image of the United States abroad.

Krenn's book is a virtual roll call of failures, each one described and analyzed in depressing detail. Americans have never been comfortable with the notion of having the government subsidize works of art and decide which ones deserve public funding. From the earliest days of the republic, when a semi-nude, commissioned statue of George Washington (pretending to be Zeus) had to be consigned to various basements and closets to conceal it from public wrath, art has remained a contentious matter in a pluralistic society. Indeed, the motto "de gustibus non est disputandum" should probably have been carved above the doorway of the National Gallery of Art when it opened in 1941.

In any case, as congressional brouhahas over the alleged missteps of the National Endowment for the Arts in recent years have amply demonstrated, competing tastes, worries over whether the ostensible content of an image actually conceals a sinister message, and a general feeling that most museum-type art is not something the average citizen ought to waste much time over have meant that official exhibitions of American art abroad have not fared well. Curators have often put together shows guided by trendiness or a personal stake in promoting a given style. Members of Congress and pundits have found ready targets for accusations of waste and subversion.

Krenn begins his story with the cautionary tale of Advancing American Art, an exhibit organized in 1946 under U.S. State Department auspices. The exhibition was slated to tour Europe in order to show that the United States consisted of more than just Coca-Cola, guns, and bubble gum, but ultimately it was dismantled and sold off at bargain prices (a Georgia O'Keeffe painting went for $50) because of allegations that some...