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Call for Papers: 'Art Histories, Cultural Studies and the Cold War'

Call for Papers: 'Art Histories, Cultural Studies and the Cold War'

Date: Friday 24 September 2010
Venue: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London
Keynote Speaker: Miranda Carter (author of Anthony Blunt: His Lives, 2001)

Study Day: Cold War Cities
Date: Saturday 25 September 2010
Venue: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London

Twenty years ago the world witnessed the most momentous geo-political
changes since the end of the Second World War: the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the implosion of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the USA as the
global superpower. The period of the Cold War (c.1948-89) was one of
ideological struggle and profound cultural crisis, no less so than for the
discipline of Art History, rooted in the ideals and aspirations of the
European Enlightenment. But the crucible of the Cold War also witnessed
the re-definition of Art History, the birth of the New Left and a nascent
tradition of Cultural Studies.

In 1952 Erwin Panofsky wrote a paper surveying Three Decades of Art History in
the United States – an essay pervaded by an acute sense of how the development
of the discipline of Art History, and the lives of individual art historians, had been
shaped by the momentous political events of the 1930s and 40s. In a specific
reference to McCarthyism, Panofsky noted how ‘nationalism and intolerance’
remained a terrifying threat to academic freedom and that ‘even when dealing with
the remote past, the historian cannot be entirely objective.’ Although the situation
was less extreme in the UK, intellectuals and academics with left wing sympathies
such as Frederick (Frigyes) Antal, Francis Klingender and Eric Hobsbawm still faced
‘red baiting’ and other challenges in gaining employment in universities and other
teaching-related posts.

Writing in 1960 to Adrian Stokes about his book Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich
reflected on the ‘considerable shock’ with which he discovered that Art History had
been misused to propagate pseudo-historical myths on both the Right and the Left.
Some decades later Peter Fuller was faced with a changing political landscape and
the need to re-consider his own response to national identity and to the Marxism he
had cherished earlier in his career.

This conference on Friday 24 September, organized by the department of History &
Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent, aims to explore how the Cold War
delineated approaches to Art History, Historiography and Cultural Studies and how its
conditions and constraints shaped the professional careers and influenced the writings and ideas of scholars and cultural theorists. We welcome a wide range of perspectives that might include, for example, the use of particular methodologies, the choice of specific subjects for analysis that were explicitly politically motivated or
contextualised readings of particular art historical monographs or reviews of wider art
historical topics, such as ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘the history of Modern Art’, as sites of
displaced ideological conflict.

Alternatively, papers might involve the exploration of state patronage and of the
intellectual debates and cultural events around the visual arts, whether overt in the
form of Soviet Realism, or more covert as in the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural
Freedom. Contributions are not confined to Anglo-Saxon Art History and we
welcome Post-Colonial and European perspectives (from both sides of the former Iron Curtain).

A related study day on Saturday 25 September, organized by the Centre for the Study
of Cultural Memory (CCM) at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, will
explore Cold War Cities. We welcome papers from a variety of angles and
disciplines, including history, art history, film, architecture, politics, memory and
cultural studies. Amongst other things, papers may address: post-war memories; cities at the centre/cities at the fringes; architecture, including divisive architecture (e.g.
walls); cities in film; the Eastern Bloc, especially former Yugoslavia;
utopian/distopian cities; cities and the space race; migration; terrorism and the city.

Please send your abstract (250 words max) by 24 February 2010 to
G.F.Pooke@kent.ac.uk or B.D.H.Thomas@kent.ac.uk (for the Art Histories
Conference); to katia.pizzi@sas.ac.uk or ricarda.vidal@sas.ac.uk (for the Cold
War Cities study day).