Painting Paranoia

During the interwar years, as the USSR was emerging as a formidable new power and the United States was asserting its final independence from Europe, Russian art began to appear in the United States, supported by the influx of émigrés escaping revolutionary turmoil. While revolutionary Russia was viewed with trepidation from across the Atlantic, the country’s creative output was initially entertained as an exotic oddity. Yet this sense of cultural alienation, based on the classical orientalizing narratives of the period, gave way to the fear of the Soviet Union as a cultural Other, which defined US-Soviet artistic relations throughout the twentieth century.

Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Russia, this manuscript contributes to the political history of twentieth-century American art and the revisionist history of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War by charting the politicization of myths of Soviet art. It reveals how those with control over the reception of art in the United States built and sustained a strategy of othering towards Socialist Realism, presents the rhetoric of Soviet artistic otherness in the context of debates surrounding the concept of American art, and reclaims the post-war history of American Social Realism.