Here
is a list of some major players in Cold
War Modernists,
Greg Barnhisel’s fascinating and meticulously researched history of
modernist art and literature’s role in Cold War diplomacy: the
American Artists Professional League (AAPL); the American Federation
of Arts (AFA); the Committee on Public Information (CPI); the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF); the International Information
Administration (IIA); the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA);
the United States Information Agency (USIA); the United States
Information Service (USIS); and the All-Union Society for Cultural
Relations with Foreign Nations, which, by way of a complicated
transliteration, adopted the acronym VOKS.
Imagine
all of the paperwork produced by one of these benignly titled groups:
the mission statements and monthly summaries, official memos and
interagency notices, budgets and projected spending reports. Then
imagine the size of the file cabinet needed to house all of the
documents for it and all of the governmental, quasi-governmental, and
philanthropic organizations that dealt in foreign policy and cultural
diplomacy between the rise of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the
Berlin Wall (or, to take the slightly more manageable time frame at
the heart of Cold War
Modernists,
between the Truman and Kennedy administrations). This will give a
sense of the archive from which Barnhisel culls his study. And now
imagine the time and patience it would require to find, request, and
read this material, and make it say something about the fate of
modernist literature and art after their initial spark in the 1910s
and 1920s.
Text
by Donal Harris
