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Europe: The 1950s Legacy

Edited by Reuben Fowkes, Edited by Nancy Jachec

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Europe: The 1950s Legacy highlights the condition of European art in the first decade of the Cold War. This volume reassesses the responses of artists to the Iron Curtain divide, the duel of colossal nuclear superpowers and the impact of major geo-political shifts affecting Europe - the Suez crisis, France's war in Algeria and other widespread colonial independence struggles. The pivotal year 1956 is marked by radical currents of leftism in Western Europe and the Soviet Union's post-Stalinist 'thaw' which, despite the forlorn defeat of the Hungarian uprising, gave hopes of reform in Europe's Eastern bloc. Fourteen art historians and specialists in their fields bring new perspectives to focus on this moment of high risk politics and creative ferment. Strivings for artistic freedom, energized by post-war avant-garde approaches to abstraction and conceptualism, became the battle line which cut across Europe's ideological division. Each country in this European drama of the Cold War represents an individual case history examined for its historical idiosyncrasies in these fourteen contributions. This book is a highly informative and timely book which refreshes our understanding of a neglected but crucial period of 20th century history. The quest for artistic freedom in the Eastern bloc countries sought for continuity with European modernism in resistance to Soviet dominance and its dogma of Socialist Realism. The authors range extensively across Central Europe, from East Germany and Poland to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia This book was originally published as a special issue of Third Text.