Crossing the Borders: Artistic Exchange during the Cold War 

Seraina Renz

The research project examines moments of aesthetic and ideological rapprochement between Italy, the Soviet bloc, and non-aligned Yugoslavia during the Cold War. The focus is on exhibitions, personal exchange, and discursive debate. The motives for the exchange are diverse and interwoven; they can be political in nature or arise from the desire for cultural connection and from shared aesthetic and artistic interests. The study is structured around four thematic areas: modernisms; the survival of the historical avant-garde; art and science; places of art. These topics are not sharply demarcated from one another, but each represents a specific perspective on art and moments of exchange in their social context. They also imply a loose chronology. The question of the aesthetics and ideological function of modern art (“modernisms”) provoked confrontational attempts to answer it from the 1930s to the 1950s and cannot be separated from the political schisms that structured world politics before, during, and after the Second World War. The continued existence or revival of avant-garde movements took place in all regions examined here over a period of around two decades from the 1950s onwards. At the same time, the engagement of artists with science became particularly virulent, in some cases leading to an institutionalized collaboration between artists and scientists. The questions about the “places of art” derive from the fact that in all of the regions mentioned, from the 1960s onwards, the spaces for the production and reception of art expanded in an unprecedented way. Seeking out the traces of transregional exchange, the project is based on archival research in Italy and Eastern Europe.