| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael L. Krenn. Fall-out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 300. $39.95.
The Cold War was many things: a series of armed confrontations, a controlled arms race, an ideological struggle, a geopolitical contest. This book by Michael L. Krenn tells the story, in far greater depth than any effort thus far, of the troubled relationship between art and U.S. foreign policy during the peak years of the Cold War.	1
The story begins with a disastrous episode, an exhibition of modern paintings entitled "Advancing American Art," that fell victim to public criticism and congressional reaction. To its critics, the exhibition was decadent art which was all the more noxious because some of the artists were suspected of promoting radical ideas. As a result, the fledgling art program of the State Department never got off the ground.	2
As Krenn points out, however, this was the beginning rather than the end of the story, for both artists and government bureaucrats, each for reasons of their own that for a time proved complementary, were determined to find an appropriate role for art. In what was seen as a struggle for the soul of modern civilization, the government was eager to reach influential audiences in the West and behind the Iron Curtain, hoping to spread the message that the United States was a cultured nation. But the art world had rather different ideas. Artists wanted to use painting as a way of promoting a form of universal communication among human beings that transcended politics and hoped that government would provide the necessary financial support. Although opposites do not normally attract in politics, in the early Cold War years the time was right for the marriage of this odd couple.	. . .

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