| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War. By Michael L. Krenn. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii, 300 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2945-5.)
According to Lloyd Goodrich, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and chairman of the National Committee on Government and Art, the arts would "provide fall-out shelters for the human spirit vastly more essential" (p. 1) than the bricks-and-mortar shelters Americans constructed for a Cold War nuclear attack. Many federal officials and art leaders heeded Goodrich's call to make the arts "an integral part of the defense of our civilization" (p. 1). Together, they created a cultural exchange program to exhibit American painting abroad between the 1940s and 1970s.	1
Michael L. Krenn illuminates both the promise and problems inherent in this public/private arts program. The State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA), and the Smithsonian Institution successfully worked with numerous art organizations to send hundreds of exhibits worldwide. The government provided funding, while the art world supplied the aesthetic expertise. It seemed a perfect match. But government officials and arts supporters harbored different hopes for the program. The former saw it as a cultural weapon in the Cold War, while the latter wished to advance art for art's sake or as a "tool for international peace and understanding" (p. 54). Ultimately, those differences derailed the program.	. . .

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