Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy: On the Reception of American Art in Romania during 1968-1974

• In Event: Exhibitions as Spaces of Artistic Contact during the Cold War

Abstract

The paper examines the series of exhibitions of American art organized by institutions such as the Smithsonian or by the Art in Embassies program of MoMA. Such exhibitions toured in Eastern Europe and also arrived in Romania between 1968 and 1974. While introducing modern American art across the Iron Curtain, they served as vehicles for contact between the West and the East, especially in Romania, in a period of the so-called ‘cultural relaxation’. Methodologically employing the history of reception and formal analysis, the main goal of the paper is to show how these programmatic exhibitions became points of contact between American and Romanian artists that influenced versions of figurative realism dominant in Romanian art of the time.

Author

• Cristian Emil Nae, George Enescu National U of Arts (Romania)