Hot Art, Cold War – Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990

This is a major, two-volume anthology of primary source texts on postwar American art between 1945 and 1989, translated from a wide range of European languages into English for the first time and augmented by scholarly essays.

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Hot Art, Cold War – Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources.

With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations.

This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences.

Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism.

This book, together with its companion volume Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990,, is a joint initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the editors of the journal Art in Translation at the University of Edinburgh. The journal, launched in 2009, publishes English-language translations of the most significant texts on art and visual cultures presently only available only in their source language. It is committed to widening the perspectives of art history, making it more pluralist in terms of its authors, viewpoints, and subject matter.