The project "European writing on American art during the Cold War era" was a special research and translation initiative, led by the editors of Art in Translation between 2015-2020. It was generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and involved the collaboration with many international advisors, authors, and translators.
The main outcome of this project is the extensive two-volume anthology Hot Art, Cold War-Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, and Hot Art, Cold War-Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1995-1990 edited by Claudia Hopkins and Iain Boyd Whyte (New York: Routledge, 2020). Focusing on the reception of US art in non-English language writings by art historians, philosophers, art critics and artists in Europe between ca. 1945-1990, the companion volumes include over 200 primary sources on US art, translated into English, and augmented by scholarly introductions. These volumes 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 readers 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.
A review by John J. Curley was published in the French journal Critique d'art in November 2021. You can read the full review here Curley_ critique dart
Other Outcomes:
The project involved an AHRC-funded PhD on 'Yugoslav-American exchanges in the early Cold War period', completed by Stefana Djokic 2021 (Supervisors: Claudia Hopkins, Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, David Hopkins).
A panel at the 2020 conference of College of Art Association explored Southern-European responses to American Pop art. The papers were published in volume 14.1 of Art in Translation (2022), Pop Art. Imitation, Translation, Transcreation, edited by Claudia Hopkins and Stefana Djokic.
Five workshops, funded by the Terra Foundation, took place in 2022 and 2023 (in Lisbon, Madrid, Dresden, Poznań, and Bucharest) to expand the research into European-American exchanges further.
A selection of the workshop papers were published in Art in Translation, vol. 16.1 Cold (War) Embraces: Spanish-American Exchanges 1945-1990 , edited by Claudia Hopkins and Javier Ortiz-Echagüe.
This will be followed by vol 16.4 Hot Art, Cold War: Three Central European Workshops, Supplements, Extensions, Alternative Narrative, edited by Iain Boyd Whyte.
