In this readable and highly original book, John J. Curley presents the first synthetic account of global art during the Cold War. Through a careful examination of artworks drawn from America, Europe, Russia and Asia, he demonstrates the inextricable nature of art and politics in this contentious period. He dismantles the usual narrative of American abstract painting versus figurative Soviet Socialist Realism to reveal a much more nuanced, contradictory and ambivalent picture of art making, in which the objects themselves, like spies, dissembled, housed and managed ideological differences.

Headline-making in every sense, the myriad works of art in which Andy Warhol used or referenced tabloids throughout his career are explored in this book as a coherent body for the first time. Obsessed with contemporary culture, Warhol celebrated the sensational as well as the mundane in every facet of society. His headline works, which were realized in a range of formats--from two-dimensional to time-based media such as film, video, and television--chart in real time the great shift in the technological means employed to deliver the news from the 1950s until the artist's death in 1987. This companion volume to a riveting exhibition brings together more than 80 works, from Warhol's earliest drawings and paintings of newspaper headlines, to his screen-printed canvases, photographs, and electronic media, and concluding with collaborative works he produced with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Featuring illuminating essays and abundant reproductions of the headline works, as well as source materials and examples of Warhol's private scrapbooks of clippings, this unique and powerful volume demonstrates the rich intersection of mainstream media and fine art.

An important new look at Cold War art on both sides of the Atlantic In October 1962, a set of blurred surveillance photographs brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse during the Cuban missile crisis. The pictures themselves demonstrated little, and explanatory captions were necessary to identify the danger for the public. In the following months, two artists with antithetical backgrounds arrived at a similar aesthetic: Andy Warhol, who began his career as a commercial artist in New York City, turned to the silkscreened replication of violent photographs. Gerhard Richter, who began as a mural painter in socialist Dresden, East Germany, painted blurred versions of personal and media photographs. In A Conspiracy of Images, author John J. Curley explores how the artists' developing aesthetic approaches were informed by the political agency and ambiguity of images produced during the Cold War, particularly those disseminated by the mass media on both sides. As the first scholarly consideration of the visual conditions of the Cold War, A Conspiracy of Images provides a new and compelling transatlantic model for Cold War art history.