Tracing the relationship between Abstract Expressionist artists and contemporary intellectuals, particularly the French existentialists, Nancy Jachec here offers a new interpretation of the success of America's first internationally recognized avant-garde art form. She argues that Abstract Expressionism was promoted by the United States government because of its radical character, which was considered to appeal to a Western European populace perceived by the State Department as inclined toward Socialism.

Although cultural exchanges were named within the Council of Europe in the mid- 1950s as being second only in importance to the military as a tool for ensuring a stable and integrated Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, European-led initiatives have generally been overlooked in the historiography of art of the immediate post-war period. Popularly remembered as the era of the United States' cultural 'triumph', American Abstract Expressionism in particular is commonly identified as the cultural 'weapon' by which that nation conquered Western European culture. Using the Venice Biennale as a case study, this book challenges the idea that there was an American cultural conquest in the 1950s through the fine arts, arguing instead that Western Europe retained a strong sense of world cultural leadership in the immediate post-war years. An institutional history that combines political and diplomatic with art history, and is informed by extensive archival research, it argues that Italian political and cultural figures actively promoted the 'Idea of Europe' - the Council of Europe's cultural initiative of 1955 designed to promote the idea of a homogeneous post-war European culture - at the Biennale in the form of gesture painting as an international style, as the emblem of a culturally united Western Europe, and as the repository of universal humanist values for the international community. Scholarly but accessible, this book will be of interest not only to researchers and to students of international cultural relations during the Cold War, but to general, interested readers, too. -- .

In 1950, nearly 300 of Europe's leading artists, philosophers and writers formed an international society intended to end the Cold War. The European Society of Culture was composed of many of Western Europe's best-known intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno, Julien Benda, Albert Camus, Benedetto Croce, Andre Gide, J. B. Haldane, Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Henri Matisse, Francois Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Albert Schweitzer, among many others; over the next twenty years it would also include many luminaries from the East, such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ilya Ehrenburg and Georg Lukacs. Pioneering the earliest political discussions between intellectuals in Eastern and Western Europe that would serve as a model for the activities of the better-known CCF in its efforts to end communism, the ESC went on to create an informal but powerful, 1,600 member-strong cultural and political network across the world in pursuit of dialogue between the Marxist East and the liberal West, and in pursuit of peace and shared cultural values. Here, in this first, comprehensive history of the SEC's early years, Nancy Jachec demonstrates the influence its members had not only on preventing the isolation of Europe's eastern states, but on enabling the flow of people, publications and ideas from the West into the East, thus playing a vital role in introducing the ideals of human rights and cultural rights in the East in the run-up to the signing of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. She also shows the profound impact that the SEC had on the development of post-colonial theory through the exchanges it organised between European and African intellectuals, directly shaping the expectations statesmen like Leopold Sedar Senghor, revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, and institutions such as Unesco would have of culture in newly emerging countries.

In 1950, nearly 300 of Europe's leading artists, philosophers and writers formed an international society intended to end the Cold War. The European Society of Culture was composed of many of Western Europe's best-known intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno, Julien Benda, Albert Camus, Benedetto Croce, Andre Gide, J. B. Haldane, Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Henri Matisse, Francois Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Albert Schweitzer, among many others; over the next twenty years it would also include many luminaries from the East, such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ilya Ehrenburg and Georg Lukacs. Pioneering the earliest political discussions between intellectuals in Eastern and Western Europe that would serve as a model for the activities of the better-known CCF in its efforts to end communism, the ESC went on to create an informal but powerful, 1,600 member-strong cultural and political network across the world in pursuit of dialogue between the Marxist East and the liberal West, and in pursuit of peace and shared cultural values. Here, in this first, comprehensive history of the SEC's early years, Nancy Jachec demonstrates the influence its members had not only on preventing the isolation of Europe's eastern states, but on enabling the flow of people, publications and ideas from the West into the East, thus playing a vital role in introducing the ideals of human rights and cultural rights in the East in the run-up to the signing of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. She also shows the profound impact that the SEC had on the development of post-colonial theory through the exchanges it organised between European and African intellectuals, directly shaping the expectations statesmen like Leopold Sedar Senghor, revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, and institutions such as Unesco would have of culture in newly emerging countries.