Introduction. The art that came in from the cold -- Failures of containment: the case of postwar abstraction -- The development of Andy Warhol's pop eye -- Socialist realism and Gerhard Richter's 'third way' -- Paranoid styles: Warhol's and Richter's conspiracy theories of painting -- The uncontained image: the politics of Warhol's and Richter's blur -- Conclusion. Art and illusion: Cold War art history.
Summary:
"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."
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