Painting Paranoia

About the Book

The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted the USSR’s state-sponsored Socialist Realism against its so-called opposite: Western art in general and Abstract Expressionism in particular. But can one version of art be the opposite of another?

Julia Tatiana Bailey teases out the complexity and artificiality of the persistent narrative of US and Soviet artistic otherness. She explores why this notion was introduced and how it shaped the art of both countries. She also analyses and deconstructs the ideological frameworks that have estranged the art of the USSR in Western art history. In doing so, Bailey reveals the Cold War biases and institutionalized responses that influence the politicized histories of art even today.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival material from Russia and the US, Painting Paranoia investigates how the myth of Soviet otherness contributed to America’s post-war artistic identity.

* Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art
Publication Fund of CAA.