Activities Courses and seminars

Lecture series, directed by Serge Guilbaut

This series of lectures which is organized in preparation for the show Be-Bomb: the Transatlantic War of Images and all that Jazz. 1946-1956 will bring in Barcelona a group of internationally known scholars working on the cultural and artistic productions. The idea is to show the tight connections between the U.S. and France during those cold war days which produced not only a series of misunderstandings but which also projected in the margin of the art world quantities of modern expressions not considered vital.

The invited speakers will present the overall and complex transatlantic cultural scene between 1946-1956 (Serge Guilbaut and Frances Stonor Saunders), the French cultural landscape at the end of the war (Laurence Bertrand Dorléac), the antagonistic debate between the left artistic production and radical modernist positions a la Greenberg (Andrew Hemingway and Caroline A. Jones). The Spanish art scene and its relation with the US will be discussed (Valeriano Bozal) as well as specific artistic productions like the work of Jean Fautrier (Rachel Perry), Bram Van Velde (Jordi Ibañez) and Hans Hartung (Annie Claustres).

Such a series will be able to alert the public that the western art production during the cold war while Abstract Expressionism was on the ascendance was more diversified and exciting than the traditional art history has led us to believe. What the lectures and the show will argue is that paintings were in the end part and parcel of a vibrant international artistic production full of symbolic/political stakes represented at all level of Cold War culture.

Mondays at 7 pm.

PART 1: COLD WAR CULTURAL GEOPOLITICS

OCTOBER 2
Serge Guilbaut: How New York stole the idea of modern art

OCTOBER 9
Frances Stonor Saunders: The CIA and the cultural Cold War

PART 2: ARTISTIC SITUATIONS

OCTOBER 16
Laurence Bertrand Dorléac: L'art de la defaite. Immediate postwar in Paris. Reconstructing the scene

OCTOBER 23
Andrew Hemingway: The Battle over Humanism. Politics and the Body in American Painting in the Early Cold War

OCTOBER 30
Valeriano Bozal: Spanish situation: Spanish-US cultural relations during Cold War

NOVEMBER 6
Caroline Jones: Greenberg, the avant-garde and abstract expressionism

PART 3: EXPRESSING A COLD WORLD

NOVEMBER 13
Rachel Perry: Jean Fautrier

NOVEMBER 20
Jordi Ibañez: Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, or the reinvention of the begining as an end

NOVEMBER 27
Annie Claustres: Hans Hartung

Enrolment fee: 50 €
Students and jobless: 37.50 €
Friends of the MACBA: free

Individual sessions: 4 €
Individual sessions students, jobless and Friends of the MACBA: 2 €

MACBA Auditorium. Limited number of seats. Programme subject to possible last-minute changes.