Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism with Julia Bailey (U Illinois Press, 2026)
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…
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