THE TEXT IS IN CYRILLIC WITH NO ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS.
Catalog of an art exhibition which turned out to be part of an historic event. Following a June 1959 Soviet exhibition in New York, the American National Exhibition opened in Sokol'niki Park, Moscow on July 24, 1959. The American exhibition was intended to demonstrate the advantages of capitalism to the Soviets. Exhibits included home appliances, farm equipment, automobiles, boats, sporting equipment and scientific and technological achievements. The famous Kitchen debates between Krushchev and Nixon took place at various sites around the exhibition, but primarily in the kitchen of a model suburban house equipped with all modern conveniences which the Americans maintained any American could afford.
The art exhibition, which opened the following day, attracted its own controversy. Not only were the Soviets in general opposed to modern art, but the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities determined that 34 of the 67 artists to be exhibited had been involved in some kind of Communist organization. The committee was prepared to remove these artists from the exhibition and only the intervention of President Dwight Eisenhower allowed them to be displayed as planned.
The art exhibition included approximately 50 paintings and 25 sculptures from 1930 to 1959. The artists ranged from Sloan and Glackens to Pollock and de Kooning. There was work by Marin, Weber, Hartley and Davis and the regionalists Wood, Benton and Curry. Among the sculptors were Zorach, Laurent, Smith, Roszak, deCreeft and Calder. The selections were made by a four-man jury: Franklin C. Watkins, Theodore Roszak, Lloyd Goodrich and Henry Hope. The introduction to the catalog by Goodrich, translated into Russian, was a revised and adapted article "What is American in American Art?", first published in the journal Art in America.
Rare in commerce. Good .
Keywords: ART; EXHIBITION CATALOG; AMERICAN ART IN MOSCOW; AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE TOURED BY THE ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART TO MOSCOW JULY 25-SEPTEMBER 5, 1959; AMERICAN NATIONAL EXHIBITION; KITCHEN DEBATES; NIXON; KRUSHCHEV; LLOYD GOODRICH; SLOAN; GLACKENS;