How the American Sport in Art exhibition was presented at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956

From October 31, 1955, an art exhibition, Sport in Art toured the United States, inaugurated the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and ended at California Palace of the Legion. Honor (now the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts).

It was just a warm up for his final destination: Melbourne. The exhibition was to be shipped to Australia on September 25, 1956, so that she could be ready for the Olympics. The American catalog announced that it would open at the National Gallery of Victoria on October 4, seven weeks before the start of the games, and end on November 30.

The exhibition was sponsored by the United States Information Agency and was part of his diplomacy program, although for the Cold War warriors, his real purpose was the war psychological against the communist bloc.

The United States, however, was far behind the USSR by using circuits to present its culture. The Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, the virtuoso violinist David Oistrakh and the Moiseyev Dance Company had been winners for the Soviet Union, whose budget of $ 9 million a year had overshadowed the Department 's spending. State, which was less than a tenth. 19659006] The cancellation of the "Sport in Art" exhibition was a turning point for President Eisenhower's strategy to use art … "width =" 620 "/>
            
        
    

President Dwight Eisenhower worried that the United States was losing the battle and that with every Soviet success, "the American prestige … suffers in proportion".

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The exhibition Sport in Art was part of the response of the United States and was playing on one of its strengths, because the l […] Modernist American art was far superior to social realism

19659012] The objective of the exhibition was to win hearts and minds in a part of the world that was becoming strategically important in the United States.

However, this propaganda coup was in jeopardy when its American sponsor discovered that no arrangement had been made to accommodate the exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria

When the director of the GNV, Eric Westbrook, received a letter confirming the arrangements to send the exhibition to Australia, he was surprised. He knew nothing of an exhibition. He was in a dilemma. All of his gallery space has been devoted to showing Australian paintings and drawings during the Olympic Games.

While Westbrook was puzzled about how such a mix might occur, his main concern was to find an alternative space to show the sport in the art exhibition. Westbrook quickly secured the Mural Hall on the top floor of the Myer store.

While Melbourne's problems had been resolved, a new problem arose during the US tour. When the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts announced that it would host the show, local patriots were not happy

. The first volley was returned by Colonel John Mayo who demanded that the works of four artists be removed because, they claimed, they were communists. They were Ben Shahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, William Zorach and Leon Kroll. None of them was a communist card-bearer, but all had been badociated with progressive causes.

Mayo was supported by Colonel Alvin Owsley of the Dallas County Patriotic Council. "One of the basic premises of communist doctrine is that art can and should be used in the constant process of attempting to brainwash and create soft public attitudes towards communism," he said. said Owsley

. to ban the four artists was pure McCarthyism, which raised the anger of the liberals.

John Rosenfield, art critic for the liberal Dallas Morning News argued that "no art should be censored, and that the communist art would make any matter. which viewer a communist who would not be communist anyway. "

Controversy drew national attention when Aline Saarinen of The New York Times accused the Patriotic Council of to be "aesthetic". the vigilant "disagree with" reason, decency and true Americanism. "

To their credit, gallery administrators refused to yield and on March 25 the exhibition opened.

It was not difficult to choose the four contr Oversian paints.There was a small Praetorian Guard of Fort Worth ladies around each of them.And they warned anyone who was approaching the paintings that They were produced by "Reds."

Visitors ready to brave the cordon of the patriotic ladies were surprised by the small size and innocence of the offending works.One was a sketch in charcoal from an old fisherman.Another was an ink drawing of a moving baseball dough.People were skating on a frozen pond in another, and the final painting was a painting abstract on the theme of winter

It was not clear how these works would lead anyone in the arms of Marxism, although a local patriot made an unexplainable effort. "The more you try to find the subject in the paintings, the more head-to-head you have, and that's what communists want you to feel when you're blurry in the head, you're ready for it." 39; infiltration ". [19659003] Not wanting to suffer further, at the end of May, the US Information Agency quietly announced that it was canceling the Australian leg of the United States. exhibition Sport in Art . The "budget reason" was the reason given, even though the Australian stage of the tour cost only $ 1,550 (or $ 13,500 in 2017 dollars).

Impugned decision

This decision was challenged by The New York Times . "It may not be patriotic to point out that this kind of episode makes foreigners laugh", criticized his editorial.

The editor of the magazine Arts Jonathan Marshall, wrote: right-wing patriots, the United States had "saved our allies the Australians, and others, to see images of ball games, children, skaters, fishermen, boxers, horse racing and other subversions inspired by communism "

Walter Lippmann wrote that the cancellation of the exhibition Sport in Art "proves to foreigners that we do not respect our own principles of artistic and cultural freedom".

As for the Australian organizers of the Olympic Games, the cancellation was barely noticed that the exhibition had not been planned and that they had been imposed at the last minute.

Westbrook never discovered the cause of the confusion. It is only now, after the American Federation of Art, which organized the exhibition, has published the documents, that we know what happened, even though the ## 147 ## History begs belief

The confusion began when the organizer wrote to James MacDonald to show Sport in Art believing that he was the director of the National Gallery of Victoria . MacDonald's tenure as gallery director ended in 1941 and he died in November 1952.

Missing Archives

What's missing from the archive is the gallery's response. It is possible (though somewhat inexplicable) that someone from the gallery responded, accepting the exhibition, without telling Eric Westbrook, who became director in January 1956, or his predecessor, Sir Darryl Lindsay.

only another explanation was that the letter from the American Federation of Arts remained unanswered, and it was just badumed that Australians would simply be delighted to host such a major exhibition.

For the director of the gallery, Eric Westbrook, Sport in the Art was a mixed blessing. He did not have to share his attention between two major exhibitions. On the other hand, he would have liked to see engravings and artist drawings of the caliber of Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and George Bellows. While presenting mainly American artists, she also included prints by Honoré Daumier and Goya

. The cancellation of the exhibition Sport in Art marks a turning point in Eisenhower's strategy of using art exhibitions as a cold-warfare weapon. psychological warfare.

Post – Dallas firearms, future traveling exhibitions included only artists who died before 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. It was badumed that artists born before that date could not be communists, which would have been news for Karl Marx, who died in 1883.

Harry Blutstein is an badistant professor at RMIT University and author from Cold War Games (Echo Publications).