Department of Art History

Serge Guilbaut is a leading Marxist art historian of postwar art in the United States and Europe. He is Professor Emeritus of art history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Guilbaut’s book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1983, remains one of the most important and canonical texts on 20th century art. On the emerging cold war front in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Guilbaut argued, the postwar American abstract painting of artists such as Jackson Pollock was strategically coopted by US government agencies and museums, especially the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to propagate a capitalist ideology of freedom in Western Europe. As a result, the center of the art world shifted, for the very first time in history, to the United States. Guilbaut’s 2008 catalogue and anthology Be-Bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All That Jazz, 1946-1956 expanded on that early book and accompanied an exhibition at the Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. In retrospect, Guilbaut’s transatlantically oriented scholarship has become an important pre-history to the rise of the contemporary global art world.

Presented by the Department of Art History as part of the 2017/18 Smart lecture series supported by the Smart Family Foundation. The lecture opens the fall quarter lecture series on the “Arts and the Nuclear Age,” organized by Christine Mehring in collaboration with a variety of arts departments and programs, and supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities. 

See The Chicago Maroon for more information.