The Foreign Service Journal, December 2006

the promotion of American painting abroad in the post-World War II era, primarily by the State Department and the United States Information Agency but also by private groups (including the American Federation of Arts), he delineates two approaches toward American international art programs. The first, upheld by the handful of U.S. government officials who saw a role for the arts in fighting the Soviet cultural offensive, was that art was essentially another propaganda tool for, among other things, “assuring the world’s peoples that America was not a militaristic, materialistic, anti-intellec- tual nation; and, particularly through the use of modern and abstract art, serving as a message of freedom and individuality in contrast to the strict dogmas of the Soviet Union’s ‘socialist realism.’” The second view, held by members of the art world in the United States, was that the mission for American art was to “serve as an inter- national language of understanding and healing in a world left scarred and divided by global war.” Krenn illustrates the tensions — and compromises — between these two groups in an illuminating and detailed treatment of some key episodes of the U.S. international art programs saga between 1945 and 1970. He begins with the “Advancing American Art” fiasco of 1946-1947, a modern art exhibit organized by the State Department that had to be abruptly terminated while on display in Czechoslovakia after the U.S. media, Congress and even President Truman himself severely criticized it (“the vaporings of half-baked, lazy D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 77 B O O K S Krenn’s subtle study explains why “arts diplomacy” plays such a minor part in our foreign policy today.