ABSTRACT
In Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, a stocktaking of Cold War historiography from its origins just after the Second World War, Odd Arne Westad marked the 1990s as seeing the emergence of a “new Cold War history.” As Westad anticipated back in 2000, over the past two decades a body of literature has grown up around Cold War culture in Europe, in which studies specifically on the visual arts have been appearing for the past eight to ten years. Art history’s entering into dialogue with the discipline of Cold War historical studies in a larger sense actually matters, because during the Cold War the fine arts were regularly used as a means of pursuing policy goals— and of shaping opinion— far beyond the confines of the art world. Proces-verbaux also capture the views of individuals and of groups and the decisions they made, and this brings us to collective biography.
