ABSTRACT
During the Cold War period Czechoslovak audiences rarely came into direct contact with modern art from the USA. Before discussing the Czechoslovak reception of US art through exhibitions and publications between 1945 and 1990 in detail, it is important to understand how Czechoslovak information about and knowledge of American art depended on state politics. The first exhibition that brought American art to Czechoslovak audiences was Advancing American Art Organized by the US State Department and its federal agency USIA, it was one of several traveling exhibitions hosted by state institutions as part of “inter-state cultural agreements”. Undoubtedly, the broader program of connecting art with life and having intermedia overlaps in art resonated in the circles of Czechoslovak alternative culture, especially in the period of the Prague Spring. To understand how contemporary American art was perceived and transposed to the circumstances of socialist culture, it is important to be aware that this culture was far from being homogeneous.
