Greg Barnhisel's new book analyses a familiar topic: how artists, writers and performers supported narratives about the superiority of American culture and civilization in the context of the Cold War. The novelty of Barnhisel's study lies in its focus on the reconfiguration of modernism as an artistic movement in the process. How could something that began as an irreverent assault on bourgeois sensibilities end up as a “style” that was sold to middlebrow Americans and foreign audiences as an emblem of Western freedom? Barnhisel sets out to answer this question in six engagingly written chapters. He argues that modernism, with its emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, was peculiarly suited to reassuring Americans that theirs was a society composed of free, innovative individuals as opposed to the stifling socialist realism of the Soviet sphere. Modernism was also useful when it came to convincing European elites of the value of American culture. A host of different government agencies, front organizations, foundations and enterprising individuals fleshed out what Cold War modernism meant across the visual arts, broadcasting and publishing. The latter forms the main focus of the study with a chapter each on book programmes, the influential magazine Encounter (1953–91) and the short-lived journal Perspectives USA (1952–56).

During the period under consideration, the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, the height of modernism as an artistic movement had passed. According to Barnhisel, the Cold War gave it the final blow as it dispensed with modernism's more radical politics in favour of “a celebration of the virtues of freedom and the assertion that the individual is sovereign.” What remained was a repertoire of formal techniques that were “largely emptied of content” (3). Nonetheless, modernism in its various guises turned out to be a somewhat unwieldy weapon in the hands of State Department officials and self-appointed cultural diplomats.

Time and again the Cold War modernist project was hampered by anticommunists who policed what the government agencies pushed on foreign audiences as the prime products of American culture. As is well known, McCarthyites toured US-sponsored reading rooms in Europe to reveal what they regarded as pro-communist material on the shelves. This in turn made administrators wary of including experimental literature in their book and translation programmes. The State Department was less wary of recruiting a perpetually tipsy William Faulkner for official trips abroad in the mid-1950s. Faulkner had stressed the importance of artistic individualism in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech. He was a favourite of US embassy officials who liked his pithy statements on American freedom and Soviet aggression. Whether foreign audiences in Latin America, Asia and Europe uncritically accepted such rhetoric is not a question that can be answered conclusively with Barnhisel's source base. Also, one wonders to what extent the international institution of the Nobel Prize served to validate Faulkner as a cultural ambassador both in the State Department and abroad. If Cold War modernism relied on being perceived as “fundamentally international” (135), connecting to the recognized institutions of a wider global cultural internationalism must have mattered a great deal.

No other magazine embodied this ambition as much as Encounter, which modelled itself on the tradition of modernist “little magazines.” Barnhisel's detailed discussion of Encounter’s content is a valuable complement to other accounts which have emphasized the covert CIA funding and complex personal politics behind the magazine. Again, though, an ambivalent relationship with modernism emerges. Encounter’s editors constantly harked back to modernism's glory days of the 1910s and 1920s and found contemporary works wanting, tainted by mass culture. This enabled Encounter to rewrite the modernist tradition, claiming for it the values of freedom and individualism, but it also hitched the magazine's fortunes to an artistic movement that was out of time.

Was modernism really as crucial a weapon in the Cold War as Barnhisel suggests? If book programmes treated “modernism either as a variant of regionalism or as a kind of inexplicably prestigious coterie taste” (98), they probably failed to exploit its propaganda potential. Similarly, Voice of America (VOA), the US Information Agency's broadcasting arm, only gave “relatively scanty coverage” to modernism (247). To some extent that may have been the point: easily digestible summaries of prestigious experimental art were exactly what American middlebrow audiences demanded in their quest for cultural capital. But then VOA was broadcasting not to American consumers but to foreigners in strategic regions of the globe. Understandably, given the scope and diversity of this audience, we hear relatively little about how receptive it was to the various projects that can be subsumed under Cold War modernism. The main contribution of this study remains a compelling exploration of the kinds of propaganda Americans themselves found acceptable.