Work In Progress, Seminar Notes 1 

“In his text for Picasso. Fifty Years of His Art (1939), [Alfred H.] Barr drew strategic differences: he separated the artist from the man and Guernica from the rest of his work, from propaganda, and from the specific context in which it had been painted; he distinguished Picasso’s political position from the position of the Communist Party and turned him instead into a representative of the Allies and their policies.”

-"The Power of Interpretation (or How MoMA explained Guernica to its audience)" Andrea Giunta, 2017.

Gathering texts for a seminar that I've been co-developing, in this section I've focused on contextualizing the birth the American modern art museum and the politics of representation during the Jim Crow era leading up to the Cold War.

n.b. Guernica was painted in 1937. A year after the Communist Party's Popular Front Movement formed in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil war 1936-1939). Picasso didn't publicly join the French Communist Party until 1944. "Why I joined the Communist Party, Picasso 1944 " from ART THEORY /// TEXTS, WRITINGS & MANISTOS