Defining geographies through international art exhibitions in Cold-War divided Europe (1955–1959)

This essay sheds light on selected intersecting plots and dots among large-scale perennial exhibitions of contemporary art, established or iterated in the second half of the Fifties in divided Europe. At the outbreak of the so-called “cultural Thaw”, the mid-Fifties inaugurated “a second wave of biennialization”, which throughout the Cold War “insisted upon a self-conscious, critical regionalism as the means for realigning cultural networks across geopolitical divides” (Green, Gardner, 2016, p. 83). In his history of “Exhibitions That Made Art History”, Bruce Altshuler sets by 1960 the outset of a new era when exhibitions began to be organized by professional exhibition makers, working as institutional or free-lance curators mainly for the worldwide emerging Biennials (Altshuler, 2013, 11). The present contribution will analyse within this crucial half-decade to what extent international art exhibitions sought to chart, by means of emulation, inclusion and exclusion, new art geographies across divided Europe.