Les échanges artistiques entre la France et les États-Unis, 1950-1968

In the last two and a half decades, there has been a dramatic increase in scholarship about artistic exchanges between France and the United States during the first two decades of the Cold War. Part of this increase is due to the distance that the passage of time provides and which historical study requires - scholars in the 1980s increasingly began to consider the 1950s worthy of research. But many scholars also were drawn to the topic by figures like Serge Guilbaut, who broke free of formalist readings and anecdotal histories by demonstrating the complex ways in which transatlantic artistic relationships were implicated in Cold War ideology. This essay discusses the many subsequent scholarly works that have been written about Franco-American artistic exchanges in the decades after World War Two, with attention to such topics as: American expatriates in Paris, the influence of titanic figures from France (such as Matisse, Dubuffet and Duchamp) on American art, and the tendency of recent exhibitions to differentiate between French and American artists from this period according to their respective political radicality or complicity.