The art that came in from the cold: Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, 1950--1968

During the cold war, photography was both a trusted evidentiary source and a hidden form of abstraction. The slippery relationship between the irrational and the rational, between ideological rhetoric and lived experience, was only a blur away. This dissertation identifies the photographic appropriation in global forms of pop art as a product of the conflict's visual and ideological contradictions. I focus on two artists trained in opposing cold war camps during the 1950s: Andy Warhol was a commercial artist and Gerhard Richter was a socialist realist wall painter. Throughout their respective work, each came to understand the deep, structural similarities between the visual cultures of capitalism and socialism, especially how both sides needed and yet feared the mutability of the photograph. When cold war visual culture is considered as a continuous field, Warhol's and Richter's appropriated paintings intervene between the conflict's political and artistic poles, demonstrating the ambiguity inherent in any act of interpretation, whether visual, historical, or ideological. These painted explorations into the visual culture of the cold war expose its allegorical impulse: the attempt and subsequent failure to give coherent form and meaning to a conflict dependent on images. Not only is this dissertation the first to consider either Warhol or Richter in terms of the cold war---it also offers a new interpretative model for art during the conflict, one that dismantles traditional debates about figuration and abstraction through a consideration of photography.