Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s

Focusing on international trade fairs and world's fairs of the Cold War years, Haddow recounts how exhibits with slogans such as ""Industry in the Service of Mankind"" and ""People's Capitalism"" were meant to seduce European audiences to the American way of life. Under the direction of the Eisenhower administration, and with the financial assistance of the advertising and business communities, American consumer culture was sent abroad as a ""silent ambassador for democratic ideals."" Haddow's background as an art historian is apparent and welcome in the attention he pays to the artists and architects involved in the actual design and production of the exhibits. Especially strong is the lengthy section on the 1958 Brussels World's Fair where the rigid ideological demands of the U.S. department of state (the overseeing governmental agency) often clashed with the modernist aesthetic of the architect Edward Durell Stone, whose free-flowing circular American pavilion owed a debt to Frank Lloyd Wright, and to the educational theories of Victor D'Amico, a director at the Museum of Modern Art. Revealing more of the ideological battles played out at the fair is the history of ""Unfinished Work,"" an exhibit that offered an honest, if naively optimistic, look at the problems of race and poverty in America--the exhibit was ultimately replaced by one on public health issues. By comparison, the section on the Krushchev-Nixon kitchen debate seems scant but as Haddow points out, after Brussels the Eisenhower administration took ""fewer risks"" in Moscow where ""commercial products, instead of radical ideals, would be the featured performers."" Though Haddow includes some photographs (26), the text--and the price--begs for more. (May)