One has to grudgingly admit that the tendency these days is towards black and white, for or against, right or wrong, perfect or imperfect—if not in fashion, then at least in politics and cultural analysis. To devastating effect, some recent scholars have chosen to rewrite the history of post-war French culture in this simplistic manner filtered through their own contemporary political agendas. Rather than contribute to this trend by erasing subtle differences, my aim will be to flesh out the numerous cultural and political debates raging in the late 1940s and 1950s, and to emphasize their many interconnections. As this period was a crucial moment of national reconstruction and social reorganization, artistic production became the site of choice for ideological debates during the Cold War. Since the “Bomb” was unusable, art became one of the international weapons of choice.

By emphasizing rather than eliding the diversity of the French art scene, my talk will take issue with those accounts that reduce post-war France to an empty, lost, anti-Semitic, politically incorrect and regressive culture. Acknowledging that such propensities did exist, in particular in the art establishment, I will address the vitality of cultural forms produced at the time and ignored since as so many flawed and minor instances. I am thinking about movements (Surréalisme Révolutionnaire), as well as artists (Picasso, Wols, Bram Van Velde, Vieira Da Silva, even Hans Hartung among others.) My talk will try to specify aesthetic differences and locate them inside a diffracted political scene. The fact that even then some of those positions had been dismissed as irrelevant shows how difficult it was to gain visibility and power in a scene divided by strong ideological positions. This exciting visual debate was simultaneously a strength and a weakness during the black and white days of the Cold War. After the total victory of American Abstract Expressionism, American critics dismissed French art production as meaningless and hopeless. Confronted with the overpowering display of a monolithic and victorious Abstract Expressionist movement, the French art scene, in its diffracted richness seemed unable to project a unique voice or direction for the future as Paris had done in the past. French art historians themselves, confronted later with such an implosion, preferred not to revisit what they felt was a shameful moment.

My talk will try to reassess some of the arts and reframe those forgotten discussions by taking into account the many (usually dismissed) positions elaborated by artists and pugnacious groups like the “Internationale Situationniste.” I will also try to demonstrate, through all these debates, including those in the fashion industry and Jazz music, that France, through its art and cultural theories, was mounting a crucial critique of consumerist culture, a sophisticated critique of capitalism and of the spectacularization of culture, which would only be recognized and thoroughly appreciated during the 1980s. French cultural past might seem by some to be imperfect, but at least it was alive, complex, raucous and certainly not pre-packaged.