“With thirty-five contributions, the present volume gathers an unusually high number of texts. Most of them are case studies on a single artist, image, exhibition, meeting, etc. From the outset, the project was conceived as a kaleidoscopic research work… It reflects the diversity of the academic community writing on art history across present-day Europe. And it gives a better picture of the diversity of exchanges, thanks to substantial and contextualized analysis… We hope that the perspectives highlighted here contribute to a better understanding of the importance of communist Europe in the political economy of art during the second half of the twentieth century. And we hope to continue reflecting on the links between ideology and art. Academic works on the capitalist side have shown the relevance of a precise analysis of universalizing ideology. To insist on the influence of ideology and to understand its declinations does not impoverish the analysis of works of art; on the contrary, it enriches such an analysis. The issue for us is neither to rehabilitate nor to define an artistic quality since that would lead to search beyond ideology; on the contrary, we hope to offer a better understanding of ideologies, taking into consideration their ambitions, their contradictions, and their concrete applications,” editors Jerome Bazin, associate professor in history of art and history at the University of Paris-Est, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, senior researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and Piotr Piotrowski (d. 2015), late professor of art history at Adam Mickiewicz University, say in the Introduction.
