Breathless Days, 1959-1960

Taking 1959–1960 as a pivotal cultural and political moment, the contributors to Breathless Days reframe postwar Western art history, examining the aesthetic and ideological alliances and tensions in art throughout Western Europe and the Americas. The collection provides a heterogeneous account of the intersections of the fine art world with literature, jazz, film, and theater in New York, Paris, Milan, Brazil, and Cuba. This reveals the knotty and multilayered connections among these divergent artistic milieus. Whether discussing Duchamp’s With My Tongue in My Cheek, Brazilian abstraction, post-revolutionary Cuban art, Jean Tinguely’s self-destroying machines, or Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, the contributors show this brief period to be a key to the cultural and political development of Western Europe and the Americas during the Cold War.

Serge Guilbaut is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of British Columbia and the author and editor of several books, including How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War.

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John O'Brian is Professor of Art History and Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia and the author and editor of several books, most recently, Camera Atomica.