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The Competition for a Monument to "The Unknown Political Prisoner"

Published in Tate Britain’s and Yale’s three-volume History of British Art, the chapter focuses on the role of British sculptors in a major international sculpture competition organised by the London ICA in 1953, providing an instructive case-study in how British art and art institutions were implicated in the ideological and propaganda struggles of the early Cold War. The chapter was commissioned by the editor, Dr Chris Stephens (Head of Displays and Curator of Modern Art at Tate Britain), as a result of the author’s international reputation in this field of research.

As the first major study published for over two decades of late 19th and 20th century British art, this prestigious and widely read book brings an innovative approach to the subject, using thematic overviews and detailed case-studies written by leading experts in the field. This particular chapter draws on the author’s doctoral research, aspects of which have previously been published in peer-reviewed academic journals and cited by British, French, German, Polish and US scholars.

The chapter demonstrates that the competition, in which many British participants won major prizes, was covertly funded by the US government, probably through the CIA, as a weapon of anti-Communist propaganda. Challenging comparable writings by British and US scholars on the propaganda uses of American expressionist painting in the Cold War, this chapter argues that more extreme forms of modernist art were not compatible with the ideological beliefs of the American internationalist liberals who backed the competition, since they withdrew their support after the Grand Prize was awarded to an ‘ultra-modern’ British design.

The high standard of scholarship is based on research undertaken in the Tate Gallery Archive, MoMA Archive and Whitney Corporation archive (New York), and on the personal papers of, and interviews with, sculptors, critics, and former ICA staff and CIA officers.