View of the exhibition Guernica: Studies and Postscripts

This exhibition exemplifies how a particular institution produces a hegemonic narrative of modern art and represents an organising system (through its gallery displays and archive), promoting artworks apolitically. In this sense, and with regard to the archive, MoMA and Alfred H. Barr Jr. epitomised a Cold War “archive fever”. Consider the exhibition display and press release in the context of the cultural Cold War, contemporary artists’ protests against the US bombing of Vietnam, and Barr’s interventions in 1967 and in 1970 to thwart US-based artists’ attempts to petition Pablo Picasso to withdraw Guernica from MoMA as an act of protest against the war.