Randolph Bell, of Floating Films, created a video exclusively for WSJ. magazine chronicling the American Exposition and the Moscow Kitchen Debates.
This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, a golden moment in Cold War one-upsmanship and cultural thaw. Most people know about the so-called “Kitchen Debate,” the heated exchange between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that took place in a model kitchen on the opening day of the fair. But most don’t have a clue of where or why it happened.
The exhibition ran from July 25 to September 4 in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park and it was packed every day with more than 50,000 wide-eyed Russian citizens. Jack Masey of the USIA was in charge of design and construction and it was Masey who brought in some of America’s most radical and avant-garde talents, including Buckminster Fuller, who designed a soaring geodesic dome that stood as a kind of ceremonial gateway and logo to the fair. (It was a 200-foot Kaiser aluminum dome with a gold anodized surface.) Masey, who had a good deal of experience organizing international trade fairs, managed to quietly work around the more conservative idealogues within the Eisenhower administration who would have preferred tributes to Abraham Lincoln and John Deere tractors.
George Nelson was invited to design the overall exhibition including the so-called “jungle gym,” an ingenious gridlike structure that served as a sprawling armature for all of the various products on display from high art to children’s toys and lady’s undergarments. (Plastic Tupperware bowls were given out as gifts—these were especially prized by Russian visitors to the fair.) It was all considered a soft but very real threat to Soviet security and was, in some ways, more dangerous than all those intercontinental missiles pointed at Moscow as the exhibition expressed the crazy variety, abundance and exuberance of the modern American marketplace. The fair was said to have been infiltrated by hundreds of KGB agents who were there to contain the brainwashing effects of American-style capitalism. (Many arrests were made for trumped-up and insignificant reasons.) Nelson also designed several freestanding clusters of fiber-glass parasols that served as protective canopies for a number of displays, including the daily fashion show that was particularly mobbed as young American volunteers paraded along the platforms modeling the latest sportswear fashions. There was also a beauty pavilion in which Russian women were able to get their hair, manicures and makeup done by Helena Rubenstein specialists. Rubenstein herself was on hand to show how to put it all together.
An exhibition of new American painting created a great deal of friction and not just among Soviet critics who felt the work was appalling. There were ruffled feathers within the U.S. State Department among those who felt that America was being misrepresented by the paint splatters and colorful smears of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Philip Guston. They would have preferred Norman Rockwell’s depictions of wholesome American values. An outdoor sculpture garden also raised hackles with cutting-edge work by Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, José De Rivera and Jacques Lipchitz. Two American architects, Peter Blake and Julian Neski, curated a selection of the best and boldest in new architecture with projects by Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Craig Ellwood, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei and Eero Saarinen, among others. There was also a separate building on the fairgrounds that housed the “Family of Man” photography exhibition that had previously caused a sensation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; perhaps the most radical display of all was “Glimpses of the U.S.A,” the multimedia extravaganza designed by Charles and Ray Eames that was mounted on giant screens hung from the ceiling of Bucky Fuller’s golden dome. The idea was to create a completely three-dimensional audiovisual immersion into the American way of life, depicting the country’s broad cultural mix and open-minded pluralism. The dome and the Eames’ screens were meant to constitute a kind of “information machine” and provide a subliminal introduction to the entire fair. It was a heady cross-fertilization of imagery projected onto seven 20-by-30-foot screens and depicting every aspect of a week in the life of America, including highways, factories, skyscrapers, supermarkets, suburban housing, etc. Many Soviet citizens were said to have been overwhelmed by the intoxicating effects of the dome and the multiple screens and some were even brought to tears when the screens’ final sequence showed a bunch of forget-me-not flowers, a universal symbol of friendship. (The musical score was composed by Elmer Bernstein.) It was an early foreshadowing of a whole multimedia culture that was yet to come.
Meanwhile, back in New York City, the Soviets were mounting their own version of a cultural trade fair at the old Convention Center on Columbus Circle. Dubbed the “Red Fair” by local newspapers, it included models of the Sputnik satellite and exhibits about nuclear icebreaker ships, displays about collective farming, Chaika car manufacturing, Soviet-made combine harvesters, medical research, radio telescopes, workers housing, etc., but had none of the sexy consumer-friendly buzz of the American Fair in Moscow.
Alastair Gordon is a contributing editor for WSJ. magazine. For more Wall to Wall, read his review of the Frank Lloyd Wright show at the Guggenheim Museum, the Guggenheim’s “Design It” competition, Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses, and An Ode to a Beach House.
For more from Alastair Gordon, read California Grass from WSJ.’s May issue.
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