The Group of Seven in the USSR: Cold War Cultural Diplomacy and the Art of Prestige

In 1977, Canada sent The Group of Seven: Canadian Landscape Painters to the Soviet Union in what it hoped would be an exchange under the 1971 Canada–USSR General Exchanges Agreement. This article argues that this moment consolidated the Group of Seven’s identification with Canada’s national brand. It came as the resolution of Canada’s efforts to secure a showing for the Group’s work in the Soviet Union dating back to the early 1960s and the National Gallery of Canada’s then decades-long practice of using international exhibitions to promote the Group of Seven as Canada’s national school of art. The authors foreground the Group of Seven show in an exhibition history currently obscured by scholarly focus on the Cold War’s superpower cultural exchanges and the rise of blockbuster exhibitions—rock-star shows of “masterpieces,” “masterworks,” and “treasures” that drew mass audiences and significant revenue to the museum sector. In this history, the Canadian show, modest by comparison, was nevertheless of a type that included such extravaganzas. Ranging in scale and cultural power, exhibitions of this type were related through their circulation as a function of cultural diplomacy; specifically, the formal intergovernmental agreements on general cultural co-operation and exchange that proliferated in the third quarter of the twentieth century as culture assumed an increasingly important role in the conduct of interstate relations. In the otherwise bi-power/bipolar focused scholarship on the cultural Cold War, this article provides a much-needed case study of a middle power’s instrumentalization of the art exhibition in the Cold War competition for national prestige.