Reception of the Baroque in US university textbooks in art history

The call for papers at the conference "Baroque for a wide public," held at the Institute for Art and Visual History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in June 2015 noted that histories of art and artists had found a mass public thanks to publications, broadcasts, films, and photography exhibitions. These media reveal attitudes about the arts within the competing political systems in Western and Eastern Europe during the second half of the 20th century. The wide public, however, was not just European. It included American viewers of television programs and films, increasing numbers of museum visitors, and millions of undergraduates who were introduced to art history through survey texts embracing arts from prehistory through the year prior to publication. The present essay attempts to explain why the American approach to art history of the Baroque era excluded the art history of Eastern Europe. [Publication Abstract]