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Strong assertions have been made about the internationalization of American art as an instrument of cultural imperialism, enabled by the intervention of political agencies in the US that used the aesthetic openness represented by American art to reinforce notions of American/capitalist “freedom” within Cold War politics. This session will shift attention away from US political intentionality to the European experience of American art. The reception of American art in West-Germany, France, and Britain is fairly well known, but how might our understanding of the rise of US art in Europe change when considering hitherto neglected regions in Eastern/Southern Europe? How did art professionals/artists deal with the cultural differences and even untranslatability that emerged in their interactions with American art? Focusing on case studies drawn from examples in the USSR, GDR, Spain, and Italy, this session foregrounds the diverging ideological, aesthetic, and pragmatic issues that impacted on the cultural translation of American art in these contrasting contexts. Modes of encounter varied, from secretly reading and translating texts about American art at one extreme, to seeing US art in New York at the other. As the result, the assimilation of the “other” varied. GDR critics debated American and Socialist art to define what “modern/contemporary” art meant. In Francoist Spain, Equipo Crónica found a “third way” when repurposing Pop Art for a critique of their time. Overall, the notion of a homogenous discourse on US art, the concept of “influence,” and the cliché of American art as “universal” are called into question.