What better time to rediscover the cultural classics of the Cold War?

All right, I hear you. The new Ipcress File on ITV is just fine. Though why anyone, ever, wants to remake a film that stars Michael Caine is beyond me. Just leave them alone. But what the series does usefully is plug us back into the Cold War, a period that obviously resonates just now.

And the old Cold War was curiously productive, artistically speaking. Spy movies, like The Ipcress File, with their uncertainty about who is hero and who is villain, were just one element. The possibility that the confrontation between East and West could result in mutual nuclear annihilation created an atmosphere that was oddly, if bleakly, creative.

There’s a big new exhibition in London’s Barbican Centre right now – Postwar Modern, 19451965 – which, in work after work, sums up the sense of alienation after the Second World War, combined with a paranoid sense that worse might follow. It kicks off with a disturbing giant black dot by John Latham from 1961, called Full Stop, which sprays beyond its outline; suggestive of some kind of annihilation. A nuclear bomb?

Maybe, for as Frank Auerbach, who is in the show too, observed: “I don’t think I can exaggerate the degree to which, consciously or unconsciously, the atom bomb hovered over all our heads. Very few of us thought that we had many years to live … So what are you going to do? You live in the moment and you try to construct your own framework to justify this brief and instinctive existence.” It turned out that fear was a remarkable spur to creativity.

The artist who perhaps reflected the atmosphere best during the Cold War was Francis Bacon; even though he couldn’t care less about politics he managed to intuit and express a pervasive sense of alienation. All those grotesques, those screaming heads, the figures disappearing into nothingness; they were the product of a time, not just of a painter.

You’d have thought that when the West had an identifiable antagonist in the Soviet Union and China it would have given rise to an agreeable sense of moral certainty. Nope. Many novels and films reflected a disturbing uncertainty. John le Carre never glamourised the Soviets, but his best, Cold War novels suggest that he didn’t think much of Britain either. Graham Greene, who was involved in the intelligence world during the war, specialised in moral ambiguity. One of the best of those novels, The Human Factor, is as much about disenchantment with Britain as with the pull of communism.

The Bond novels and films are another matter, but they only really made sense in an atmosphere where mutual East-west destruction was a possibility, though Smersh, the Soviet counterespionage agency was trumped for villainy by the purely evil international criminal organisation, Spectre. In fact, Len Deighton, who was fired from From Russia With Love, wrote The Ipcress File on which the Michael Caine film was based to give us a working-class spy hero instead of the public school Bond.

The Cold War was grim, but it was culturally productive. Will its return – if that’s where we are – spur artistic creativity? Our sense of our identity, our moral certainties are far less clear cut now than they were even then. Maybe our present anxieties will give rise to new creativity. Looking round at our contemporary artists and novelists, they could do with inspiration.