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'Modern Art'
Still A CIA Weapon

 By Jim Kirwan
1-9-14

 

Jackson Pollack Tate Modern


Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

For decades in art circles it was either a rumor or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.”

For that entire time and before, a number of artists were more than just “aware” of what was going on: We were routinely side-lined by this scam across the whole of the ‘art world’. This CIA effort reached into the gallery owners, the art-agents, and the general public along with the major museums that had a hammer-lock on everything that came under this artificial “heading”!

Actually the design of this planned-destruction included several other aspects that began what has today become the LBGT movement, the anti-heterosexual drive, as well as the whole plethora of cults which have always surrounded this undermining of the graphic arts, as well as popular music, poetry and writing in the U.S. and Europe.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.”

Actually that’s not true. The hand-picked artists that led this “innovation” were selected because of their nihilistic and anti-human bent, both in their work and in their lives. Those that were communists were given preference precisely because of that tendency and because of the distain their lives lent to the “edge” which the gallery owners and dealers wanted to use to “sell” the idea of their supposed genius at that supposedly enlightened time in history.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumored and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.”

The “artists” that were used in this way, had to know that they were being played. What most of them never bothered to look into; was the root of the cause they were making possible. That was primarily because of the notoriety because they did not “share” in the fabulous sums the “work” was bringing to the galleries, the dealers and the agents. It was enough for most of them that they were becoming household-words, along with having found a way to excuse whatever they did as “cutting-edge”.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organizations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.”

In the 1950’s it would have been ridiculous to try to proclaim that there even was a shadow-government, much less that such a stealth-force could or would even attempt to do something as outrageous as trying to manipulate the entire “ART World.” To have postulated such an idea would have condemned whoever tried to explain that as someone who was just crying about their own failure to be able to sell their work. No one looked at the leading figures in “the arts” as anything remotely like who they actually were: Except for the few of us that knew first hand just how filthy the entire scene had become.

The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organizations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidized the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring program. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.”

Personally I didn’t pick up on the multitude of direct-connections to Hollywood, until much later in the late 1960’s by which time everything between ‘artists’ designers and illustrators along with the entire film-industry which by then included all of television as well: Which had become seamless.

Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organized and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.

The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.”

And that was the beginning of the end for American Artists

The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.”

YES there were many casualties that never recovered from that attack!

"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognize the difference. It was recognized that Abstract Expression-ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylized and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.

What was done first was that the “critics” made the connection to the original-cave-paintings from 17,000 years before as being: Well ahead of their time”. From there it became a short hop to shapeless imagery, splashing paint at random and then challenging the public for not being sufficiently ‘astute’ to be able to discern the raw-unvarnished-truth in such works that were being proclaimed as genius throughout the galleries and the formal art world. Clearly for the ‘other-artists’ this was a case of recognizing that the Emperor had no clothes at all.

My case was different because I started from Goya’s Disaster’s of War which has always been totally political, so my view of the so-called “art-world” was always taken from the outside looking in instead of the other way round.

"In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticized that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."

Part of the reason that this government effort was so successful was because it became mixed-in with the almost regimented Russian classicism that found few takers in the West because of the outright-rigidity. But there were many in America that did not hold with either the Russian views at the time or with the barely disguised gay-world, which the Arts-in-America had become, by the late 1960’s.

In California by that time the entire “art-world” was dominated by the gay-community. This was so predominate at the time that when AIDS hit, it decimated the “art-world” because by that time over 85% of that entire area of life was already controlled-totally by that community.

To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered.”Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr. Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organization. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."

This was the "long leash". The centerpiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travelers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.”

For those of us not-included in this “new-world’ just trying to stay artistically alive became a duel worthy of a monumental task.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favorable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.”

By the time the CIA pulled away, all the components had been permanently installed so there could be no opportunity for a new renaissance that could have offered the needed recovery on the global art-scene; in fact just the reverse happened. Because of the overwhelming-success which they had already enjoyed the next level was begun.

They moved on from “the arts” to publishing across-the board, magazines, newspapers, books, prints, posters etc. so that there was virtually no market left for anyone who had not “joined” in the discretion of the arts, that with the purchase of almost every American publishing imprint, by international-publishing houses, which began with Bertelsmann, in Germany ­ there was virtually nowhere to go for anyone that had refused to join in this charade.

This organization put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).

Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organize and curate most of its important art shows.

The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Program. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

Now in his eighties, Mr. Braden lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.

"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."

It sounds GREAT until you look beyond the labels at what was being offered, versus what they had to murder to create it.

He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."

If this meant playing pope to this century's Michelangelo’s, well, all the better: "It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognize art and to support it," Mr. Braden said. "And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilization has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn't been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn't have had the art."

So true, what we would have had would have been a far more humanistic connection between art and the people of the world that loved it! That’s why the Rockefellers stepped in

To kill it before it could ever be born.

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.

But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.”

Yes please; be sure to look at who owns what today, and be sure to mark them well!

* The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first program in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.

Covert Operation

In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London.

The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds.

So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device."

Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.” (1)

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net


1) Modern art was CIA Weapon

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html


 

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