CIA-Art

THE VAPORS OF UNDER-EDUCATED LAZY The story begins in 1946, when the US Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs purchased 79 paintings by American modern artists for $50,000. The investment was strictly political and linked to the new goals of US cultural policy. The aim was to promote a "new, better" image of the United States to the world; from now on, it would be associated not only with Westerns, chewing gum, and the assembly line production of cars at the Ford factory, but also with freedom in the broadest sense, including freedom of artistic expression. The exhibition "Advancing American Art" was shown in Paris and Prague, from where it was planned to travel to Budapest and later Warsaw. These plans were thwarted by a protest from the American Artists Professional League, a trade association of American artists, who claimed that the exhibition presented American art in a negative light and even ridiculed it. At the same time, a congressman revealed that most of the artists on display were on the "Un-American Activities List" and had ties to the Communist Party. George Marschall (the creator of the famous Plan) asked directly, "Why is the state spending taxpayers' money on art that supports communism?" The final nail in the coffin came from President Truman, who figuratively called the abstractionist exhibition "the fumes of uneducated lazy people." As a result, the exhibition was pulled first from the gallery walls, then from overseas, and the paintings were auctioned off at a significant loss (the total price for all the works was $5,500). It seemed that the idea of ​​state subsidizing modern art was doomed for a long time.

Interestingly, Salvador Dali himself noted the exhibition in question in his ephemeral periodical "Dali News." In his article "Truman, Marshall, Picasso, and Dali Announce Art Crisis and Revolt," he reviewed the event in his own unique way: "News from New York – President Truman declared: 'I don't like paintings that resemble eggs thrown on canvas!' General Marshall has canceled an exhibition of contemporary painting, already paid for with taxpayer money, which was intended to showcase the art of American artists abroad." WAS JACKSON POLLOCK A SECRET WEAPON? Yet the idea was soon to resurface. This happened when modern painting was deemed by CIA cultural advisors to be a psychological weapon in the then-emerging Cold War. This occurred when the Soviet authorities began to suppress modern art (which had flourished in post-revolutionary Russia) and recognized "socialist realism" as the only valid and official state art, expressing the progressive aspirations of the working people of cities and countryside. From then on, rigid formal rules were imposed on artists in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, and their works were subjected to ideologization and intrusive didacticism. In the West, these canons of socialist realism were unpalatable even to the most left-leaning intellectuals and the communist-leaning artists and students surrounding them. Propaganda experts from the American intelligence services decided to exploit this very circumstance. The idea was to contrast the ossified socialist realist art with the spontaneous, uninhibited, and anarchic creativity of the free world. This offered a chance that Western elites, while remaining left-wing, would not become openly pro-Soviet, a development that the cultural Cold War experts at the CIA were particularly keen to avoid. The second, equally important target of this large-scale operation were the oppressed nations of the Eastern Bloc. That's why art critic Luis Menand rhetorically asked in the New Yorker (September 17, 2005): "Was Jackson Pollock a weapon used in the Cold War?"

A BY-PRODUCT OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION In 1950, an institution called the Congress for Cultural Freedom was founded in West Berlin, led by Michael Josselson. The Congress published 20 journals in various languages, held exhibitions and conferences, awarded prizes, and had offices in 35 countries. The first high-profile event organized by Josselson in Paris was the "Masterpieces of the 20th Century" festival. Serge Guilbaut in his book "How New York Stole the Idea of ​​Modern Art" (1983) and Frances Stonor Saunders in "The Cultural Cold War" (1999) note that abstract painting proved to be an ideal propaganda tool in the clash between West and East. Unlike the art of the Soviet Union, it was neither representational nor didactic. It was "pure painting," where only experimentation, form, color, and emotion mattered. It gave the artists who created it complete freedom, and precisely this "individual freedom" was to be the flagship export of American democracy. The hidden message conveyed by the abstractionists' exhibitions was: look and admire—individualism and unrestricted freedom of expression flourish in America. We live in a free country! We respect the "First Amendment" without reservation. The art tax deduction system concealed the actual financing of exhibitions and the accompanying promotional, publishing, and opinion-forming activities. Thanks to the work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the exhibition "Modern Art in the USA," sent to Vienna in 1956, was later unveiled in Belgrade—the only capital behind the Iron Curtain to receive permission for such a presentation. (As Walter Benjamin writes in his essay "The Making of Americans," this was accomplished with the outstanding support of another government agency, the United States Information Service (USIS)). A true masterpiece of the Central Intelligence Agency was the opening of the "American National Exhibition" at the very height of the Cold War—in 1959, and in the very lion's den—Moscow. During this show, thousands of Russians were able to become acquainted with American Abstract Expressionism. From then on, jeans, Coca-Cola, and jazz—those American fetishes that embodied freedom for the oppressed citizens of the Eastern Bloc, dressed in "pants as gloomy as sewer pipes," drinking kvass, and listening to mass chants—were joined by abstract painting.

BENEFITS FROM ROTTEN ART The collusion between the CIA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which implemented MoMA's program in Europe) is confirmed by the personal ties of prominent modern art buyers to the intelligence services. Nelson Rockefeller (MoMA's president in the 1950s) and his family have always had ties to the CIA. Thomas Braden, the man who managed cultural affairs at the CIA, was an early member of MoMA's board. The most vocal proponents of abstract expressionism, art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (who coined the term "action painting"), were leftists (though not communists), and the CIA needed them for its games and implicitly (sometimes even without the CIA's knowledge) supported them. Alfred Barr, the first director of MoMA, another CIA-funded figure, labored diligently to create a media profile for American abstractionists. In his essay "Is Modern Art Communist?", he cleverly defended modernism with an oblique argument: since Hitler and Stalin opposed modernism as "degenerate" and "rotten," it follows that it is valuable. Barr also wrote a letter to newspaper magnate Henry Luce, publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, suggesting he change his attitude toward this painting, using the same argument: that if totalitarian regimes so harshly criticize abstract art, it was the duty of the free media to defend it. Luce yielded and published an article about Pollock in Life, later promoting him as a hero of American culture. This alliance of financial power and media power gave a whole host of artists, skilled at intellectual maneuvering but not particularly gifted visually, a boost and, taking advantage of the favorable atmosphere, began to pursue brilliant, albeit highly inflated, careers. At the same time, many cultural consumers, disoriented and fearful of being perceived as backward, believed in the snares of criticism and began to value abstract art far more highly than it truly deserved (in the 1960s, abstraction was even considered the culmination of the evolution of the visual arts). The Congress for Cultural Freedom ended abruptly and unexpectedly when information about the active role played by CIA agents leaked to the American press in 1967. Its spiritual legacy, however, survived quite well. It managed to replicate and perpetuate itself in media coverage, intellectual rhetoric, and the educational programs of art schools. Critics around the world began repeating the opinions of Barr, Greenberg, and Rosenberg in their native languages. Recognizing the innovation and originality in works that the average person saw nothing of, they were able to transform from rank-and-file reviewers into priests of higher initiation. And, incidentally, they became salesmen of modern art for a whole host of gullible collectors. Art dealers, in turn, quickly realized the lucrative business of promoting new art and speculatively inflating prices. Behind the popularity and prestige of modern art lies a conspiracy of the Central Intelligence Agency – first, the rejection of modernism by totalitarian systems, and later, the Cold War propaganda games of American intelligence agencies, became one of the driving forces behind modernism's unexpected success. This, at least in part, explains why modern art so often seems like a cruel joke.