Was Fashionable Artwork Actually a CIA Psy-Op?
Within the mid-twentieth century, fashionable artwork and design represented the liberalism, individualism, dynamic exercise, and artistic threat doable in a free society. Jackson Pollock’s gestural model, as an illustration, drew an efficient counterpoint to Nazi, after which Soviet, oppression. Modernism, in reality, turned a weapon of the Chilly Warfare. Each the State Division and the CIA supported exhibitions of American artwork all around the world.
The preeminent Cultural Chilly Warrior, Thomas W. Braden, who served as MoMA’s govt secretary from 1948-1949, later joined the CIA in 1950 to oversee its cultural actions. Braden noted, in a Saturday Evening Post article titled “I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral’” that American artwork “gained extra approval for the U.S. …than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower may have purchased with 100 speeches.”
The connection between Fashionable Artwork and American diplomacy started throughout WWII, when the Museum of Fashionable Artwork was mobilized for the warfare effort. MoMA was based in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. A decade later, her son Nelson Rockefeller turned president of the Museum. In 1940, whereas he was nonetheless President of MoMA, Rockefeller was appointed the Roosevelt Administration’s Coordinator of Inter-American affairs. He additionally served as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of State in Latin America.
The Museum adopted go well with. MoMA fulfilled 38 authorities contracts for cultural supplies through the Second World Warfare, and mounted 19 exhibitions of latest American portray for the Coordinator’s workplace, which had been exhibited all through Latin America. (This direct relationship between the avant-garde and the warfare effort was effectively suited: The time period avant-garde actually began as a French navy time period to explain vanguard troops advancing into battle.)
Within the battle for “hearts and minds,” fashionable artwork was significantly efficient. John Hay Whitney, each a president of MoMA and a member of the Whitney Household, which based the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, explained that artwork stood out as a line of nationwide protection, as a result of it may “educate, encourage, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free males.”
Whitney succeeded Rockefeller as President of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in January 1941, in order that Nelson may flip his whole consideration to his Coordinator duties. Underneath Whitney, MoMA served as “A Weapon of Nationwide Protection.” In accordance with a Museum press release dated February 28, 1941, MoMA would “inaugurate a brand new program to hurry the interchange of the artwork and tradition of this hemisphere amongst all of the twenty-one American republics.” The aim was “Pan-Americanism.” A “Touring Artwork Caravan” by means of Latin America “would do extra to convey us collectively as pals than ten years of business and political work.”
When the Warfare ended, Nelson Rockefeller returned to the Museum, and his Inter-American-Affairs staffers assumed duties for MoMA’s worldwide exhibition program: René d’Harnoncourt, who had headed Inter-American’s artwork division, turned the Museum’s vice chairman accountable for international actions. Fellow staffer Porter McCray turned the Director of the Museum’s Worldwide Program.
Fashionable artwork was so effectively aligned with American Chilly Warfare international coverage that McCray took a depart of absence from the Museum in 1951 to work on the Marshall Plan. In 1957, Whitney resigned his place as MoMA’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees to change into United States Ambassador to Nice Britain. Whitney remained a trustee of the Museum whereas he was Ambassador, and his successor as Chairman was… Nelson Rockefeller, who had served as Particular Assistant to President Eisenhower for International Affairs till 1955.
Regardless that Fashionable artwork and American diplomacy had been of a bit, Soviet propaganda asserted that the US was a “culturally barren” capitalist wasteland. To make the case for American cultural dynamism, the State Division in 1946 spent $49,000 to buy seventy-nine work immediately from American Fashionable artists, and mounted them in a touring exhibition known as “Advancing American Art.” That exhibition, which made stops in Europe and Latin America, included work from artists akin to Georgia O’Keeffe and Jacob Lawrence.
Regardless of optimistic opinions from Paris to Port au Prince, the exhibition stopped brief in Czechoslovakia in 1947, as a result of Individuals themselves had been indignant. Look Journal fired off an article entitled “Your Cash Purchased These Work.” The Look piece questioned why U.S. tax {dollars} had been being spent on such complicated items of artwork—and puzzled if these had been work even artwork. Harry Truman took one have a look at Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s portray Circus Woman Resting, which was included within the exhibit, and stated, “If that is artwork, I’m a Hottentot.”
In Congress, Republican Representatives John Taber of New York, and Fred Busbey of Illinois apprehensive that a few of the artists held Communist sympathies, or engaged in “Un-American Actions.”
The American public’s concern of the Red Menace introduced “Advancing American Artwork” residence early, however it was exactly as a result of Fashionable artwork was not universally fashionable, and was created by artists who brazenly disdained orthodoxy, that it was such an efficient software in showcasing the fruits of American cultural freedom to anybody trying in from overseas. President Truman personally considered Fashionable artwork, “merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy folks.” However he didn’t declare it degenerate and expel its practitioners to gulags in Siberia. Not solely that, summary expressionism particularly was a direct repudiation of Soviet Socialist Realism. Nelson Rockefeller preferred to name it “Free Enterprise Portray.”
In distinction to the Soviet Union’s “Well-liked Entrance,” the New Yorker journal splendidly, and completely, referred to the political function of American Modernism as “The Unpopular Entrance.” The very existence of American Fashionable Artwork proved to the world that its creators had been free to create, whether or not you preferred their work or not.
If Advancing American Artwork proved the nation’s artists had been free as a result of they may splatter as a lot paint as they needed, it additionally proved that Congress couldn’t all the time be induced to spend tax {dollars} supporting it. Braden later wrote, “the concept Congress would have accepted lots of our tasks was about as probably because the John Birch Society’s approving Medicare.” Clearly the State Division wasn’t the precise patron for Fashionable Artwork. Which brings us to the CIA.
In 1947, on the very second that the Advancing American Artwork present was being recalled, and the US Authorities was promoting its O’Keeffe’s for 50 bucks a-piece (all seventy-nine items within the present collectively introduced in $5,544), the CIA was being created. The CIA grew out of “Wild” Invoice Donovan’s Workplace of Strategic Providers (OSS), which was the U.S.’s wartime intelligence equipment. MoMA’s John Hay Whitney and Thomas W. Braden had each been members of the OSS.
Their fellow operatives included the poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, the historian and public mental Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the Hollywood director John Ford. By the point the CIA was codified in 1947, clandestine affairs had lengthy been the sector of America’s cultural elite. Now, as museum staffers like Braden joined, the cultural cognoscenti and the CIA fought the Cultural Chilly Warfare aspect by aspect, with the Whitney Belief performing as a funding conduit.
Talking of entrance organizations, in 1954, MoMA took over (from the State Division) the U.S. Pavilion on the Venice Biennale, in order that the U.S. may proceed to exhibit Fashionable artwork overseas with out appropriating public funds. (MoMA owned the U.S. pavilion at Venice from 1954 to 1962. It was the one nationwide pavilion on the present that was privately owned.)
Eisenhower made MoMA’s function as a authorities proxy clear in 1954, talking on the Museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. Eisenhower called Modern art a “Pillar of Liberty,” saying:
So long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will likely be wholesome controversy and progress in artwork. How completely different it’s in tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and instruments of the state; when artists change into the chief propagandists of a trigger, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed.
It was MoMA’s job, concurred United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, to reveal to the remainder of the world “each that we now have a cultural life and that we care about it.”
The CIA not solely helped finance MoMA’s worldwide exhibitions, it made cultural forays throughout Europe. In 1950, the Company created the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), headquartered in Paris. Although it seemed to be an “autonomous affiliation of artists, musicians and writers,” it was in reality a CIA funded venture to “propagate the virtues of western democratic tradition.” The CCF operated for 17 years, and, at its peak, “had places of work in thirty-five nations, employed dozens of personnel, printed over twenty status magazines, held artwork exhibitions, owned a information and options service, organized high-profile worldwide conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances.”
The CIA selected to headquarter the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, as a result of that metropolis had lengthy been the capital of European cultural life, and the CCF’s principal aim was to persuade European intellectuals, who would possibly in any other case be swayed by Soviet propaganda, which prompt that the U.S. was residence solely to capitalist philistines, that in reality the other was true: with Europe weakened by warfare, it was now the US that may defend and nurture the western cultural custom, within the face of Soviet dogma.
Braden, writing about his function within the CCF as director of the CIA’s cultural actions, explained in 1967, “in a lot of Europe within the 1950’s, socialists, individuals who known as themselves ‘left’—the very folks whom many Individuals thought no higher than Communists—had been the one individuals who gave a rattling about combating Communism.” When the CIA made its bid to the European intelligentsia, the Company was waging what Braden known as “the battle for Picasso’s thoughts,” through Jackson Pollock’s artwork.
Accordingly, the CIA bankrolled the Partisan Overview, which was the middle of the American non-Communist left, carrying monumental cultural status in each the U.S. and Europe due to its affiliation with writers like T.S. Eliot and George Orwell. Unsurprisingly, the editor of the Partisan Overview was the artwork critic Clement Greenberg, probably the most influential arbiter of taste, and the strongest proponent of summary expressionism in post-war New York.
The CCF labored with MoMA to mount 1952’s “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century” Pageant in Paris. The works for the present got here from MoMA’s Assortment, and “established the CCF as a significant presence in European cultural life,” because the historian Hugh Wilford wrote in his e book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Performed America.
Curator James Johnson Sweeney made certain to notice that the works included within the present “couldn’t have been created . . . by such totalitarian regimes as Nazi Germany or present-day Soviet Russia.” Distilling this message even additional in 1954, MoMA’s August Heckscher declared that the museum’s work was “associated to the central battle of the age—the battle of freedom in opposition to tyranny.”
Editors’ Be aware: An earlier model of this text misquoted President Truman. He thought of Fashionable artwork “merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy folks,” not “the vaporizings.”
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.