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  • davel@lemmy.mltoComics@lemmy.ml•Bourgeois art (starving artists not welcome)English
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    8 days ago

    JSTOR Daily: Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?

    In the mid-twentieth century, modern art and design represented the liberalism, individualism, dynamic activity, and creative risk possible in a free society. Jackson Pollock’s gestural style, for instance, drew an effective counterpoint to Nazi, and then Soviet, oppression. Modernism, in fact, became a weapon of the Cold War. Both the State Department and the CIA supported exhibitions of American art all over the world.

    The preeminent Cultural Cold Warrior, Thomas W. Braden, who served as MoMA’s executive secretary from 1948-1949, later joined the CIA in 1950 to supervise its cultural activities. Braden noted, in a Saturday Evening Post article titled “I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral’” that American art “won more acclaim for the U.S. …than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.”

    The CIA not only helped finance MoMA’s international exhibitions, it made cultural forays across Europe. In 1950, the Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), headquartered in Paris. Though it appeared to be an “autonomous association of artists, musicians and writers,” it was in fact a CIA funded project to “propagate the virtues of western democratic culture.” The CCF operated for 17 years, and, at its peak, “had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances.”

    The CIA chose to headquarter the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, because that city had long been the capital of European cultural life, and the CCF’s main goal was to convince European intellectuals, who might otherwise be swayed by Soviet propaganda, which suggested that the U.S. was home only to capitalist philistines, that in fact the opposite was true: with Europe weakened by war, it was now the United States that would protect and nurture the western cultural tradition, in the face of Soviet dogma.

    Braden, writing about his role in the CCF as director of the CIA’s cultural activities, explained in 1967, “in much of Europe in the 1950’s, socialists, people who called themselves ‘left’—the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists—were the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.” When the CIA made its bid to the European intelligentsia, the Agency was waging what Braden called “the battle for Picasso’s mind,” via Jackson Pollock’s art.

    Accordingly, the CIA bankrolled the Partisan Review, which was the center of the American non-Communist left, carrying enormous cultural prestige in both the U.S. and Europe because of its association with writers like T.S. Eliot and George Orwell. Unsurprisingly, the editor of the Partisan Review was the art critic Clement Greenberg, the most influential arbiter of taste, and the strongest proponent of abstract expressionism in post-war New York.

    The CCF worked with MoMA to mount 1952’s “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century” Festival in Paris. The works for the show came from MoMA’s Collection, and “established the CCF as a major presence in European cultural life,” as the historian Hugh Wilford wrote in his book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America.

    Curator James Johnson Sweeney made sure to note that the works included in the show “could not have been created . . . by such totalitarian regimes as Nazi Germany or present-day Soviet Russia.” Distilling this message even further in 1954, MoMA’s August Heckscher declared that the museum’s work was “related to the central struggle of the age—the struggle of freedom against tyranny.”