The Emperor's New Art: The CIA as Art Patron
Arther Miller
By LENNI BRENNER
Who Paid The Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
by Frances Stonor Saunders (London: Granta Books)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565846648/counterpunchmaga
Francis Stonor Saunders' book is a major contribution to knowledge of
the inner workings of the CIA in its first two decades. Versed in the
scholarly literature, she interviewed surviving CIA figures and their
collaborators in the arts and sciences.
Saunders describes the initial cadre, vets of the OSS, the Office of
Strategic Services, spies in "the last good war." Franklin Roosevelt
put 144,000 innocent Japanese-American citizens into concentration
camps, but the "Oh So Social," lead by wealthy cultured WASP Ivy
Leaguers, had no difficulty convincing themselves that America's
capitalist democracy, racism, corruption and all, was morally and
intellectually superior to the Fuhrer-staat. When Joseph Stalin's
bureaucratic dictatorship over the proletariat became Wall Street's
rival for world hegemony, one agent again saw them as Yankee
capitalism's "order of Knights Templars."
They came out of WW II with an enormous industrial plant on a planet
in ruins. Life magazine publisher Henry Luce declared that the 20th
century "must ... become an American century." But Wall Street had to
confront its wartime Soviet ally in 4-power occupied Berlin.
They didn't argue with Nazism, they fought it. However Communism
appealed to values held by renowned cultural figures. Pablo Picasso
and others joined their Communist Party because it led the
underground. The French and Italian CPs grew to massive proportions.
Unless they acted rationally, much of western Europe could fall.
The ideological war could only be waged effectively by ex-lefts who
knew the theories and jargon of these milieus. The ones to do it were
Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown of the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union, with extensive ties to Europe's Social Democrats.
The crucial secret collaboration of the Jewish-led ILGWU with the
intelligence apparatus is a prime illustration of the post-Holocaust
full admission of Jews into America's ruling circles. The public sign
was constant official speechifying about "the Judeo-Christian way of
life," a scholarly phrase pre-war liberals had taken up against
Hitler. Now Washington was guarding invented in America
Judeo-Christiandom, night and day, against atheist Communism.
Unfortunately, God didn't play well with Europe's left. To win them to
"the free world," Washington needed propaganda about free trade unions
and vanguard art. But you couldn't do that openly without outraging
domestic McCarthyites, artistically Norman Rockwell fans. Hence the
covert action.
Saunders' book deals with the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom,
particularly its political-literary contingent. However her "Yanqui
Doodles" chapter on CIA patronage of Abstract-Expressionism is its
high point.
Tom Braden, the retired International Operations Department director,
authored "I'm glad the CIA's Immoral," an outraged 5/20/67 Saturday
Evening Post answer to attacks, which dealt with funding European
exhibits for artists, anathema to Congress because of past left ties.
In 1936, Jackson Pollock studied under David Siqueiros, the Mexican
Stalinist muralist who later tried to assassinate Leon Trotsky. There
is a photo of Pollock posing by a 30s CP May Day float. True, cold war
Pollock was anti-red, but he had taken to dribbling red paint off a
stick onto a canvas on the floor. Unfortunately, Harry Truman hated
"lazy, nutty moderns."
Braden showed more understanding. The new 'Rome' needed a
'sophisticated' art to flaunt before the decadent 'Greeks' of
modernist Europe. Happily, Manhattan's Cedar Tavern art set had its
theorist. Nation critic Clement Greenberg, formerly close to
Trotskyism, explained why Pollock was "the greatest American painter
of the 20th century."
According to Greenberg, Picasso, in successfully distorting reality,
showed that a canvas had always been a flat surface, and that three
dimensional images were arbitrary intrusions on it. Once perspective
was excluded, painting logically had to stop depicting anything
outside that two-dimensional field. Unfortunately Picasso never
abandoned representation. The surrealists were even worse since, let's
be honest, a limp watch is a watch. "It makes no difference that the
creatures, anatomies, substances, landscapes, or juxtapositions limned
by the Surrealist violates the laws of probability: they do not
violate the modalities of three-dimensional vision - to which painting
can now conform only by methods that have become academic."
Even Wassily Kandinsky was retrograde. "His best work remains those
paintings in fluid contour and gauzy color that he executed between
1909 or so and the early twenties.... The abstract ... paintings he
turned out from the middle twenties represent a misconception ... of
the very art of putting paint on canvas.... (H)e came to conceive of
the picture uberhaupt as an aggregate of discrete shapes.... Kandinsky
would go on to allude to illusionistic depth by a use of color, line
and perspective that were plastically irrelevant."
Enter Truman's incompetent modernist. "My drawing, I will tell you
frankly, is rotten. It seems to lack freedom and rhythm." ("Seldom has
so sumptuous a showcase been awarded to such tentative, graceless
art." - NY Times reviewer Holland Carter, re a 1997 Met exhibit of
Pollock's early sketchbooks). "Jack the dripper" was exactly what
Braden needed. After all, the CIA's International Ops head had been
the Executive Secretary of the Museum of Modern Art, the command post
of the war against anti-capitalist art.
The museum was the Rockefeller family passion. Mother Abby loved the
works of Mexican Diego Rivera and other revolutionaries, sweetly
unconcerned about their politics. "Get them artistic recognition" and
they will stop opposing capitalism.
In 1933, son Nelson eagerly hired Rivera to paint an entry mural in 30
Rockefeller Plaza. Soon the most ominous painting since the finger
wrote on Belshazzar's wall began to appear on Rocky's wall. Rivera
described the suddenly militarized ideological world after Hitler came
to power. When Vladimir Lenin was painted in as the workers' symbolic
leader, the guards gave the universally acclaimed artist his check and
he was thrown out. In February 1934 the horrified art world watched
Hitler crush German modern art. But for one day its attention turned
to Manhattan's privatized gleichgeshaltet as the mural was
jack-hammered into history.
The cold war put MoMA's president on the spot again. Picasso's
Guernica, his immortal response to the town's Spanish civil war
bombing, then hung on its wall. Rocky could hardly take it down. But
the fight against red art was on and Abstract Expressionism became his
beloved "free enterprise art."
There was resistance among MoMA patrons. But trustee Luce was won
over. The 8/8/49 Life, then selling five million copies weekly,
devoted a spread to "the shining new phenomenon of American art."
Pollock became world famous.
The CIA initially relied on Irving Brown to help the Congress
organizationally on the culture front. After 1950, MoMA people ran
Washington's covert art operations. MoMA chair John Hay Whitney was on
the Psychological Strategy Board. William Burden of the museum's
Advisory Committee, was President of the Farfield Foundation, the
CIA's prime money-laundering foundation. By 1954, Rockefeller was
Special Adviser to the President for Psychological Warfare.
Braden is still proud of their efforts: "I've forgotten which Pope ...
commissioned the Sistine Chapel, but I suppose that if it had been
submitted to a vote of the Italian people .... I don't think it would
have gotten thru the Italian parliament, if there had been a
parliament .... It takes a Pope or somebody with a lot of money to
recognize art and support it. And after many centuries people say,
"Look! The Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on earth."
Well said. Except that the entire people of Florence turned out for
their beloved Michelangelo's funeral.
Russian expert Donald Jameson laid it out: "We recognized that this
was the kind of art that did not have anything to do with socialist
realism, and made socialist realism look even more stylized and more
rigid and confined than it was .... (F)or matters of this sort (it)
could only have been done through the ... operations of the CIA at two
or three removed, so that there wouldn't be any question of having to
clear Jackson Pollock ... or do anything that would involve these
people in the organization - they'd just be added at the end of the
line .... (I)t couldn't have been any closer ... because most of them
were people who had very little respect for the government ... and
certainly none for the CIA."
Since their America stood for artistic experimentation, the CIA also
promoted 12-tone music via a 1954 Rome CCF International Conference of
Twentieth Century Music. However 12-tone music was about as popular as
a 4 AM car-alarm concert. It only demoralized the assembled
freeloaders.
The American Committee for Cultural Freedom was successful with
another project. West Germany was part of the free world, but its
musical world was full of Nazis. Protests made Walter Gieseking give
up a late 40s Carnegie Ha ll date. Jewish musicians forced the Chicago
Symphony to kill a contract with Wilhelm Furtwangler. In the good old
days, conductor Herbert von Karajan opened concerts with the beloved
party anthem, the Horst Wessel Lied. A Zionist group demonstrated when
he appeared in New York in 1955, but the ACCF convinced the American
Federation of Musicians to oppose protests. In the Committee's name,
ex-Trotskyist James T. Farrell declared von Karajan's past
"deplorable," but the demo "ignored the fact that the Berlin
Philharmonic ... symbolizes the courageous resistance of the people of
Berlin to Communist Totalitarianism."
The book has weaknesses. Saunders is sometimes a muscle-bound
researcher. She overloads us with quotes about events, written later
by other writers, personally uninvolved in them. Sometimes its hard to
follow who' saying what about who, and when. Occasionally she buries a
quote in a footnote instead of developing it in the story proper.
Arthur Schlesinger's admission about serving "as a periodic CIA
consultant," is too important for minor treatment. Nevertheless she
certifies him a prime Agency accomplice in its suborning of the
intellectual world.
She writes about things before her time and her lack of substantial
practical political experience is occasionally evident in
interpretations of those events. Braden claims he forgot that he took
a swearing-in oath of secrecy. The CIA knew that his article was about
to be published but didn't stop him. Braden said he "had it in the
back of my mind that they wanted it (patronage of the anti-Communist
left - LB) killed, but I can't prove it." She accepts this. But a
major casualty of his expose was the AFL-CIO. It is silly to think
that they wanted him to humiliate its head, George Meany, whose
domestic class struggle docility was precious to them. Its more
reasonable to believe they thought Braden would go public, no matter
what they did.
In the end, such errors of interpretation don't detract from the
impact of the interviews. They are must reading for anyone interested
in the CIA, but MoMA's got the most explaining to do. Unhappily for
its present administration, their predecessors did that for them.
Lenni Brenner, editor of 51 Documents:
Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1569802351/counterpunchmaga
can be reached at Brenn...@aol.com