Heather Cox Richardson
I have heard talk of the exportation of modern American art
during the Cold War as a means of proselytizing, but I’d never considered the
mechanics of that propaganda. It seemed to me a wing of art theory, and while
that’s a subject that always entertains me, it’s something for which I have
very little brain space during the school year.
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| From Life magazine, August 8, 1949. |
A recent article by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Independent explains exactly how the CIA promoted American abstract expressionism
worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. Their goal was to highlight the openness and
experimentation possible in America’s capitalist system, contrasting it with
the rigid conformity of state-censored socialist realism (some of which, to my Philistinic
eye, seems worth looking at even if Soviet state officials thought so, too.) At
first, the CIA tried to promote work by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell,
Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko at home. Quickly, though, abstract
expressionism ran into the conformism of the 1950s. Even President Truman
announced: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.”
So CIA operatives set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
which salted art magazines praising abstract expressionism and sponsored
exhibitions that toured European cities. They worked closely with Nelson
Rockefeller, president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (which his mother had
founded), to showcase “free enterprise painting.” When museums eager to show
the new art could not afford the cost of exhibitions, the CIA tapped American
millionaires as ostensible sponsors, then provided the necessary money from
government coffers. After World War II, abstract expressionism became the
symbol of modern America.
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