independent | For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now
it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American
modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock,
Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in
the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it
acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract
Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and
1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised
modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said:
"If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves,
many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the
McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to
receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them?
Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic
movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual
freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into
the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
The
existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now
been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to
the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy
known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the
indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen
Spender.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold
War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed
at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in
the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets
Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers,
magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was
like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear
whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key
step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD)
was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the
animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored
American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's
international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film
industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the
celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's
anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism. Fist tap Bro. Makheru.
