The Central Intelligence Agency and its use of modern American art were instrumental during the Cold War. A former CIA case officer, Donald Jameson, confirmed what has always been a rumor and joke in art circles. According to Jameson, the CIA saw abstract expressionism as an opportunity not only to combat communistic propaganda abroad, but also on the home front.
In a revealing article published in Britain’s news daily The Independent, writer Frances Stonor Saunders who is also writing a book on the cultural Cold War, exposes how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning as weapons in the “cultural” Cold War.
According to Saunders, the decision to incorporate culture and art in the Cold War arsenal was taken up 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 organizations in over 35 different countries.
Furthermore, the CIA felt that this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, intellectual freedom and cultural power of the US.
Soviet art on the other hand had to stay within the communist ideological boundaries of conformity and rigid patterns which made it hard to compete with the US.
From “high art” to “low art,” there were no restrictions in the range of creativity that the CIA permitted. The covert operations included subsidizing the animated film version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, sponsoring American jazz artists, opera recitals and funding the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s international tour program. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, as well as the always important travel writer.
According to Saunders, the CIA’s cultural operation promoted and established America’s anarchic avant-garde movement, abstract expressionism.
Since abstract expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called upon. The most prominent among these was Nelson Rockerfeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In the specific time and context of the early 1950s, the newly established CIA was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical communist criticisms or J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
The agency was staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels during their spare time. Tom Braden, the first chief of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, which ran the artistic covert operations, provides a fascinating glimpse into the admirable purpose of the artistic CIA agent.
“We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.”
This admission by a CIA agent does not taint any artistic achievements made by the artists of the era. Contemporary American art would have been the thriving dominant art movement that it was with or without the support of the CIA.
The agency merely pursued its own agenda through an intricate relationship with the all-encompassing vehicle that is American art. In the end, paintbrushes and music are no substitute for coup’detats and waterboarding.
Hanif Zarrabi is a History graduate student and a columnist for the Daily 49er.
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