Reminder that modern art was a CIA psy-op.
Former CIA officials came clean on this during the '90s, confirming that the agency used abstract art by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others to promote American culture during the Cold War.
The intent was to portray America as a bastion of intellectual and creative freedom. This was to rebut Soviet assertions that the U.S. was "culturally barren", and to contrast the cultural confinement of the Soviet empire, where artists had been restricted to painting Soviet realism since the 1930s.
Abstract Expressionism was seen as the most free and extreme form of artistic expression - the antithesis of Soviet rigidity. Modern art therefore became a weapon in the cultural war against communism.
Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA secretly funded a group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, through which it funnelled money to international art shows, literary magazines and operated dozens of offices around the globe - all with the explicit goal of promoting American Abstract Expressionism.
These efforts, coined operation "long leash", were meant to demonstrate to disaffected Soviets and European intellectuals that American painters were free to invent, and offend; unlike under tyranny, where "artists are made the slaves and tools of the state", as Eisenhower once said.
Paradoxically, at the time the works of Pollock and de Kooning were not even broadly popular with the American public, and earlier, more open attempts to promote new American art by the State Department had been widely mocked. Even President Truman famously said, 'If that's art, I'm a Hottentot'', when visiting an exhibit purchased by the DOS.Because of this, and because it would have been impossible to attain support for such a project through Congress, the CIA's covert operation was necessary to push Abstract Expressionism in secret.
Do you think this had a meaningful impact establishing abstract art as a legitimate movement, or would it have flourished anyway on its own merits?
