Hyperallergic riffs on how the manly and individualistic abstract expressionists were backed by the CIA and thus cogs in the capitalist machine (because there must be people who don't know this already)

https://hyperallergic.com/415616/how-freedom-was-aestheticized-during-the-cold-war/

 

 

BERLIN — Jackson Pollock — the art world’s Marlboro man, an icon of freedom in postwar America — may owe part of his legacy precisely to that image, and its potency for America’s Cold-War cultural battle. A new exhibition in Berlin’s House of World Cultures (HKW), Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War, looks at the little-known history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an association of intellectuals and cultural producers that first met in West Berlin in 1950, and dispersed in 1967 when its funding ties to the CIA were exposed. The history of the CCF is no secret — you can read all about it on the CIA’s own website. But the HKW exhibition tells the parallel story of the CCF’s aesthetic of freedom, and contextualizes the lasting legacy of modernism within the geopolitical power struggles of the Cold War.

 

After World War II, the CIA’s strategy in Europe was to strengthen intellectual elites who supported socialist policies but not Communism, who they termed the non-communist left. Doing so without having those actions traced back to the US, however, was challenging. The CCF was one solution: its director Michael Josselson proposed that strengthening the non-communist left should be done through cultural organizations rather than straight-out political ones. The CCF would gather European influencers under the guise of promoting “cultural freedom” —and indeed most intellectuals and artists involved in the congress were not aware of its CIA bankrolling. The CCF was founded in Berlin and went on to assert influence over writers, artists, and intellectuals in Cold War frontiers throughout Africa, Asia, and West Asia. Its operations assumed that modernist expression in literature, art, and music forged a path for spreading capitalism, democracy, and liberalism in the American model.

 

Could anything communicate white, male freedom more than Pollock’s drip paintings? Or embody abstract thought more than Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings? Secret agents could never have invented better antidotes to Socialist Realism — all they had to do was push these all-American exports as hard as they could. One of the CCF’s activities was to organize traveling exhibitions of 20th century art from American collections (primarily MoMA’s) across Europe. These exhibitions posited Abstract Expressionism as a natural development, à la Alfred Barr, to the European, prewar avant-garde. They asserted both a new canon and a new brand of all-American imagery. The HKW doesn’t miss its chance to merrily topple male-modernist myths, and adds a new twist: these celebrated artists were cogs in the capitalist expansion, unbeknownst to them, frontmen for the CIA’s global mission to plant the aesthetics of freedom.

 

One of my reading projects this year is Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer, about how the CIA created front groups to promote American interests against Soviet propaganda by basically copying Soviet techniques and communist front group strategies.  I'm still early in the book but even before I started into this book I had heard about how the abstract expressionists had CIA backing. 

 

So it's all too easy to note the irony of someone like Pollock being backed by the CIA while embodying a manly stereotype, but a comparable irony can exist for artists with leftist sympathies who express them in the context of the United States educational apparatus, too.  I think we should try to be more nuanced than that in both directions.  Daniel may have worked for a pagan ruler but he did keep kosher, right?  Sometimes you don't really get a choice about whether or not you're ultimately working for a terrible leader or in a terrible line of work.  In fact I'd venture to say that that's going to be most of us regardless of which nation we live in. 

 

Could anything communicate white, male freedom more than Pollock's drip paintings?  I dunno, Marlon Brando, perhaps?  Steve McQueen?  People who write about the visual arts can seem to live in a bubble in which tens of thousands of more obvious examples of some masculinist trope can be thought of but, hey, if you're writing about the art scene then Pollock it is.