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CounterPunch
January
11, 2003
The Emperor's
New Art
The CIA as Art Patron
By LENNI BRENNER
Who Paid The Piper? The CIA and the Cultural
Cold War
by Frances Stonor Saunders (London: Granta Books)
Francis Stonor
Saunders' book is a major contribution to knowledge of the inner
workings of the CIA in its first two decades. Versed in the scholarly
literature, she interviewed surviving CIA figures and their collaborators
in the arts and sciences.
Saunders describes the initial cadre,
vets of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, spies in "the
last good war." Franklin Roosevelt put 144,000 innocent
Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps, but the
"Oh So Social," lead by wealthy cultured WASP Ivy Leaguers,
had no difficulty convincing themselves that America's capitalist
democracy, racism, corruption and all, was morally and intellectually
superior to the Fuhrer-staat. When Joseph Stalin's bureaucratic
dictatorship over the proletariat became Wall Street's rival
for world hegemony, one agent again saw them as Yankee capitalism's
"order of Knights Templars."
They came out of WW II with an enormous
industrial plant on a planet in ruins. Life magazine publisher
Henry Luce declared that the 20th century "must ... become
an American century." But Wall Street had to confront its
wartime Soviet ally in 4-power occupied Berlin.
They didn't argue with Nazism, they fought
it. However Communism appealed to values held by renowned cultural
figures. Pablo Picasso and others joined their Communist Party
because it led the underground. The French and Italian CPs grew
to massive proportions. Unless they acted rationally, much of
western Europe could fall.
The ideological war could only be waged
effectively by ex-lefts who knew the theories and jargon of these
milieus. The ones to do it were Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown
of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, with extensive
ties to Europe's Social Democrats.
The crucial secret collaboration of the
Jewish-led ILGWU with the intelligence apparatus is a prime illustration
of the post-Holocaust full admission of Jews into America's ruling
circles. The public sign was constant official speechifying about
"the Judeo-Christian way of life," a scholarly phrase
pre-war liberals had taken up against Hitler. Now Washington
was guarding invented in America Judeo-Christiandom, night and
day, against atheist Communism.
Unfortunately, God didn't play well with
Europe's left. To win them to "the free world," Washington
needed propaganda about free trade unions and vanguard art. But
you couldn't do that openly without outraging domestic McCarthyites,
artistically Norman Rockwell fans. Hence the covert action.
Saunders' book deals with the CIA's Congress
for Cultural Freedom, particularly its political-literary contingent.
However her "Yanqui Doodles" chapter on CIA patronage
of Abstract-Expressionism is its high point.
Tom Braden, the retired International
Operations Department director, authored "I'm glad the CIA's
Immoral," an outraged 5/20/67 Saturday Evening Post answer
to attacks, which dealt with funding European exhibits for artists,
anathema to Congress because of past left ties.
In 1936, Jackson Pollock studied under
David Siqueiros, the Mexican Stalinist muralist who later tried
to assassinate Leon Trotsky. There is a photo of Pollock posing
by a 30s CP May Day float. True, cold war Pollock was anti-red,
but he had taken to dribbling red paint off a stick onto a canvas
on the floor. Unfortunately, Harry Truman hated "lazy, nutty
moderns."
Braden showed more understanding. The
new 'Rome' needed a 'sophisticated' art to flaunt before the
decadent 'Greeks' of modernist Europe. Happily, Manhattan's Cedar
Tavern art set had its theorist. Nation critic Clement Greenberg,
formerly close to Trotskyism, explained why Pollock was "the
greatest American painter of the 20th century."
According to Greenberg, Picasso, in successfully
distorting reality, showed that a canvas had always been a flat
surface, and that three dimensional images were arbitrary intrusions
on it. Once perspective was excluded, painting logically had
to stop depicting anything outside that two-dimensional field.
Unfortunately Picasso never abandoned representation. The surrealists
were even worse since, let's be honest, a limp watch is a watch.
"It makes no difference that the creatures, anatomies, substances,
landscapes, or juxtapositions limned by the Surrealist violates
the laws of probability: they do not violate the modalities of
three-dimensional vision - to which painting can now conform
only by methods that have become academic."
Even Wassily Kandinsky was retrograde.
"His best work remains those paintings in fluid contour
and gauzy color that he executed between 1909 or so and the early
twenties.... The abstract ... paintings he turned out from the
middle twenties represent a misconception ... of the very art
of putting paint on canvas.... (H)e came to conceive of the picture
uberhaupt as an aggregate of discrete shapes.... Kandinsky would
go on to allude to illusionistic depth by a use of color, line
and perspective that were plastically irrelevant."
Enter Truman's incompetent modernist.
"My drawing, I will tell you frankly, is rotten. It seems
to lack freedom and rhythm." ("Seldom has so sumptuous
a showcase been awarded to such tentative, graceless art."
- NY Times reviewer Holland Carter, re a 1997 Met exhibit of
Pollock's early sketchbooks). "Jack the dripper" was
exactly what Braden needed. After all, the CIA's International
Ops head had been the Executive Secretary of the Museum of Modern
Art, the command post of the war against anti-capitalist art.
The museum was the Rockefeller family
passion. Mother Abby loved the works of Mexican Diego Rivera
and other revolutionaries, sweetly unconcerned about their politics.
"Get them artistic recognition" and they will stop
opposing capitalism.
In 1933, son Nelson eagerly hired Rivera
to paint an entry mural in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Soon the most
ominous painting since the finger wrote on Belshazzar's wall
began to appear on Rocky's wall. Rivera described the suddenly
militarized ideological world after Hitler came to power. When
Vladimir Lenin was painted in as the workers' symbolic leader,
the guards gave the universally acclaimed artist his check and
he was thrown out. In February 1934 the horrified art world watched
Hitler crush German modern art. But for one day its attention
turned to Manhattan's privatized gleichgeshaltet as the mural
was jack-hammered into history.
The cold war put MoMA's president on
the spot again. Picasso's Guernica, his immortal response to
the town's Spanish civil war bombing, then hung on its wall.
Rocky could hardly take it down. But the fight against red art
was on and Abstract Expressionism became his beloved "free
enterprise art."
There was resistance among MoMA patrons.
But trustee Luce was won over. The 8/8/49 Life, then selling
five million copies weekly, devoted a spread to "the shining
new phenomenon of American art." Pollock became world famous.
The CIA initially relied on Irving Brown
to help the Congress organizationally on the culture front. After
1950, MoMA people ran Washington's covert art operations. MoMA
chair John Hay Whitney was on the Psychological Strategy Board.
William Burden of the museum's Advisory Committee, was President
of the Farfield Foundation, the CIA's prime money-laundering
foundation. By 1954, Rockefeller was Special Adviser to the President
for Psychological Warfare.
Braden is still proud of their efforts:
"I've forgotten which Pope ... commissioned the Sistine
Chapel, but I suppose that if it had been submitted to a vote
of the Italian people .... I don't think it would have gotten
thru the Italian parliament, if there had been a parliament ....
It takes a Pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognize
art and support it. And after many centuries people say, "Look!
The Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on earth."
Well said. Except that the entire people
of Florence turned out for their beloved Michelangelo's funeral.
Russian expert Donald Jameson laid it
out: "We recognized that this was the kind of art that did
not have anything to do with socialist realism, and made socialist
realism look even more stylized and more rigid and confined than
it was .... (F)or matters of this sort (it) could only have been
done through the ... operations of the CIA at two or three removed,
so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson
Pollock ... or do anything that would involve these people in
the organization - they'd just be added at the end of the line
.... (I)t couldn't have been any closer ... because most of them
were people who had very little respect for the government ...
and certainly none for the CIA."
Since their America stood for artistic
experimentation, the CIA also promoted 12-tone music via a 1954
Rome CCF International Conference of Twentieth Century Music.
However 12-tone music was about as popular as a 4 AM car-alarm
concert. It only demoralized the assembled freeloaders.
The American Committee for Cultural Freedom
was successful with another project. West Germany was part of
the free world, but its musical world was full of Nazis. Protests
made Walter Gieseking give up a late 40s Carnegie Ha ll date.
Jewish musicians forced the Chicago Symphony to kill a contract
with Wilhelm Furtwangler. In the good old days, conductor Herbert
von Karajan opened concerts with the beloved party anthem, the
Horst Wessel Lied. A Zionist group demonstrated when he appeared
in New York in 1955, but the ACCF convinced the American Federation
of Musicians to oppose protests. In the Committee's name, ex-Trotskyist
James T. Farrell declared von Karajan's past "deplorable,"
but the demo "ignored the fact that the Berlin Philharmonic
... symbolizes the courageous resistance of the people of Berlin
to Communist Totalitarianism."
The book has weaknesses. Saunders is
sometimes a muscle-bound researcher. She overloads us with quotes
about events, written later by other writers, personally uninvolved
in them. Sometimes its hard to follow who' saying what about
who, and when. Occasionally she buries a quote in a footnote
instead of developing it in the story proper. Arthur Schlesinger's
admission about serving "as a periodic CIA consultant,"
is too important for minor treatment. Nevertheless she certifies
him a prime Agency accomplice in its suborning of the intellectual
world.
She writes about things before her time
and her lack of substantial practical political experience is
occasionally evident in interpretations of those events. Braden
claims he forgot that he took a swearing-in oath of secrecy.
The CIA knew that his article was about to be published but didn't
stop him. Braden said he "had it in the back of my mind
that they wanted it (patronage of the anti-Communist left - LB)
killed, but I can't prove it." She accepts this. But a major
casualty of his expose was the AFL-CIO. It is silly to think
that they wanted him to humiliate its head, George Meany, whose
domestic class struggle docility was precious to them. Its more
reasonable to believe they thought Braden would go public, no
matter what they did.
In the end, such errors of interpretation
don't detract from the impact of the interviews. They are must
reading for anyone interested in the CIA, but MoMA's got the
most explaining to do. Unhappily for its present administration,
their predecessors did that for them.
Lenni Brenner,
editor of 51
Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, can
be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com
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