Modern Art and the Cold War

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Modern Art and the Cold War

I just came across the following article from the Lew Rockwell email.

Weird...

I bet Ayn Rand is turning over in her grave to think that modern art was a propaganda weapon to defeat communism.

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

By Frances Stonor Saunders

The Independent

22 October 1995

From the article:

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.

. . .

Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.

"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.

"In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."

. . .

This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.

This article is from 1995. I haven't looked yet, but I wonder what else is out there about this...

Michael

[Kimmler]

Modern Art and the Cold War

I just came across the following article from the Lew Rockwell email.

Weird...

I bet Ayn Rand is turning over in her grave to think that modern art was a propaganda weapon to defeat communism.

Michael

Lucky she did see this one too...

http://www.cordair.com/bokor/beginnings.php

[BaalChatzaf]

Modern Art and the Cold War

I just came across the following article from the Lew Rockwell email.

Weird...

I bet Ayn Rand is turning over in her grave to think that modern art was a propaganda weapon to defeat communism.

Michael

Lucky she did see this one too...

http://www.cordair.c.../beginnings.php

Between Aristotle and Ayn --- nothing? Poor art, worse history.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Reidy]

A few interesting facts drowning in an ocean of cliché and stereotype. The article gives no support to its assertion that McCarthy ever ventured an opinion on art in his life, or that any of the New York School were leftists. Aaron Copland had a communist past, but he was was esthetically conservative and not a painter. To say that artists were used "unwittingly" is a loaded way of saying that they were happy to accept money and publicity that helped them to make more money in turn. No surprise there. The propaganda intent of cultural exchanges was never a secret, so the fact of CIA involvement isn't the big revelation the article makes it out to be.

One of these exchanges (a USIA exibition in Leningrad) was how Rand got back in touch with her sister in the 1970s.

[Jonathan]

I bet Ayn Rand is turning over in her grave to think that modern art was a propaganda weapon to defeat communism.

The older, established, uptight, Objectivist Authority Rand would be spinning in her grave.

But the young, creative, artistic Rand appreciated the infiltration of abstract art into the Soviet Union. In a draft of We The Living, she wrote of its “laughing, defiant broken lines and circles cutting triangles, and triangles splitting squares," and of "the new art coming through some crack in the impenetrable barrier.”

J

[Mike11]

“laughing, defiant broken lines and circles cutting triangles, and triangles splitting squares," and of "the new art coming through some crack in the impenetrable barrier.”

Ayn Rand wrote that? Wow.

[Reidy]

As I've mentioned more than once on the O-web, the WTL outtake is about book design, a decorative art. Thus it isn't an endorsement of non-representational fine-art painting. In one of her 60s essays she said in passing that decorative art ought to avoid representation because it's distracting. She didn't have a theory of art in the 30s, but I see no inconsistency or change of mind in her statements on the subject, including this one.

Edited November 5, 2010 by Reidy

[Jonathan]

As I've mentioned more than once on the O-web, the WTL outtake is about book design, a decorative art. Thus it isn't an endorsement of non-representational fine-art painting. In one of her 60s essays she said in passing that decorative art ought to avoid representation because it's distracting.

I think you're projecting Rand's later statements on the decorative arts onto her earlier appreciation of abstract shapes in order to avoid accepting the fact that she found meaning in abstraction when she was younger and had not yet begun denying or stifling her own responses in order to adhere to the "objective" aesthetic theory that she later concocted.

Anyway, Rand's later distinction between "decorative art" and "fine art" is irrelevant to this discussion because her opinion on the decorative arts was that they are "not conceptual, but purely sensory," and that they convey "no meaning other than visual harmony," and therefore the abstract art described in the We The Living draft would not qualify as "decorative" since Rand describes it as evoking conceptual content rather than being purely sensory -- it represents the human characteristics of laughter and defiance; it has conceptual meaning.

Frankly, I think your "decorative arts" ploy is pretty lame. If Rand had instead described a realistic painting on a book's cover, would you also claim that since it's on the cover of a book, it is therefore not fine art but "book design" and therefore "decorative art"?

She didn't have a theory of art in the 30s, but I see no inconsistency or change of mind in her statements on the subject, including this one.

The young Rand saw laughter and defiance represented in abstract shapes, where the older Rand's theory-driven mindset led her to deny that representations of things such as laughter and defiance could be achieved through visual abstraction, and you don't see an inconsistency or change of mind? Heh.

J

Edited November 5, 2010 by Jonathan