How the CIA ran the art world
During the Cold War, the US intelligence agency played a key role in promoting American art abroad, writes Lucie Levine
In the mid-20th century, America’s modern art and design seemed to represent all that was possible in a free society – including liberalism, individualism, dynamic activity and creative risk. Jackson Pollock’s wild, gestural style, for instance, appeared to provide an effective counterpoint to Nazi, and then Soviet, oppression. Modernism, in fact, became a weapon of the Cold War. Both the US State Department and the CIA supported American art shows around the world. As one cold warrior, Thomas W. Braden, noted, modern culture won the US more acclaim than “Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches”.
The relationship between
American modern art and US diplomacy began during the
Second World War, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was mobilised for the war effort. MoMA fulfilled 38 government contracts for cultural materials during the War, and mounted 19 exhibitions of contemporary US painting, which were shown throughout Latin America. In the battle for “hearts and minds”, modern art had proved itself particularly effective. As John Hay Whitney, MoMA’s president from 1941, explained: it stood out as a line of national defence for its power to “educate, inspire and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men”.
During the Cold War, modern art became so well aligned with US foreign policy that senior MoMA figures even took on government roles – for example, Porter McCray, who ran the museum’s international programme, took a leave of absence in 1951 to work on the Marshall Plan. Whitney himself resigned as chair of MoMA’s trustees in 1957 to become US ambassador to Britain; Nelson Rockefeller, his successor as chair, had served as special assistant to President Eisenhower for foreign affairs.
With Soviet propaganda asserting that America was a “culturally barren” capitalist wasteland, the US State Department made the case for the country’s cultural dynamism in 1946 by spending $49,000 on 79 paintings by modern artists for a travelling exhibition entitled Advancing American Art. The show, which made stops in Europe and Latin America, included work by such talents such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Jacob Lawrence. But despite positive reviews from Paris to Port-au-Prince, it stopped pped short in Czechoslovakia in 1947, because Americans them mselves were indignant. In an article entitled “Your Money Bought These Paintings”, Look magazine asked why US tax dollars were being spent on such works – while Pres sident Truman said of one exhibit, Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Circ cus
Girl Resting (right): “If this is art, I’m a Hottentot.” ” In Congress, Republicans worried that some of the art tists were engaged in “Un-American Activities”.
The US public’s fear of the Red Menace brought
Advancing American Art home early, but it was precisely because modern art was not universally popular, and was created by artists who openly disdained orthodoxy, that it was such an effective tool in showcasing American cultural freedom. President Truman personally considered modern art “merely the vapourings of half-baked lazy people”. He did not declare it degenerate, however, or expel its practitioners to gulags. But if the show proved American art was free, it also proved Congress would not always back the State Department in supporting it. Which brings us to the CIA.
Just as the Advancing American
Art show was being recalled in 1947 – and the government was auctioning off its O’Keeffe for $50 – the CIA was being created out of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US wartime intelligence agency. Thomas W. Braden, a former MoMA staffer, joined the CIA to supervise its cultural activities; he had been in the OSS, along with John Hay Whitney, the poet Archibald MacLeish and the film director John Ford. By the time the CIA was formed in 1947, clandestine affairs had long been the arena of the US cultural elite. The cognoscenti and the CIA fought the “Cultural Cold War” side by side.
President Eisenhower himself declared modern art a “pillar of liberty”; and in 1954, MoMA took over the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale from the State Department – so the US could continue to exhibit modern art abroad without being seen to use public funds. The CIA helped finance MoMA’s international exhibitions, and also made its own cultural forays across Europe. In 1950, the agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), headquartered in Paris. Apparently an “autonomous association of artists, musicians and writers”, it was in fact a CIA-funded project to “propagate the virtues of Western democratic culture”. The CCF operated until 1967 and, at its peak, had offices in 35 countries, publishing magazines and organising exhibitions, performances and prizes. Its main goal was to convince left-leaning European intellectuals, who might otherwise be swayed by Soviet propaganda, that the US would protect and nurture the Western cultural tradition.
As Braden put it, the CCF was fighting “the battle for Picasso’s mind” via Jackson Pollock’s art. It bankrolled the Partisan Review Review, t the prestigious cultural magazine of the US nonCommu unist Left. It also worked with MoMA to mount the
Master rpieces of the Twentieth Century festival in Paris in 19 52. Curator James Johnson Sweeney made sure to note n that the works included in the show “could not have h been created... by such totalitarian regimes as Nazi N Germany or present-day Soviet Russia”. Distilling th his message even further in 1954, the MoMA grandee August A Heckscher declared that the museum’s work was w “related to the central struggle of the age”. It was, he e said, “the struggle of freedom against tyranny”.
“Modern art, MoMA’s president declared, had the power to ‘educate, inspire and strengthen
the hearts and wills of free men’”