The Abstract Expressionists
emerged from obscurity in the late 1940s to establish New York as the center of
the art world – but some say they became pawns of US spies in the Cold War.
By Alastair Sooke
In the immediate aftermath of
World War Two, something exciting happened in the art world in New York. A
strange but irresistible energy started to crackle across the city, as artists
who had struggled for years in poverty and obscurity suddenly found
self-confidence and success. Together, they formed a movement that became
known, in time, as Abstract Expressionism. It is currently the subject of a
major exhibition, featuring 164 artworks by 30 artists (including Willem de
Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko), at the Royal Academy of Arts in
London.
One of the most remarkable things
about Abstract Expressionism was the speed with which it rose to international
prominence. Although the artists associated with it took a long time to find
their signature styles, once the movement had crystallized, by the late ‘40s,
it rapidly achieved first notoriety and then respect. By the ‘50s, it was
generally accepted that the most exciting advances in painting and sculpture
were taking place in New York rather than Paris. In 1957, a year after
Pollock’s death in a car crash, the Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for his
Autumn Rhythm – an unprecedented sum of money for a painting by a contemporary
artist at the time.
The following year, The New
American Painting, an influential exhibition organized by New York’s Museum of
Modern Art, began a year-long tour of European cities including Basel, Berlin,
Brussels, Milan, Paris, and London. The triumph of Abstract Expressionism was
complete.
Unwitting helpers?
Before long, though, the backlash
had begun. First came Pop Art, which wrested attention away from Abstract
Expressionism at the start of the ‘60s. Then came the rumor-mongers,
whispering that the swiftness of Abstract Expressionism’s success was somehow
fishy.
The art critic Max Kozloff
examined post-war American painting in the context of the Cold War. He claimed
to be reacting against the “self-congratulatory mood” of recent publications
such as Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting (1970), the first
history of Abstract Expressionism. Kozloff went on to argue that Abstract
Expressionism was “a form of benevolent propaganda”, in sync with the post-war
political ideology of the American government.
In many ways, the idea seemed
preposterous. After all, most of the Abstract Expressionists were volatile
outsiders. Pollock once said that everyone at his high school in Los Angeles
thought he was a “rotten rebel from Russia”.
According to David Anfam,
co-curator of the Royal Academy exhibition, “Rothko said he was an anarchist.
Barnett Newman was a declared anarchist – he wrote an introduction to
Kropotkin’s book on anarchism. So here you had this nexus of non-conformist
artists, who were completely alienated from American culture. They were the
opposite of the Cold Warriors.”
Despite this, however, Kozloff’s
ideas took hold. A few years before they were published, in 1967, the New York
Times had revealed that the liberal anti-Communist magazine Encounter had been
indirectly funded by the CIA. As a result, people started to become suspicious.
Could it be that the CIA also had a hand in promoting Abstract Expressionism on
the world stage? Was Pollock, wittingly or not, a propagandist for the US
government?
Soft power
A number of essays, articles and
books followed Kozloff’s piece, all arguing that the CIA had somehow
manipulated Abstract Expressionism. In 1999, the British journalist and
historian Frances Stonor Saunders published a book about the CIA and the
“cultural Cold War” in which she asserted: “Abstract Expressionism was being deployed
as a Cold War weapon.” A synthesis of her argument is available online, in
anarticle that she wrote for the Independent newspaper in 1995. “In the manner
of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and
promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more
than 20 years,” she wrote.
The gist of her case goes
something like this. We know that the CIA bankrolled cultural initiatives as
part of its propaganda war against the Soviet Union. It did so indirectly, on
what was called a “long leash”, via organizations such as the Congress for
Cultural Freedom (CCF), an anti-Communist advocacy group active in 35
countries, which the CIA helped to establish and fund. It was the CCF that
sponsored the launch of Encounter magazine in 1953, for instance. It also paid
for the Boston Symphony Orchestra to travel to Paris to participate in a
festival of modern music.
According to Saunders, the CCF
financed several high-profile exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the
‘50s, including The New American Painting, which toured Europe between 1958 and
1959. Supposedly, the Tate Gallery couldn’t afford to bring the exhibition to
London – so an American millionaire called Julius Fleischmann stepped in,
stumping up the cash so that it could travel to Britain. Fleischmann was the
president of a body called the Farfield Foundation, which was funded by the
CIA. It is therefore possible to argue that important British abstract
painters, such as John Hoyland, who were profoundly influenced by the Tate’s
exhibition in ’59, were shaped by America’s spymasters.
Saunders also highlighted links
between the CIA and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which was
instrumental in promoting Abstract Expressionism. Nelson Rockefeller, the
president of MoMA during the ‘40s and ‘50s, had close ties with the US
intelligence community. So did Thomas Braden, who directed cultural activities
at the CIA: prior to joining “the Company”, he was MoMA’s executive secretary.
‘Shrewd and cynical’
Even today, however, the story of
the CIA’s involvement with Abstract Expressionism remains contentious.
According to Irving Sandler, who is now 91, it is totally untrue. Speaking to
me by phone from his apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, he said: “There
was absolutely no involvement of any government agency. I haven’t seen a single
fact that indicates there was this kind of collusion. Surely, by now, something
– anything – would have emerged. And isn’t it interesting that the federal
government at the time considered Abstract Expressionism a Communist plot to
undermine American society?”
David Anfam is more circumspect.
He says it is “a well-documented fact” that the CIA co-opted Abstract
Expressionism in their propaganda war against Russia. “Even The New American
Painting [exhibition] had some CIA funding behind it,” he says. According to
Anfam, it is easy to see why the CIA wished to promote Abstract Expressionism.
“It’s a very shrewd and cynical strategy,” he explains, “because it showed that
you could do whatever you liked in America.” By the ‘50s, Abstract
Expressionism was bound up with the concept of individual freedom: its canvases
were understood as expressions of the subjective inner lives of the artists who
painted them.
As a result, the movement was a
useful foil to Russia’s official Soviet Realist style, which championed
representative painting. “America was the land of the free, whereas Russia was
locked up, culturally speaking,” Anfam says, characterizing the perception that
the CIA wished to foster during the Cold War.
This isn’t to say, of course,
that the artists themselves were complicit with the CIA, or even aware that it
was funding Abstract Expressionist exhibitions. Still, whatever the truth of
the extent of the CIA’s financial involvement with Abstract Expressionism,
Anfam believes that it was “the best thing the institution ever paid for”. He
smiles. “I’d much rather they spent money on Abstract Expressionism than
toppling left-wing dictators.”
Alastair Sooke is art critic of
The Daily Telegraph.