W R I T E R S , A R T I S T S , M U S I C I A N S , F I L M M A K E R S
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Faced with these charges, which appeared to find a receptive audience among intellectuals in western Europe, Americans responded by accusing the Russians of disregarding the inherent value of culture, of subjugating art to the dreary dictates of a totalitarian political ideology. Not only that, the picture of the United States as a bastion of philistinism was, so they claimed, badly outdated. In fact, America was the seedbed of the most creative impulses in modern culture, as was shown by, for example, the influence of Pound and T. S. Eliot over modernist poetics. With Europe enfee-bled by its recent political convulsions, and many of its artists seeking refuge across the Atlantic, it now fell to the United States to protect and nurture the best cultural traditions of western civilization.
Yet there were problems with this set of claims. American politicians were hardly known for their appreciation of modern art: indeed, one congressman, Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan, won himself considerable publicity by loudly denouncing the “horde of foreign art manglers” as a “pen-and-brush phalanx of the Communist conspiracy,” while even the president himself, Harry Truman, once famously declared of a Yasuo Kuniyoshi semi-abstract painting, “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.”7 This sort of Babbittry inhibited U.S. government officials who wanted to counter communist propaganda by publicly displaying works of homegrown modern art. One traveling State Department exhibit, “Advancing American Art,” which featured work by, among others, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, and Georgia O’Keefe, was the target of such vitriolic attack that it had to be canceled in mid-tour and its contents sold off as surplus government property (they fetched a mere $5,544).8 Combined with the effects of this sort of cultural vigilantism was a fundamental contradiction. The whole point of American art was supposed to be that it was free, the unfettered expression of individual consciousness: this was what distinguished it from the agitprop produced by the Soviet Union’s “artists in uniform.” How, then, could the U.S. government openly mobilize American culture in the Cold War kulturkampf?
In these circumstances, it fell to the CIA to shoulder a large share of the burden of official artistic patronage during the first years of the Cold War.9 The Agency’s principal front organization in the so-called cultural Cold War was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the body created in 1950 to counter the Cominform’s “peace offensive.” Under OPC officer Michael Josselson’s skillful stewardship, the CCF evolved into one of the
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most important artistic patrons in world history, sponsoring an unprecedented range of cultural activities, including literary prizes, art exhibits, and music festivals. The CCF’s location in Paris, the citadel of western European Cold War neutralism, reflected the CIA’s desire to carry “the battle for Picasso’s mind” (as Tom Braden later described it) to the communists.10 It also indicated that, ironically, anticommunist American literati stood to gain less from their government’s patronage than their uncommitted European fellows. Nonetheless, American writers, artists, and musicians were involved in the CCF’s international program as part of the CIA’s efforts to “showcase” U.S high culture for the benefit of neutralist foreign intellectuals. Agency subsidies as a result had domestic repercussions in America—or, to use intelligence parlance, “blowback.”
This fact, combined with the prominence of many of the individuals concerned, has ensured that, among the CIA’s numerous front operations in the Cold War, the CCF has attracted the most attention from historians. For many years after the existence of the Agency’s covert network was exposed by investigative journalists in 1967, writing about the cultural Cold War displayed a strong revisionist impulse. The CIA was credited with having a heavy influence on the production of high culture in the United States and its distribution abroad. In particular, the postwar preeminence of certain modernist cultural movements, such as abstract expressionism in painting, was ascribed, in part at least, to covert official sponsorship. The culmination of this school of thought was British researcher Frances Stonor Saunders’s 1999 book