Many of the artists in the movement had radical backgrounds (Jackson Pollock, for example, had worked in the studio of Marxist Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros) yet had renounced communism in favor of a belief in art for its own sake.26 Their painting, with its gestural expression of the individual artist’s consciousness and total rejection of representation, constituted a massive rebuke both to the banal illusionism of the official style of Soviet art (socialist realism) and the almost photographic mimesis of such middlebrow American painters as Norman Rockwell.
Here was an artistic movement that, in all its formal difficulty and obscurity—attributes that help explain why professional explicators like New York intellectuals Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg featured so prominently in its ranks—would surely appeal to even the most refined of European sensibilities. Yet, for all the high modernist aesthetics, it could also be claimed that there was something peculiarly
Of course, the CIA was not the first patron to spot these qualities. A number of private American citizens had already begun collecting and exhibiting the works of the abstract expressionists, emulating those European aristocrats whose patronage had earlier enabled the modernist avant-garde to evade the twin threats of totalitarianism and kitsch. Foremost of these American patrons was Nelson Rockefeller, the fabulously
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wealthy president of the Museum of Modern Art and admirer of what he liked to call “free enterprise painting.”27 Another influential booster of the so-called new American painting was John Hay Whitney, benefactor of New York’s second great exhibitor of modern art after MoMA, the Whitney Museum. As well as holding positions of immense power within the New York art world, these men were profoundly connected to the U.S. intelligence community. Indeed, Rockefeller had pioneered many of the CIA’s characteristic methods of psychological warfare while serving as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II. He would later reprise this role when he took over from C. D. Jackson as President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs in 1954. Whitney likewise worked in Inter-American Affairs before joining the OSS. His secret service in the Cold War took the form of a berth on Harry Truman’s “psy-war” planning unit, the Psychological Strategy Board. He also allowed the CIA to use the Whitney Trust as one of its funding conduits. These and numerous other links between the worlds of intelligence and art—perhaps the most telling of which was Tom Braden’s working as MoMA’s executive secretary in the late 1940s—meant that the CIA did not always have to foot the bill in the Cold War promotion of American art. They also provided the Agency with a host of privately owned and internationally famous institutions behind which it could conceal its interest in artistic patronage.
The typical CIA operation in this theater of the cultural Cold War, then, was a joint public-private venture, usually involving Rockefeller’s Museum of Modern Art and the Agency’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.
In 1952, MoMA provided the art exhibit for the CCF’s spectacular “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century” festival in Paris, the event that established the CCF as a major presence in European cultural life and the Farfield Foundation as a credible pass-through for the Agency. Although the new American painting was not on show at Paris—the exhibit took a mainly retrospective and Eurocentric view of modern art—the Cold War subtext was plain enough, with curator James Johnson Sweeney, an advisor to MoMA (and associate of
A second collaboration in 1954 resulted in the show “Young Painters,”
consisting almost entirely of new abstract works, with large cash prizes do-
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nated by the CIA’s principal front man in the cultural Cold War, Julius Fleischmann. It was presumably efforts such as these that August Heckscher of MoMA had in mind when he declared that the museum’s work was “related to the central struggle of the age—the struggle of freedom against tyranny.”29 Then, in 1960, came the opening of the