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“Antagonismes” show at the Louvre, with the U.S. participants chosen by MoMA and the costs met by the Farfield and another CIA conduit, the Hoblitzelle Foundation. Among the American artists represented were abstract expressionists Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline.

By no means were all of MoMA’s exhibits sponsored by the CIA—the Rockefeller Brothers Fund remained the museum’s chief source of financial support throughout this period—nor were their organizers’ tastes confined to abstract expressionism. Indeed, there was sufficient representational art featured in MoMA shows for one critic to complain that the museum was dedicated less to the “art of our time” than the “art of our grandfathers’ time.”30 In his encyclopedic 2003 history of the cultural Cold War, The Dancer Defects, David Caute accuses Frances Stonor Saunders of confusing the actual importance of abstract expressionism in the 1950s American art scene with the claims for its supremacy made by such critic-boosters as Clement Greenberg.31 A number of art historians have similarly claimed that the revisionist historical school exaggerated MoMA’s support for the new American painting in the early Cold War period, dating the beginning of the museum’s interest in promoting the abstract expressionists as a distinct avant-garde movement to as late as 1956.32 Saunders has responded to such charges by arguing (not un-persuasively) that while the museum might have pandered to more conventional artistic tastes in many of its public exhibitions, its collection policies during the 1940s and 1950s were heavily slanted toward the acquisition of recent American abstraction. The evidence connecting abstract expressionism with MoMA—and, through MoMA, the CIA—remains, she insists, compelling.33

The post-revisionist argument that the CIA’s aesthetic preference for modernism has been overstated seems most convincing when applied to the realm of music. Classical symphonies, Broadway musicals, even the jazz of Dizzy Gillespie, all were used by a large array of U.S. government bodies (the postwar military government in Germany, the State Department, President Eisenhower’s Emergency Fund) in an attempt to persuade

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music lovers around the world that America was no less hospitable to the aural arts than the literary and visual.34 Yet surprisingly, the CIA appeared reluctant to extend its patronage to America’s musical avant-garde, experimental, “serialist” composers such as Milton Babbitt and John Cage, both of whom shared many of the same aesthetic ideas and indeed often collaborated with the abstract expressionists.

Instead, the music program of the CCF, as it developed under the guiding hand of the organization’s flamboyant General Secretary, Nicolas Nabokov, seemed more concerned with presenting earlier European works that had either been banned or condemned as “formalist” by the Soviet authorities. The glittering 1952 “Masterpieces” festival in Paris opened with a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, with the composer himself sitting in the audience, flanked by the French president and his wife. Over the next thirty days, nine separate orchestras performed works by over seventy composers who had been dismissed by communist commissars as “degenerate” and “sterile,” among them Dmitri Shostakovich and Claude Debussy.35 Here indeed were “the abundant riches which the mind of free man has created in the first half of our century” promised in the festival program, except that the emphasis clearly was on the early 1900s, the Parisian “good old days,” as one unimpressed spectator sniffed.36

If American avant-garde composers were overlooked by the CCF, American virtuoso musicians were very much in favor. The Paris performance of The Rite of Spring marked the first appearance in Europe by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). The huge expenses of transporting an orchestra across the Atlantic had been met by a grant from the CIA’s International Organizations Division of $130,000, arranged by Tom Braden and BSO trustee C. D. Jackson (and recorded in CCF accounts as a donation from “prominent individuals and associations.”)37 “You know how much capital our enemies constantly make about the lack of culture in this country,” Jackson explained to a colleague. “The Boston Symphony’s music, played in Europe, with the attendant European publicity, would be a most startling and useful refutation of these charges.” Was the outlay worth it? Some observers reckoned not. “I thought [the festival]

was trivial,” recalled one of the CCF’s founders, Melvin Lasky. “It’s unim-portant whether foreigners think Americans can play music or not.”

Braden and Jackson, however, were delighted with the overwhelmingly

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