Art is the weapon: A brief history of the CIA and abstract expressionism
So, fun fact, Nazis absolutely despise modern art.
For fascists, there’s an unchanging, objective vision of beauty. Any art that doesn’t reflect that is evil. In the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin was a hub for transgressive, progressive art. So, when the Nazis came to power, part of their crusade to Make Germany Great Again was to vilify and demonise not just the art, but those who create and appreciate it.
The strange thing is that they didn’t actually destroy said modern art or ban it from public viewing. Instead, they exhibited it alongside their state-sanctioned “beautiful art” as a way of showing how much better their vision of beauty was than the alternative.
Many of the artists who managed to escape the rise of fascism in Germany ended up in America and found a home for themselves in the artistic communities of Los Angeles and especially New York. The likes of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Mark Rothko took pointers from these new arrivals and popularised a movement known as abstract expressionism. One that veered away from accepted visions of art as depictions of real life and more towards art as untrammelled internal expression.
This is all hunky dory on the surface. Especially the part about pissing off fascists. To this day, works of abstract expressionism still make fascists incredibly angry. Just look at how many cunts online still post photos of photorealistic sculptures in contrast with more abstract works as a way of signifying a cultural downgrade. If that sounds like the behaviour of the Nazis from earlier, there’s a reason for that. It’s because they’re one and the same.
Trust the American government to take these works of art and try to do fash shit with it too.
Why did the CIA get involved with abstract expressionism?
As we all know, once the Second World War ended, a colder, much longer war began between the US and the Soviet Union. One that, since both sides had nuclear weapons, wouldn’t be carried out between the nations directly, but via the medium of cultural control. And, y’know, proxy wars in Vietnam and Korea. Both sides had to show the world that they were the dominant force in the world, and the CIA, allegedly, tried to make this recent development, taking the art world by storm, part of their arsenal.
Which kind of makes sense. After all, the United States were trying to prove themselves as the land of the free in contrast to the Soviets‘ cold, state-controlled conformity. What better way of showing that off than with all this wild, untamed art? A kind that simultaneously is non-conformist work of a singular artistic vision, but also sells for mind-boggling sums of money? There was no better argument for the American cultural atmosphere, and no less a voice than Thomas W Braden said as much in 1967, when he said that American art “won more acclaim for the US …than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.”
From 1948 to 1949, Braden was the executive secretary of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1950, he left to join the CIA. You really wouldn’t make it up, could you? He wasn’t the only one, either. The president of MOMA in the 1940s and 1950s was Nelson Rockefeller, a fellow Cold Warrior with close ties to the government of the day. The funding that these people put into the work of abstract expressionism means that the work that these artists were doing was, unbeknownst to them, state propaganda.
It’s a bleak irony that artists who refuse to prop up a nation with their work just end up propping up another in time.