The Cultural
Cold War
by Miles Mathis
When artists are made the slaves and the tools of the state, when artists become chief
propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed.
President Eisenhower, 1954
Eisenhower said the above in his “Freedom of the Arts” address at MoMA for its 25th anniversary gala.
Yes, MoMA and the Rockefeller's could even afford to hire the President to read their scripts. Although
he was intending to condemn Russian realism and promote Abstract Expressionism, we can now see
that his words were upside down, as usual. Most of the 20th century was upside down to the truth and
this is just one more example. For his words are a perfect description of Modernism and its purposeful
subordination of art and artists to politics, Theory, and financial speculation. This subordination was
not engineered from Moscow. It was engineered from New York City and DC. And it turned out to be
even worse than Eisenhower warned. If progress had only been arrested, how happy we would now
be. Due to the engineered collapse of art in the 20th century by speculators, propagandists, paid
academics, and New-World-Order architects, we have regressed no one knows how many centuries.
before: Tate Britain 19th century gallery
after: Pace Gallery, 2010
We can see from these before and after photos what Eisenhower's “freedom of the arts” really meant. It
meant the freedom of art to devolve from something large and beautiful into something small and
meaningless. It was an early example of Newspeak, telling you one thing while selling you the inverse.
This has now been proven. It is no longer a theory or an opinion. Documents have been declassified,
agents have gone on record, and fully researched books have been written. We now know exactly
which artists were slaves (all the famous ones) and which artists were propagandists (all the famous
ones). We can only guess at the genius destroyed, since most of it was never allowed to see the light of
day. Thousands of talented artists have been suppressed, ignored, slandered, and ultimately lost to
history. Some quit, some killed themselves, and others just faded out.
I have referenced the work of Frances Stonor Saunders in three previous papers, including her 1995
article in the London Independent and her 1999 book Who Paid the Piper/The Cultural Cold War.
While using parts of her research, I nonetheless mentioned several times that I found her work to be a
probable diversion. In other words, I think it is likely the book was either suggested by Intelligence,
overwritten by them, or written in full by them with only her byline. I come to this conclusion from
several facts, which I will now share with you. The first curious fact is that this book which is sold as
an exposé of the CIA managed to be reviewed by top mainstream sources, including the London Times
and the London Review of Books. Her initial article also managed to get published by the London
Independent. Since Intelligence owns the London press just as it own the US press, we must assume
Intelligence is trying to spin information that has already been leaked.
With more research, that is precisely what I found. Saunders admits that much of the information in
her book was leaked or published in various places decades earlier, and though it has been suppressed
since then and is now barely remembered, it means her research is not new. In this context, her article
and book appear to be the somewhat late effort to spin old information, for reasons unknown to me. It
seems to me they would have been better off keeping quiet about it, but I don't know what undercurrent
they might have been trying to quell in the late 1990's. Probably they know their own jobs better than I
do.
Another thing that leads in this direction is her bio, which is almost non-existent. Both parents were in
the British peerage, which is in itself a red flag in this case. The first thing on her bio is this CIA
exposé, which she produced at age 29. So there is an 8-year gap in her bio, from age 21 to age 29. She
then became an editor at the New Statesman, another red flag. Her own book ought to tell us that, since
it admits most of these journals had been taken over by Intelligence soon after W.W II (or even before).
But the warning is even easier to hear when we find that Saunders was at the New Statesman under the
leadership of Ian Hargreaves, a big supporter of Tony Blair. Blair, like Bush and Obama, was just a
puppet of Intelligence.
But it is the content of the book that is the real indication it was written to whitewash and spin
information. Although she and her editors manage to compile a lot of old evidence that someone like
me can use to his own purposes, most people reading the book will not be able to take the information
they receive and sew it into their own shirts. Most readers will take the information as Saunders gives
it to them, and Saunders is careful in most cases to make Intelligence look not-so-bad-after-all.
I have already shown in my previous papers how ridiculous the main thesis is: that Modern Art was
sold as part of the Cold War, to combat Communism and the backward ideas about art professed by the
Russians. I agree that the Soviets were wrong about just about everything, including politics and art,
but that doesn't make the US position right. Saunders helps sell the peculiar idea that a government
either has to outlaw “decadent art”—as the Soviets did—or promote it wildly, as the US did. She helps
those she quotes at Intelligence gloss over the possibility that we might have done neither. We might
have promoted the American art of the time in proportion to its merits. . . which was not much. Or,
since we were supposed to be an example to the world of free-market capitalism, we might have let the
free markets promote the art of the time, letting the buyers and the public decide its merits. Instead, we
chose to propagandize it to the greatest extent possible, outdoing any propaganda Hitler or Stalin ever
dreamed of. We then tried to sell this propaganda as pure simply because it was ours. “Their
propaganda is manipulation; our propaganda is just 'fair promotion' of 'free enterprise.'”
I have shown the main thesis of the book is false, since the art they chose to promote wasn't chosen
based on merit, much less on its ability to fight Communism or make the US look creative. The works
were chosen because the Rockefeller's had already invested in them, and the Rockefeller's controlled
both the museums and the CIA. That information is buried in the book, but since it isn't highlighted or
stressed, readers will tend to miss it.
In this paper I wish to continue pulling apart the book by concentrating on chapter 16, “Yanqui
Doodles.” It is in this chapter that Saunders finally gets to the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, de
Kooning, Motherwell, and others. Before we get to the analysis of the text, let me just say that I agree
that the Abstract Expressionists aren't very decadent. I have always found them more boring and
pointless than decadent. They tie into the adjective “decadent” not in the way Duchamp did before
them or Warhol would after them. That is, they don't obviously try to tear down culture by any direct
attack. They still give you colors and shapes, some of which might be called interesting in a small way.
However, they are decadent in the sense that they were used by critics and others to continue the
destruction of art, by the loss of old conventions. They aren't morally decadent, they are aesthetically
decadent. They represent the decay and loss of old standards, old conventions, and all the means the
artist historically used to create beauty, meaning, depth, and subtlety. Remember, Abstract
Expressionism wasn't and isn't sold as just another artistic possibility. It was sold by critics like
Clement Greenberg as the historical replacement for old aristocratic art—meaning high realism. Even
the artist Ad Reinhardt—Greenberg's arch enemy—said that Abstract painting was “the last painting
that anyone could paint.” The new art was promoted as superior in every way, immediately
mothballing all art that had come before. It was the art of a new century, the art of America!, the art of
the future, blah blah blah. So in promoting Abstract Expressionism and Modernism in general, the
salesmen in Intelligence were at the same time forbidding the old realism.
Saunders' book and Tom Braden's lengthy quotes in it only tell you about the promotion side; they
forget to tell you about the suppression side. They forget to tell you that while they were promoting
Modernism, they were implicitly forbidding anyone from painting the old way. The old painting was
dismissed as outdated, regressive, undemocratic, and generally small minded. No, they didn't outlaw
realism, but any artist of the time who wished to be noticed got the message very clearly: do not paint
in the old way anymore. If you do, we won't like you.
I will be told that was a blessing: we didn't want any more of that Nazi realism or Communist realism.
We didn't want that arid, stiff, poster-art, selling the party-line. But again, that kind of argument creates
the illusion of only two possibilities. You are led to believe that you must either promote poster-art
realism that glorifies the State, or you must promote Modernism. I beg you to remember that all of the
high realism before 1900 falls into neither category. In arguing against Modernism, I am not
promoting Soviet realism or Nazi illustration. The mainline argument in the book, like the argument of
the 20th century, is a finessed argument. It presents the choice as being between one of two categories,
and real art isn't in either category.
Barnett Newman
Jackson Pollock
But let us return to Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism was chosen as the lead for the
book for the same reason it was chosen as the lead for the CIA. Since the decadence of AE is far less
obvious than the decadence of most other Modern Art, the CIA and Saunders can dodge the decadence
question. Most people think of decadence in terms of moral decadence. If they even know what
aesthetic decadence is, it doesn't mean anything to them. So most readers will look at a Pollock and
say, “well, I don't like it, but I don't see how it is decadent. If the CIA wants to promote that to combat
Communism, OK.” Most readers won't understand why the Soviets were saying AE was decadent,
why they were banning art, or why the US was promoting it. As long as the CIA can spin this as some
patriotic crusade, most people will give them a pass.
But what Saunders and the CIA are leaving out is the other art of the 20th century, which Intelligence
also promoted. Saunders keeps your eyes on Pollock and Rothko, and off Duchamp, Manzoni,
Fontana, Nitsch, Quinn, Hirst, and the Chapman Brothers. Since thousands of promoted 20th century
artists—including many in 1950's and 60's—have explicitly and vocally been trying to be both morally
and aesthetically decadent, it must look odd to argue that Modern art is not decadent—as Saunders
does in chapter 16. It is a mystery to me how 20th century art can be promoted as gloriously decadent
for 90 years, but when a Congressman or Harry Truman says he doesn't like it because it is decadent, he
is a “philistine.”
Duchamp
Manzoni
Hirst
[I can't even show you Nitsch, since you may have just eaten. If you search on him, be warned][I have to agree with Miles on Nitsch,the disgust level is very high D.C]
When the Soviets say this art is decadent, they are out-of-touch and backwards and regressive and antidemocratic.
No, they have just read the artists' own press releases, where they brag about how decadent they are.
Painters and writers have been bragging about their decadence since the time of Baudelaire, so when
we see historians like Saunders clicking their tongues at those who have found it decadent, we can only
laugh.
This is not to say that I think Duchamp or any of the rest should have been banned. They should have
just been ignored. Since it is too late for that, they must be exposed for what they were: closeted
fascists destroying art on purpose, at the behest of even more closeted masters in Intelligence.
I must say this goes for the Abstract Expressionists as well as the Dadaists before them and the
post moderns after them. Although they may not have been as decadent as some, they were still
fascists. Pollock, Motherwell, Calder and Baziotes were all members of the American Committee for
Cultural Freedom [A.C.C.F], which was an Orwellian name for yet another CIA organization. The
figurative artist Ben Shahn called it the A.C.C.Fuck. Although its stated purpose was to promote art as
free expression, it actual purpose was to promote the art the Rockefeller's had invested in, and since
these member/artists had been invested in, they were happy to join that promotion. However, this
promotion also entailed the anti-promotion of everything else, so that abstract painting became the new
religion. As Saunders puts it,
The Museum of Modern Art, described by one critic as the “over geared cartel of Modernism,” held tenaciously to
its executive role in manufacturing a history for Abstract Expressionism. Ordered and systematic, this history
reduced what had once been provocative and strange to an academic formula, a received mannerism, an art
officiel.
I encourage you to have that quote in mind as you re-read my under title quote from Eisenhower.
Rather than being the antithesis of propaganda or slave art, the art of the 1950's (and after) was actually
its perfect representation. It was part of a “manufactured history” promoted by a cartel. It was “official
art.” Not only was it promoted by the state, but it was promoted covertly by a secret state agency. If
nothing illegal or unseemly was going on here, why keep it all in the dark?
New York Times art critic John Canaday said, “an unknown artist trying to exhibit in New York
couldn't find a gallery unless he was painting in a mode derived from one or another member of the
New York School [Abstract Expressionism].” And Peggy Guggenheim—a Rockefeller competitor—
apparently had an even better grasp of the situation, saying “the entire art movement had become an
enormous business venture.” [p. 274].
Since these leading artists of the New York School like Pollock and Motherwell were members of C.I.A
organizations, they could not have been on any “long leash.” These were dogs leading their masters,
yapping and leaping. Almost a decade before the A.C.C.F, Rothko and Gottlieb had founded the
Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in 1940, which was already fiercely anticommunist before
the US declared war on Japan. “Rothko and Gottlieb led these efforts to destroy Communist presence
in the art world.” [p. 277] This by itself proves two things. One, in earlier chapters, C.I.A agents like
Tom Braden told us that the U.S had secretly promoted leftist artists during the Cold War to fight
Communism. This was supposed to be ironic or something, but it turns out to be false. The few artists
that had ever been red or pink hadn't been pink since the 1920's. The ones sold to us as leftist after
W.W.II weren't leftists then, and weren't leftists before the war. It wasn't McCarthy who turned them, or
new-found patriotism. It was the desire to get noticed by the Rockefeller's and MoMA. Rothko and
Gottlieb were acting as little McCarthy's in 1940, purging the art world of opposition. So much for freedom of expression. Two, we were also sold the idea that this art propaganda only started after the
war, as part of the Cold War. But we see that isn't true, either. If Rothko and Gottlieb were founding an
anti-Communist artist organization in 1940, then this whole program couldn't have been started after
the war or by the C.I.A. There was clearly covert promotion of Modern art before the war, by pre-C.I.A
intelligence as well as by MoMA.
So the argument of Saunders and the C.I.A doesn't add up. Neither does their attack on Truman and the
post-war Congress. Although I normally don't have much use for Harry Truman, when he says Modern
art looks pathetic compared to Rembrandt or Holbein, I can only agree. Saunders quotes him as saying,
The Dutch masters make our own modern day daubers and ham and egg men look just what they are.
That is simply a true statement. Saunders doesn't try to refute it by any cogent argument or direct
comparison, putting a Pollock next to a Rembrandt, for instance. She only jumps immediately into
this:
Those European vanguardists who had fled the Fascist jackboot were now startled to find themselves in an
America where modernism was once again being kicked about. This was, of course, consistent with the cultural
fundamentalism of figures like McCarthy, and part of the confusing process by which America, whilst advocating
freedom of expression abroad, seemed to begrudge such freedoms at home.
I almost doubt that Saunders wrote those particular sentences. Frankly, I would bet they were inserted
into her draft at some point by Intelligence. Most of Saunders' book is on or least near the mark, and
even where it is off she in only subtly turning you from the truth. But here, all subtlety is gone. The
fact that Truman preferred Rembrandt to Pollock has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy
and his Communist witch hunts. Truman didn't dislike Pollock or any of the others because they were
Communists. He says it very clearly in his own words: he dislikes them because they don't impress
him in any way as artists.
Beyond that, promotion of the Abstract Expressionists or other Moderns had absolutely nothing to do
with freedom of expression. I am all for freedom of expression, and I think all people who are creating
art for their own purposes should be allowed to do it. But that doesn't mean I think they should be
promoted by the CIA just because they have done it, or made rich and famous because they have done
it.
Remember, freedom of expression applies to the audience as well. The audience should be free to
express their dislike for Modernism if they honestly do dislike it, without being attacked as philistines.
Saunders—or whoever wrote those sentences—is implying that those like Truman who disliked
Modernism were “kicking it about” or denying the artists freedom to create. But neither Truman nor
anyone else ever suggested Modernism should be banned. Almost without exception, those in
Congress or in the press who were against Modernism in the early years were simply making the
argument that it shouldn't be promoted with tax dollars. They thought the US should either be
promoting really fine art or no art at all. There is no “jackboot” involved in either idea. In reality, the
jackboot involved is in forcing people to like Modernism when they don't: taking their tax dollars under
the threat of jail, then spending that money to promote art they strongly dislike, as part of expensive
propaganda initiatives their representatives haven't voted on. That is what is anti-democratic.
The jackboot is also involved in funding decades of domestic propaganda for Modernism in magazines,
trade journals, professional journals, academic journals, books, TV, and film. The jackboot is involved
in telling several generations of art students they cannot create any realism and be taken seriously. The
jackboot is involved in calling the art market pluralistic and free, and then consciously excluding any
form of realism from that market for many decades. The jackboot is involved in a century of bold lies,
by which artists and the public are told Modernism is being promoted to advance freedom, encourage
expression, celebrate diversity, and air important political issues, when in fact we find the opposite has
always been true. After the unmasking, we see that Modernism was promoted mainly to protect the
investments of the Rockefellers, but that when there was an agenda beyond that purely financial one, it
was an agenda of destabilization, stupefaction, liquefaction, misdirection, and obliteration. It was the
century-long program of taking everything solid in art, atomizing it, and selling us back the fragments
at a vicious mark-up.
Large parts of chapter 16 in Saunders' book look to have been inserted later by external hands. Great
swaths of it don't even parse like her common sentence structure. On p. 253, we get this:
This was not a propitious time for modernists. Most vulnerable to the attacks of the Dondero caucus [in the
Congress] was a group of artists that emerged in the late 1940s as the Abstract Expressionists. . . . They were
linked by a similar past: most of them had worked for the Federal Arts Project under Roosevelt's New Deal,
producing subsidized art for the government and getting involved in left-wing politics.
The problem with that argument is that Congress was almost as marginalized in the late 1940's as now.
No one was listening to Rep. Dondero or anyone else in Congress. Then as now, Congress was just a
backboard against which Intelligence hit its tennis balls. Saunders admits that on the next few pages,
where we are reminded that by 1946, a whole gaggle of critics (already being underwritten by the
Rockefeller's in various ways) were praising these artists to the skies. It is these critics who were being
read by academics and gullible progressives. Those interested in art weren't reading the Congressional
record, they were reading Partisan Review and Commentary and the Nation—and assuming, naively,
that these magazines were independent. Saunders also admits that Pollock got his center spread in Life
Magazine in 1949 thanks to the CIA pressuring Henry Luce. So to say this was “not a propitious time
for Modernists” is just hooey.
And we see from the quote above that other things in this chapter don't add up. Although all bullets for
the book tell us it blows the whistle on CIA influence after the war, it is clear these people were being
promoted and subsidized before the war and before the CIA was ever founded. Look again, these
artists were “subsidized” under the New Deal. The New Deal was before the war, in the 1930's. As
another example, we know Clement Greenberg was promoting Modernism fiercely before the war, and
again, Saunders admits it, quoting from his “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” article of 1939 in the Partisan
Review. That is before the war and before the CIA, so none of this started in 1947. Despite the fact
that Partisan Review and Greenberg were saying the same things—at least regarding art—in 1948 that
they were saying in the 1930's, why are we supposed to believe they were bought in the 1940's and
independent in the 1930's? It is pretty obvious they were bought all along. After 1947, the Rockefeller's
paid Greenberg and Partisan Review via the CIA; before that they paid them directly.
Although we now know Greenberg was just a puppet, he was pathetic, talent less puppet. And if I hear
one more time about how Greenberg was a “brawling, boozing, one-man slug fest,” I think I am going
to cough up a lung. Greenberg was a short, bald, paunchy little creep even when he was young, and he
looks like the kind of guy who only punched women and those in lower weight classes.*
My favorite story is how Greenberg started shoving the tiny Max Ernst, only to get clocked by the long-armed Nicholas Calas. In 1961, the 52 year old Greenberg got caught with a left jab from the 57
year old de Kooning and wasn't able to respond. From my research, none of these fights ever got past
one punch, so as usual it looks like a lot of posturing by armchair critics and fighters. Despite the fact
that Greenberg is a minor character in her book, Saunders implies he,of all the people who pulled the
Rockefeller oars (except possibly the Trillings)—was the most unctuous, the most reviled, and the most
insincere. Which gives me an opening I missed the first time I counter-critiqued “Avant-Garde and
Kitsch.” Coming to Greenberg from the assumption that Modernism was trying to sell itself as leftist
and progressive, I hadn't been able to understand his assertion that the avant garde “belonged to the
ruling class,” or that “it had always remained attached to this ruling class by an umbilical cord of
gold.” But now that I understand that Greenberg was actually a conservative and a fascist, I see what
he means. He is constructing a subtle apologia for his groveling at the feet of the Rockefeller's. Art
had always belonged to the ruling class, according to Greenberg, so why should he or his artists have
any qualms about accepting their gold?
Leaving aside the moral or political aspects of that idea, we see a huge contradiction here. If the avant
garde belongs to the ruling class, then the famous division of the avant garde from old “aristocratic” art
evaporates, doesn't it? This division—which Greenberg helped to manufacture—has been one of the
defining divisions of the century, being used to jettison any and all realism from the new definitions. I
was personally excluded from the upper echelons of contemporary art based on that manufactured
division. I was told my art was “aristocratic” and therefore outmoded, based only on its use of old
forms and conventions—like figuration, representation, and attention to technique. But if both the old
art and the new art “belong to the upper class,” then this slur against realism collapses. The old art is
then not frowned upon because it is “aristocratic.” It is frowned upon because the new aristocrats like
Rockefeller choose to frown on it. An art that “belongs” to the elite is then at the mercy of the elite. If
they decide to redefine art to suit their portfolios, artists and critics can only go along. This is what
Greenberg is really saying, in his nearly illegible way.
But back to Saunders' book. The more I reread chapter 16, the more it looks like a palimpsest, written
over and written over again. It undercuts itself and then the undercut is re-undercut. We see this most
clearly in the way Pollock is dealt with. Although the main line of the book would lead most people to
dismiss Pollock as a CIA creation, someone underneath the top layer of this book is trying to save him
with all the rest. We hear the tired superlatives once again: that Pollock was the great American painter
[so says Budd Hopkins], the Hemingway of painting, the real American, the cowboy, the hard-talking
heavy drinker with “the grittiness of Marlon Brando and the brooding rebelliousness of James Dean.”
But then that sales pitch is destroyed in one sentence, where we are reminded that all of this is bunk:
Pollock couldn't ride a horse and left Wyoming as a child. And this reminds us he was also terrorized
by self-doubt (hence the drinking), couldn't hold his booze, and—like Greenberg—was short, bald and
unattractive. Pollock had nothing in common—even on the surface—with Marlon Brando or James
Dean, much less John Wayne. He was neither a rebel nor a tough guy, spending his afternoons—like
Woody Allen—in therapy. He saw his drip period as a lark and a marketing ploy, and felt guilty for the
undeserved fame. He preferred his earlier work, and wished he were allowed to pursue figuration.
This is the reason he went off the wagon after the Hans Namuth photo shoot in 1950 and quit doing the
drip paintings. The photo shoot made him feel like a big phony.
Which brings us to a curious outcome of my research on Pollock. Turns out Pollock spent some time
pursuing Theosophy, attending retreats in California with Krishnamurti. That of course brings us back
to the paper that started all this, where I show that Theosophy was founded as a joint project of
US/Russian Intelligence. So even before Modernism was infiltrated by the CIA, it had long been
infiltrated by Intelligence through Theosophy and its offshoots. Other artists who were influenced by
Theosophy include Rothko, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Gauguin, Itten, Marc, Pasternak, Blok,
Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Klee, Gropius, Delauney, Scriabin, and Schoenberg. **
Since Theosophy was founded in 1875, it would seem difficult to connect it to the Rockefeller's. The
Rockefeller fortune was just being made at that time, and most assume the first Rockefeller was too
busy creating his monopoly to bother with spiritualism. But those who assume this would be wrong.
Rockefeller not only followed Vivekananda in the 1890's, he is one of the ones who brought him here.
Vivekananda, like Krishnamurti, was one of the early importations of the Theosophists. What most
people don't know is that Vivekananda was a freemason. It is not widely publicized, but it is admitted
even at Wikipedia. He was educated at the General Assembly's Institution, now known as the Scottish
Church College. This is curious, since this college taught a “liberal Western” education.
Vivekananda's favorite professor was from Trinity College. Also of interest is the fact that when
Vivekananda came to the US for the first time in 1893, he went straight to Harvard and the waiting
arms of William James. See my previous papers for the importance of that fact. To get you started,
remember that James was a Theosophist and a mentor of Gertrude Stein.
But back to Saunders' book. Here's another strange contradiction in chapter 16. On page 256, we learn
of an exhibition in 1947 called “Advancing American Art.” We are told that speeches in Congress
killed it after it got to Europe. This is supposed to be evidence of the power of the reactionaries in the
House, including Rep. Dondero. But Saunders, in the previous paragraph, had just admitted that the
show—which included works by O'Keefe, Gottlieb and Gorky—had already been to Paris and Prague,
where it was “a major success.” It was such a success, we are told, that the Russians had to
immediately organize a competing exhibition. So we see the contradiction already. We are told that
Congressmen killed the show, but if they had killed it, it would never have left New York. It opened
first at MoMA before moving to Europe, and a proper “killing” would have prevented it from ever
being shown at all, here or abroad.
What we learn if we delve deeper is that Congress voted funds for the show in the amount of $50,000.
With that money, 79 paintings were bought, and the funds also had to include travel expenses to Europe
and Latin America. Which means the average price paid for an oil painting was about $500. Since
most were bought through galleries, each artist got about $250. We are told the itinerary after Prague
included Budapest and an “undetermined venue in Poland.” That sounds fishy to me, since what major
art exhibition goes to Europe without a firm itinerary? The “great success” in Prague also turns out to
be pushed, since it is admitted that the opening attracted 1,000 visitors. That sounds pretty paltry to
me, considering the show was supposed to have received advanced promotion from critics and
accolades from Czech President Benes. If the President was in favor of the exhibition, why wasn't it
shown at one of the National Gallery venues in Prague? Why was it relegated to an art cooperative?
The story completely unwinds when Saunders admits that after the show was “canceled,” the paintings
were sold off at a 95% discount as surplus government property. What? That means each painting
fetched about $25 on the open market! Two questions are begged by that: 1) if the exhibitions were
such a success, why was no one interested in buying this “exciting new work”? We know most of the
lots went to small museums in Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama. If the works were so good, why
didn't any of the major museums bid on them? Apparently it wasn't only Truman who didn't care for
this work. The directors of 99% of the museums in the country also passed, even at a bid of $25. 2) If
the government and the CIA believed so strongly in Modernism, why did they sell off these works for
almost nothing? The CIA agents themselves should have been bidding these works up into the
thousands, right? No. The CIA believed in Modernism to the tune of less than $25, and the rest is
bluff.
But of course this means the whole story was manufactured. It wasn't the “philistinism” of Truman or
Dondero or Busbey that killed this show. That story was created after the fact as spin. The show went
to Europe and Latin America as planned and bombed on its own lack of merits. If the show really had
so much critical and academic support back in the US, the paintings would have sold to critics and
academics. Anyone can afford $25 for a painting, even a lowly art critic.
The reason these early shows failed while later shows didn't is that the CIA hadn't yet assumed total
control of the press in 1946. Some magazines and newspapers were still printing honest opinion at that
time, which obviously got in the way of the propaganda machine. But within a couple of years, that
changed completely. Whereas Hearst's New York Journal-American and LOOK magazine had panned
the show in 1946, the CIA soon brought them on board. And once the media was speaking with one
voice, it didn't matter what Truman or any Congressman thought. The newspapers could be instructed
not to report it, or to report it with a strong spin. If the newspapers got a hundred letters from readers
panning the show and one extolling it, they would print the one and throw the other hundred in the
trash. That is how things work to this day.
We see another bold contradiction on page 258, which starts off, “Supporting left-wing artists was
familiar territory for the Rockefellers.” Saunders then repeats the story we all know about Diego
Rivera being hired to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center. Rivera paints Lenin into the mural, Nelson
Rockefeller asks him to remove it, Rivera refuses, and Rockefeller pays him off and destroys the mural
with jackhammers. Saunders gives us the CIA spin here, which is that despite that, the Rockefellers
continued to support left-wing artists. Of course she doesn't pursue the obvious conclusion here, which
is that the Rockefellers promote left-wing artists only as long as “left-wing” means “Modern.” If leftwing
has any real political meaning—as in supporting either Socialism or Republicanism—the
Rockefellers run like the wind. They only support lefties that aren't really lefties. All the Rockefeller
artists who are sold as lefties turn out on closer inspection to be righties sold as lefties. They are
fascists posing as Marxists. In my previous papers we saw the same thing with Ezra Pound and many
others. Sometimes, as with Pound, the fascists posing as Marxists then pose as fascists, just to be sure
you are well and permanently confused.
On page 261, the tug of war between Saunders and her invisible re-writers continues, as she re-leaks
the information that most of MoMA's trustees/directors/executives are from Intelligence, the invisible
writers come on the page and spin that, and then she comes back and despins it. For the reader, the
entire chapter is like riding a yo-yo. We are told that in addition to Nelson Rockefeller, the
Intelligence/trustees included John Whitney, William Burden, Rene d'Harnoncourt, William Paley,
Joseph Verner Reed, Porter McCray, Gardner Cowles, Junkie Fleischmann, Cass Canfield, Oveta
Hobby, and Tom Braden. And although she lists the actual links to Intelligence, the invisible writer
then pops in and says,
Of course it could be argued that this congruity revealed nothing more than the nature of American power at the time. Just because these people knew each other, and just because they were socially (and even formally)
enjoined to the CIA, doesn't mean that they were co-conspirators in the promotion of the new American art.
What? Yes, that is exactly what it means, Buddy. You have to be kidding me with sentences like that.
Saunders is too good a writer to be caught writing that. “Congruity”? “Socially enjoined to the CIA”?
What the fuck does that mean? Is the CIA now a cotillion? Saying that just because these people were
in the CIA and running MoMA doesn't mean the CIA was running MoMA is like saying that just
because these clothes are on my body doesn't mean I am wearing them. It is the dastardly attempt to
dodge the definition of words. Only an organization as untouchable as the CIA would even think to put
such an argument in print.
The invisible writer is so confident, he next sends you to Eva Cockcroft's 1974 article in Artforum—
which is of course one of Saunders' primary sources for this 1999 book—but does nothing to spin it
except to preface it as a “rumor.” But since the CIA's Tom Braden has since confirmed large parts of
that article, and since documents are referenced showing these people's official links to Intelligence and
the government, none of this is a rumor, and hasn't been for decades. In fact, that is why Saunders'
book was allowed to go to press, and why it was allowed to be reviewed by major media outlets in
Great Britain: the CIA needed to spin it, because it was now common knowledge. You don't need to
spin rumor, since you can dismiss it as rumor. You only need to spin things that are documented and
making the rounds.
The confidence of the invisible writer is again apparent when he allows Saunders back on the page
immediately to undercut him. As proof that MoMA's support for Abstract Expressionism was not
linked to the CIA or the Cold War, Michael Kimmelman is quoted from 1994 telling us that MoMA
didn't get involved in collecting or showing Abstract Expressionism until the late 1950's. But Saunders
comes back in the next sentence to show that is an outright lie. She proves that not only was
Kimmelman paid to say that by MoMA, but that it is easily refuted by the record. Saunders quotes
from the Museum's own catalogs to show that it had been collecting all the big names since 1941. She
finds a particularly damning entry in 1944, in which the Museum sold off “certain of its 19th century
works” to buy more Pollocks, Motherwells, and Mattas.
In probably the last attack of name artists upon an American museum, we see in 1952 a group of fifty
including realists Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield and Jack Levine publishing a “Reality
Manifesto” against MoMA, accusing it of propping up unpopular art for “dogmatic” reasons. Reading
the manifesto, it is clear these artists had no idea of the real reason this art was being promoted. Since
my realist friends and I still had no idea until recently, this is not surprising. The Rockefellers and CIA
were not unmasked until the mid 1970's, and then only partially. Since that unmasking was in
Artforum, no realist would have been expected to see it. They were unmasked again in 1995 by
Saunders, but that was in London, and you could count the number of outspoken realists there on one
hand. I would have expected to hear something from the Stuckists on this, but haven't. The article at
the Independent seems to have only hit the web recently, and that is where I discovered it. I don't know
of any realist since Thomas Hart Benton who is as outspoken as I am, so I suppose it is up to me to lead
the first serious charge since 1952.
Motherwell
Matta
As part of that charge, we can borrow some firepower from Ad Reinhardt, a painter of little talent from
the time in question, who we would have liked to have sicced on Clement Greenberg. Reinhardt would
have pounded him into a meaty pulp. Reinhardt was a sort of anti-Agnes Martin, being famous for his
all black canvases. He was also the anti-Agnes in that while she was semi-catatonic, he was a volcano.
He claimed to be painting the “last paintings that anyone can paint,” so he was as full of air as the next
Abstract Expressionist; but he is useful at least as a provider of interesting quotes against his fellow
airmen. Reinhardt called Rothko a “Vogue magazine cold-water-flat-fauve,” and Pollock a “Harper's
Bazaar bum.” Barnett Newman was “the avant-garde huckster-handicraftsman and educational
shopkeeper.” He called art criticism “pigeon droolings” and ridiculed Clement Greenberg as a phony.
He said the museum should not be a “counting house or amusement center,” which means he would not
be comfortable in the Whitney, Guggenheim, MoMA, Pompidou, Tate or Saatchi Gallery. You almost
have to like the guy, no matter what you think of his art. Although not much of a painter, he was at
least not a boot licker of the elite, and he was the only Modern artist to participate in the March on
Washington for black rights in 1963. We may suppose the others were polishing their medals.
Of course, this is the reason you haven't heard of Reinhardt before now, despite the fact he was
producing pretty much the same thing as everyone else. The others kept quiet and just pissed in the
fireplace or something. He was foolish enough to think he was actually a real person, and therefore the
owner of his own life.
To wrap this up, let us return to the book. Russell Lynes gives us a good quote to end with:
The Museum now had, and was delighted to have, the whole world (or at least the whole world outside the Iron
Curtain) in which to proselytize—though this time the exportable religion was home-grown rather than what been
in the past its primary message, the importable faith from Europe.
That is from his history of MoMA, and he is talking about the year 1950. It was upon reading this
unparsable sentence that I finally figured out what the European exhibitions were all about. It wasn't
about fighting Communism or showcasing democracy. It was about expanding the market. In order to
drive the prices of their investments up, the Rockefeller's needed to manipulate not just the US market,
but the European market as well. Since the population of Europe was at that time about 3 times that of
the US, the Rockefeller's could quadruple their market for new art by expanding operations into Europe.
Until the end of the war, Europe was too unstable for anyone to think of pursuing art markets there, but
as soon as hostilities ended, the Rockefeller's saw their opening. Hiding this move under the flag was
the perfect cover. Samuel Johnson's “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” fits this ploy like a
hand in a glove.
Since the recent NSA scandals have proven that we are being watched at all times, I will turn straight
into the camera for this final paragraph, talking to the agents directly. It occurs to me you may be as
surprised as all my other readers to discover the true story behind Modern art. Perhaps you have never
cared enough about art to look closely; or perhaps you cared but—like me—just couldn't see through
the many layers of veils. I beg you to ask yourself if this is really what you signed on for. Maybe you
feel just as used as the rest of us. Since I have shown that patriotism was just a cloak here, your
patriotism doesn't matter. Art history wasn't killed on the altar of patriotism or US political interests, it
was killed only to enrich people that were already billionaires. You may say, “You are right, I don't
care about art. Its loss means nothing to me.” So substitute what you do care for instead of art. For the
truth is, everything is being destroyed to enrich those who are already billionaires, and the destruction
is always justified under the cloak of patriotism. Our health is being destroyed, the oceans are being
destroyed, the fertility of the land is being destroyed, our water quality is being destroyed, our privacy
is being destroyed, our very self-determination is being destroyed, and in each case those doing the
destroying are hiding behind the flag. So I ask again, is this what you signed on for? It isn't what I
signed on for when I squeezed through the birth canal.
*Like theater critic Lionel Abel, who was about 5'5”. It takes a real macho man to attack a theater critic. After that,
Greenberg went out and stole cookies from a girl scout.
** This link tying the Moderns to Theosophy is to a reprint of another article by Frances Stonor Saunders, although I
wasn't aware of it until later. The website does not attribute the article, but it is from a BBC4 program book called
Hidden Hands. According to the linked website, the article was on the web for a while but was later wiped. Curious,
since we saw that Saunders' 1995 Independent article was also wiped from the web for about 15 years.
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