Franz kline black subjectivity10/4/2023 If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. “I’d much rather they spent money on Abstract Expressionism than toppling left-wing dictators.”Īlastair Sooke is art critic of The Daily Telegraph. Still, whatever the truth of the extent of the CIA’s financial involvement with Abstract Expressionism, Anfam believes that it was “the best thing the institution ever paid for”. This isn’t to say, of course, that the artists themselves were complicit with the CIA, or even aware that it was funding Abstract Expressionist exhibitions. “America was the land of the free, whereas Russia was locked up, culturally speaking,” Anfam says, characterising the perception that the CIA wished to foster during the Cold War. And isn’t it interesting that the federal government at the time considered Abstract Expressionism a Communist plot to undermine American society?”Īs a result, the movement was a useful foil to Russia’s official Soviet Realist style, which championed representative painting. Surely, by now, something – anything – would have emerged. I haven’t seen a single fact that indicates there was this kind of collusion. Speaking to me by phone from his apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, he said: “There was absolutely no involvement of any government agency. According to Irving Sandler, who is now 91, it is totally untrue. So did Thomas Braden, who directed cultural activities at the CIA: prior to joining “the Company”, he was MoMA’s executive secretary.Įven today, however, the story of the CIA’s involvement with Abstract Expressionism remains contentious. Nelson Rockefeller, the president of MoMA during the ‘40s and ‘50s, had close ties with the US intelligence community. Saunders also highlighted links between the CIA and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which was instrumental in promoting Abstract Expressionism. “In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years,” she wrote. In 1999, the British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders published a book about the CIA and the “cultural Cold War” in which she asserted: “Abstract Expressionism was being deployed as a Cold War weapon.” A synthesis of her argument is available online, in an article that she wrote for the Independent newspaper in 1995. Could it be that the CIA also had a hand in promoting Abstract Expressionism on the world stage? Was Pollock, wittingly or not, a propagandist for the US government?Ī number of essays, articles and books followed Kozloff’s piece, all arguing that the CIA had somehow manipulated Abstract Expressionism. As a result, people started to become suspicious. A few years before they were published, in 1967, the New York Times had revealed that the liberal anti-Communist magazine Encounter had been indirectly funded by the CIA. They were the opposite of the Cold Warriors.”ĭespite this, however, Kozloff’s ideas took hold. So here you had this nexus of non-conformist artists, who were completely alienated from American culture. Barnett Newman was a declared anarchist – he wrote an introduction to Kropotkin’s book on anarchism. According to David Anfam, co-curator of the Royal Academy exhibition, “Rothko said he was an anarchist. Pollock once said that everyone at his high school in Los Angeles thought he was a “rotten rebel from Russia”. After all, most of the Abstract Expressionists were volatile outsiders. In many ways, the idea seemed preposterous. In 1957, a year after Pollock’s death in a car crash, the Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for his Autumn Rhythm – an unprecedented sum of money for a painting by a contemporary artist at the time. By the ‘50s, it was generally accepted that the most exciting advances in painting and sculpture were taking place in New York rather than Paris. Although the artists associated with it took a long time to find their signature styles, once the movement had crystallised, by the late ‘40s, it rapidly achieved first notoriety and then respect. One of the most remarkable things about Abstract Expressionism was the speed with which it rose to international prominence. It is currently the subject of a major exhibition, featuring 164 artworks by 30 artists (including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko), at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Together, they formed a movement that became known, in time, as Abstract Expressionism. A strange but irresistible energy started to crackle across the city, as artists who had struggled for years in poverty and obscurity suddenly found self-confidence and success. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, something exciting happened in the art world in New York.
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