In 1946, the United States State Department purchased 79 paintings from American Modern artists and mounted an exhibition called “Advancing American Art” that traveled through western Europe and Latin America. The exhibition included works by one of the first prominent female American artists, Georgia O’Keeffe, and by Jacob Lawrence, whose works chronicled the struggles of Black Americans. The intent was to promote the image of the U.S. as a cultural haven for freedom of expression. The State Department’s was trying to counter Communist Russia’s claim that the U.S. was a cultural wasteland. Unlike the U.S., Russia could lay claim to centuries of literary, and artistic excellence including work by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Kandinsky, and they ridiculed the U.S. as the home of Walt Disney and Coca Cola.
In 1947, the year I was born, Look Magazine published an article questioning why U.S. tax dollars were being spent on such confusing pieces of art and questioned if this junk could even be considered “Art.” In the same year president Harry Truman took a look at Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s painting Circus Girl Resting, which was included in the exhibit, and said, “If this is art, I’m a Hottentot,” managing in one statement to appear both uncultured and racist. In Congress, Republican Representatives worried that some of these artists were Communist sympathizers, and by stoking the public’s fear they guaranteed that “Advancing American Art” was brought home early, I have always known I was an artist since I could say the word “artist,” and this was the art environment I was born into.
Incidentally, Yasuo Kuniyoshi was a Japanese artist who immigrated to the U.S. in 1906. He taught at the Art Students League in New York, where I studied in 1965, twelve years after his death. And he lived in Woodstock which is on the western border of Saugerties where I live.
In contrast to the article in Look, the New Yorker published an article defending American Modern Art because it demonstrated to the world that in America artists were free to create, whether you liked their work or not! At the same time, in the Soviet Union, artists worked in the Social Realist style that promoted Communist ideals. This was seen in the West as a form of government sponsored propaganda. Obviously, Modern art would be a valuable tool in the cold war with the Soviets. So, the newly formed CIA stepped in to use government funds to promote Modern art covertly without drawing the attention of conservative politicians. In other words, they wanted to make American art a form of government sponsored propaganda.
After World II, the CIA grew out of the Office of Strategic Services, which was the U.S. wartime intelligence apparatus. One of the richest men in America, John Hay Whitney, had been an OSS operative during the war. He was also a major promoter of the arts, the president of the Museum of Modern Art since 1941, and chairman of the board of trustees since 1946. With Winey as head, MOMA worked closely with the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom and accepted CIA funding to promote pro-capitalist art during the propaganda war with the Soviets. The artists that were chosen were members of the New York movement called Abstract Expressionism, such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Unlike European Expressionism, which contained social criticism, and unlike the works included in “Advancing American Art,” which had historic and literary content, the paintings of these artists were nonobjective, meaning that they had no subject matter, just paint on canvas. Nelson Rockefeller another oligarch, art patron, and a former president of MOMA, who also had ties to the CIA, liked to call it “Free Enterprise Painting.”
Through MOMA the CIA sponsored exhibitions of Abstract Expressionists throughout the world including in Paris and Venice. They also used their extensive network of international publications to celebrate the art movement through art critics, who were on their payroll. One of these critics, the influential Clement Greenberg, strongly supported Jackson Pollock’s work. It fit well with Greenberg’s view of art history as a progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content. He believed that paintings should abandon any connection to imagery or to the illusion of depth, that it should be true to its flat surface. Once Pollock abandoned even brushstrokes and dripped the paint on his canvases, Greenberg extolled Pollock’s work as the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition.
The CIA did not stop there. They also secretly funded operatives to invest in Abstract Expressionism and greatly inflate their value. Once the paintings were selling for high prices legitimate collectors began to see these works as valuable investments and the prices kept rising. The once starving abstract painters were then eating lobster and drinking imported wine. Jackson Pollock also did the investors a favor by killing himself in a drunken driving accident in 1956 thereby assuring a limited supply of his work. Unlike the other artists in the movement, however, Pollock’s early death stopped him from benefitting from the high prices his paintings would later demand. Today, his paintings are some of the most expensive in the world and have sold for up to 200 million dollars, but in his lifetime, he never received more than $10,000 for a painting.
Abstract Expressionism became a vehicle for corporate investment. It allowed corporations to display large expensive works at their headquarters which showed their good taste without having to worry that they would contain messy literary comments that might be offensive to some. The CIA’s involvement in the art world was kept secret until a New York Times article in 1966 began to expose the information. But even today it is not well known.
As I mentioned above, I have always been an artist. By the time I was seven years old I was already drawing realistically. I would copy pictures in comic books, draw the nick-nacks around the house, or the trees behind the house. All through elementary school I was the school artist. As I graduated from one grade to the next, my old teacher would introduce me to my new teacher as the class artist and the one who designs the bulletin boards. Also, once I learned on TV that there were such things as art museums, I talked my parents into taking me to New York to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I began to learn about art history. As I got older, I continued visiting the museum as often as could. I remember waiting in line for hours in the snow outside the Met in 1963 to go inside and get a brief viewing of the Mona Lisa. But I also began visiting the Museum of Modern Art. Where I learned about Van Gogh, Gauguin, the impressionists, Picasso, the Mexican mural painters, and the Abstract Expressionists.
In Passaic Valley Regional High School in the early 1960s I was again the “school artist.” I created a mural for the school and worked on scenery for plays. Every year I won the local savings bank competition, all the art prizes that the school offered, and by my senior year I won a Nation Art Award and was included in an exhibition in New York City, where I met other High School artist from around the country.
In High School. besides figurative work I began to experiment with nonobjective abstraction. Of the three Abstract Expressionists I mentioned above, I most admired the work of Franz Kline, His work consisted of dynamic intelligent compositions mostly created by large black brush strokes on a white canvas, like an abstract form of Chinese calligraphy. Studying his work helped me while I was learning the formal elements of composition.
Of the three abstract artists, the one I was least interested in was Jackson Pollock. Unlike other painters his compositions were cluttered and there was no clear top or bottom. Yet Pollock was getting the most attention. It seemed the more the public hated his work, comparing it to something done by an ape or to the accidental drippings on a house painter’s drop cloth, and although Critics like Robert Coates derided his works as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless,” the more other art critics such as Clement Greenberg praised it.
Pollock invited this comparison to a drop cloth by dripping his paint from every side on an unstretched canvas laying on the floor, which is why there was no top or bottom to the paintings and allowed Time Magazine to mock him as “Jack the Dripper.” He also made things worse by using house paint. I remember seeing an exhibition of Pollock’s large, eight feet to eighteen feet, wide canvases at MOMA in the late 1960s. To preserve them the art preservationists had to enclose them in large airless plexiglass boxes. I could see that paint chips as well as paint tube caps and screws had fallen off the canvas and collected at the bottom of the box. He was no craftsman.
You may think that from this discussion so far that I absolutely hate Pollock’s work. But that is not the case. In the late 1960s there was an article in Art News Magazine with photos of the home of one Pollock’s collectors. The collector had hung his Pollock collection throughout his house, and between the Pollock canvases he hung examples from his extensive collection of Persian rugs. The two worked together so well that I began to see that the Pollocks were decorative abstractions like the rugs. The paintings are pleasant decorative abstractions, and with no top or bottom, maybe they should have been displayed on the floor. But they were not works of rare genius or the culmination of Western art. If they were the culmination Western art would be dead, because there is nowhere to go beyond dripping paint with no message in mind. They were also obscenely overpriced.
The biggest problem with Pollock’s work is that the general public could not understand why these paintings that said nothing were being held up as high art. It created a chasm between the art world and everyone else. Meanwhile, Norman Rockwell was greatly admired as an example of artistic talent by the public, and so the art alite used Rockwell as an example of low brow art.
As an art major in college, I realized that the art students were being encouraged to develop a sense of superiority about their aesthetic taste that separated them from almost everyone else in American culture. From that viewpoint, they could look down on the public and criticized Rockwell as simply an illustrator, whose work was conservative and “too literary.
Of course, the fact was that his Saturday Evening Post covers were not illustrating anything in the magazine. They were large stand-alone oil paintings expressing a witty theme, like photo realistic cartoons, and by modern standards his statements about American culture were not conservative, they were “woke.” At that time my study of art history taught me that in the Renaissance there was no concept of high art and low art, there was only “art.” For example, even Leonardo da Vinci did not think it was beneath him to design amusing carts for the triumphal parades in Milan. I began to adopt this view myself. The difference between high and low art is mainly in the price. High art is an investment for the wealthy or purchased for museum collections and the rest is priced for the middle class.
As an example of Rockwell’s wit, his cover for the January 13, 1962, The Saturday Evening Post features an obviously wealthy older man eying a painting that looks a lot like a Jackson Pollock. The title The Connoisseur, sums up the joke, but is the painting art criticism or is it Rockwell’s proof that he could paint like Pollack if he wanted to? According to the Norman Rockwell Museum, Rockwell rearranged his studio so that he could put his canvas on the floor and drip paint like Pollock, and then he painted the man on the canvas once it was stretched and upright. But before this final addition, he submitted the imitation Pollock to an art exhibition and signed it with a fake Italian signature. He won the contest and earned a similar honorable mention by submitting it to an exhibition at the Berkshire Museum.
Today you can find both Pollock and Rockwell paintings in museum collections. Pollock, however, is still being extolled as one the greatest painters of the 20th century and greatly overpriced.
