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H ow M oM A and t he C IA C ons p ired to U se U nw it ti ng

Ar ti s ts to Prom ote Am er ic an Prop agand a Dur ing the
C old War
Art's role in American intelligence history features in the new book
'ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful
in Art History'—read an excerpt here.

Jennifer Dasal (https://news.artnet.com/about/jennifer-dasal-1541), September 24, 2020

Nelson A. Rockefeller, president of the Museum of Modern Art at a meeting of the Board of Trustees in 1939,
examining one of the paintings to be hung in the museum's new building. Photo via Getty Images.

When the US government established the CIA in 1947, it included a division known as
the Propaganda Assets Inventor y, a branch of psychological warfare intended to boost
pro-American messaging during the Cold War. In the following excerpt from the new
book ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in
Art History, author Jennifer Dasal explores how the intelligence agency curated
exhibitions of abstract art to wage its ideological war. 

The secrecy with which the CIA pursued Abstract Expressionism was not only integral
to successfully fooling the Soviet Union but also to keeping any associated artists in
the dark. In [former CIA operative Donald] Jameson’s words, “[M]ost of [the Abstract
Expressionists] were people who had very little respect for the government in
particular and certainly none for the CIA.” Multiple artists self-identified as anarchists,
particularly Barnett Newman, who was so taken by anarchism that he would later write
the foreword to the 1968 reprint of Russian author Peter Kropotkin’s 1899 Memoirs of
a Revolutionist, describing the anarcho-communist’s influence upon his life and work.
In other words: tell Clyfford Still or Helen Frankenthaler that you wanted to use their
paintings to forward a government agenda, and the answer would most likely have
been a firm no.

The CIA’s answer to these problems was something known as the long-leash policy.
This solution kept CIA operatives at a remove of two or three degrees from the artists
and art exhibitions—sometimes even more—so that they could not be linked to any
furtive governmental bankrolling. In order to fulfill this need, they elicited the
participation of arts foundations, artists groups, and, most crucially, art museums,
requesting their assistance in organizing special exhibitions, events, and collections.
Such activity was funneled through a new arts agency created by the CIA named the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was developed in 1950 and not revealed
as a CIA project until 1966. It would always appear, then, that a museum or arts
corporation was presenting and promoting Abstract Expressionism, never the
government, no way! And no one was the wiser, not even the artists themselves.
Especially not the artists themselves.

Installation view of “The New American Painting as Shown in Eight European Countries 1958–
1959”
at MoMA. Photo by Soichi Sunami.
The museum most closely involved with the CCF’s plans for cultural domination was
the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, focused through the participation
of Nelson Rockefeller, a politician, philanthropist, and future vice president of the
United States under Gerald Ford. Rockefeller and MoMA go hand in hand, as his
mother was one of the cofounders of the institution, which he called Mommy’s
Museum (aaargh!). He was not unfamiliar with the intelligence world either, as the
former coordinator of Inter-American Affairs for Latin America during World War II, yet
another propagandistic front agency.

For the CCF, then, Rockefeller’s cooperation was ideal. He used his privileged position
as the president of MoMA’s board of trustees to arrange for some of the CCF’s biggest
and most successful AbEx exhibitions, including the landmark 1958‒59 showcase “The
New American Painting.” The exhibition was, according to its March 11, 1958, press
release, “organized in response to numerous requests [to] the Museum’s International
Program,” leading one to assume that other countries were clamoring for these
“advanced tendencies in American painting,” rather than being coordinated through
MoMA’s personnel on the order of the CIA. Under the auspices of the MoMA brand,
“The New American Painting” traveled for one year straight, visiting practically every
major Western European city, including Basel, Milan, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and
London. The widespread touring of the show in American-friendly countries—unlike
the on-the-communist-fence locations chosen for [the State Department-funded
exhibition] “Advancing American Art”—was strategic, a way to cement alliances among
like-minded Cold Warriors and to promote the much-lauded cultural preeminence of
the United States for the first time in history.

As with exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism in America, the responses to “The New

American Painting” were mixed. The Times in London declared its showing at the Tate
Gallery to be “the finest of its kind we have yet had . . . the aesthetic barometer [of ]
why the United States should so frequently be regarded nowadays as the challenger
to, if not actually the inheritor of, the hegemony of Paris.” But art critic Georges
Boudaille found the paintings to be strangely depressing and unknowable, asking in
the French literary publication Les Lettres françaises, “Where does this dramatic
sensation of nightmare and stain come from? What do these disturbing spatters
express? What?”
 Installation view of “The New American Painting as Shown in Eight European Countries 1958–
1959” at MoMA. Photo by Soichi Sunami.

The Tate London showing of “The New American Painting” provides us with an
intriguing case study on how the CCF operated its long-leash policy. After the
exhibition opened at Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne in January 1959, a
delegation from the Tate attended the show and was thrilled by its contents. Upon
requesting an extension of the tour’s run to accommodate a London stop, the Tate
cohort learned that the steep fees associated with the show were simply too pricey to
accommodate, and disappointedly accepted their art-less fate. But behold! What
happened next? An art- loving American millionaire named Julius “Junkie” Fleischmann
appeared, almost as if by magic, and ponied up the funds. The show, happily, then
continued on to London.

A fairy godfather materializes and bankrolls a major exhibition in a foreign country

simply for the love of art? How magnanimous! By now, though, we know the real story:
the money provided to travel the show to the UK wasn’t actually Fleischmann’s but
cash funneled through him from an organization called the Farfield Foundation—yet
another secret arm of the CCF disguised as a charitable body. The Tate didn’t know.
The exhibition’s visitors didn’t know. And the artists exhibited certainly didn’t know
either. Such feints were rather easy to pull off too. As Tom Braden later recounted,
“We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we
would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation.’ We would tell him what we were actually
trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ and
then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a
foundation. It was really a pretty simple device.”

By the way, it should be noted that Julius Fleischmann, like Nelson Rockefeller, had a
direct connection to MoMA: he was a member of its governing board. Many MoMA
supporters seem to have been involved in similar ways. The CIA/MoMA link was never
“official,” exactly—and many have disputed the partnership over the years—but as
writer Louis Menand noted in a 2005 article for the New Yorker, no formal deal
between the agency and the museum needed to be made because all figures were
essentially on the same page. Fighting communism, varnishing the country’s image,
and celebrating art? For the cultural elite at MoMA—and others in boardrooms and
lounges all over New York City—it was a no-brainer.

From ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in

Art History (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611497/artcurious-by-
jennifer-dasal/) by Jennifer Dasal, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of the
Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020
by Jennifer Dasal.

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