ONCE UPON a        TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002

THE EMPEROR'S NEW ART                              Who Paid the Piper?                 A book review of Frances Stonor Saunders'                THE CIA AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR                    (Granta Books, London, 1999, 509 pp.)                                by  Lenni Brenner Jackson Pollock Painting, 1950; still frame from a film by Hans Namuth. STONOR SAUNDERS' book is a major contribution to our knowledge of the inner workings of the highest echelons of the CIA in its first two decades. Versed in the scholarly literature, she interviewed many surviving major CIA figures and their collaborators in the arts and sciences. Saunders describes the initial cadre, vets of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, spies in "the last good war." Franklin Roosevelt put 144, 000 innocent Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps but the "Oh So Social," led by wealthy and highly cultured WASP Ivy Leaguers, had no difficulty convincing themselves that America's capitalist democracy, racism, corruption and all, was morally and intellectually superior to the Führer-staat. When Joseph Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship over the proletariat became Wall Street's rival for world hegemony one agent again saw them as Yankee capitalism's "order of Knights Templars." They came out of W.W.II triumphant, with an enormous industrial plant on a planet in ruins. Life magazine publisher Henry Luce declared that the 20th century "must... become an American century." But now Wall Street’s battle for world hegemony had to confront its wartime Soviet ally in four-power occupied Berlin. The anti-fascist French and Italian Communist Parties had grown to massive proportions. Unless they acted rationally and swiftly, much of western Europe could fall. They didn't argue with Nazism, they fought it. Communism was different. It appealed to humane values held by many cultural figures. Some, Pablo Picasso the most famous, joined the Communist Party because it led the anti-Nazi underground. Stalinism had to be battled ideologically. That could only be done effectively by ex-leftists who knew the theories and jargon of these milieus. The ones to do it were Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, with its extensive ties to Europe's Social Democrats. The crucial secret collaboration of the Jewish-led ILGWU with the intelligence apparatus was an example of the post-Holocaust full admission of Jews into America's ruling circles. The public ideological sign was the constant official speechifying about "the Judeo-Christian way of life," a scholarly phrase which pre-war liberals had taken up against Nazism. Now Washington was guarding it night and day against atheistic Communism. However God didn't play well with the European left. To win them to "the free world" Washington needed propaganda about free trade unions and artistic freedom. But you couldn't do that openly without outraging the domestic McCarthyites. Hence the the covert action heavies. Most of Saunders' book deals with the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom, particularly its political-literary contingent. However her "Yanqui Doodles" chapter on CIA patronage of Abstract-Expressionism has rightly caught the attention of the British public. Tom Braden, the CIA's retired International Operations Department director, authored a May 20, 1967 Saturday Evening Post article, "I'm glad the CIA's Immoral," which touched on funding of European exhibits for artists who were anathema to Congress because of their past affiliation with left causes. Serge Guilbaut developed this in his book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract-Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Saunders takes off from there. In 1936 Jackson Pollock studied under David Siqueiros, the Mexican Stalinist muralist who later tried to assassinate Leon Trotsky. There is a photo of him posing by a 30s CP May Day float. True, the Cold War Pollock was anti-Communist, but he had taken to dribbling paint off a stick onto a canvas on the floor. Unfortunately, Harry Truman hated "the lazy, nutty moderns," and a Missouri Republican declared that "All modern art is Communistic." Braden was more understanding. The new ‘Rome’ needed a ‘sophisticated’ art to flaunt before the decadent ‘Greeks’ of modernist Europe, and Manhattan's Cedar Tavern set had its theorist, Nation critic Clement Greenberg, formerly close to Trotskyism, to explain why Pollock was "the greatest American painter of the 20th century." For Greenberg, Picasso, by successfully distorting reality, had shown that a canvas had always been a flat surface, and that three dimensional images were arbitrary intrusions on it. And, according to this cutting edge critic, once perspective was excluded, painting logically had to stop depicting anything outside that two-dimensional field. Unfortunately Picasso never abandoned representation. And the surrealists were even worse. Let's be honest, a limp watch is a watch. "It makes no difference that the creatures, anatomies, substances, landscapes, or juxtapositions limned by the Surrealist violates the laws of probability: they do not violate the modalities of three dimensional vision to which painting can now conform only by methods that have become academic." Even Wassily Kandinsky was retrograde. "His best work remains those paintings in fluid contour and gauzy color that he executed between 1909 or so and the early twenties.... The abstract...paintings he turned out from the middle twenties represent a misconception...of the very art of putting paint on canvas.... [He] came to conceive of the picture überhaupt as an aggregate of discrete shapes.... Kandinsky would go on to allude to illusionistic depth by a use of color, line and perspective that were plastically irrelevant." Enter Pollock, the embodiment of Truman's incompetent modernist. "My drawing, I will tell you frankly, is rotten. It seems to lack freedom and rhythm." ("Seldom has so sumptuous a showcase been awarded to such tentative, graceless art," said New York Times reviewer Holland Carter of a 1997 Metropolitan exhibit of his early sketchbooks.) Nevertheless, “Jack the Dripper” was exactly what Braden needed. After all, the CIA's international ops head had been the executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art, the command post of the war against anti-capitalist art. The museum was the Rockefeller family's passion. Abby Rockefeller loved the works of Mexican Diego Rivera and other revolutionaries. She was sweetly unconcerned about their politics. "Get them artistic recognition" and they will stop opposing capitalism. In 1933, son Nelson eagerly hired Rivera to paint the entry mural in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Soon the most ominous painting since the fingers of a man's hand wrote upon the plaster of Belshazzar's wall began to appeared on Rocky's wall. Rivera artistically describe the suddenly militarized political world immediately after Hitler came to power. When Lenin's head appeared as the symbolic workers' leader, the guards appeared with Mr. Rivera's check. The universally acclaimed artist was escorted out. In February 1934 the horrified art world watched Hitler crush German modern art. But for a day its attention turned to Manhattan's privatized gleichgeshaltet as the mural was jack-hammered into history. The cold war put MoMA's president on the spot again. Picasso's celebrated Guernica, his masterful response to the town's bombing during the Spanish civil war, hung on its wall. He could hardly take it down. But the fight against red art was on and Abstract Expressionism became his beloved "free enterprise art." There was resistance to it among some wealthy MoMA patrons. Nelson had to show other schools. But MoMA trustee Luce was won over. The August 8, 1949 issue of Life, then with a five million per week circulation, devoted a color spread to "the shining new phenomenon of American art," and Pollock awoke to find himself world famous. The CIA initially relied on Irving Brown to help the Congress put things together organizationally on the European cultural front. After 1950 the AFL pulled out of non-labor activity, but it hardly mattered. MoMA people were all over Washington's covert operations. MoMA chair John Hay Whitney was on the Psychological Strategy Board. William Burden, chair of the museum's Advisory Committee, was the President of the Farfield Foundation, the CIA's money-laundering foundation. By 1954 Rockefeller was the Special Adviser to the President for Psychological Warfare. Braden is still proud of their efforts: "I've forgotten which Pope...commissioned the Sistine Chapel, but I suppose that if it had been submitted to a vote of the Italian people.... I don't think it would have gotten thru the Italian parliament, if there had been a parliament.... It takes a Pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognize art and support it. And after many centuries people say ‘Look! The Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on earth.’” Well said. Except that the entire people of Florence turned out for their beloved Michelangelo's funeral. Russian expert Donald Jameson laid it out to Saunders: "We recognized that this was the kind of art that did not have anything to do with socialist realism, and made socialist realism look even more stylized and more rigid and confined than it was...[For] matters of this sort [it] could only have been done through the...operations of the CIA at two or three removed, so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock...or do anything that would involve these people in the organization - they'd just be added at the end of the line...[It] couldn't have been any closer...because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government...and certainly none for the CIA." Since their America stood for free artistic experimentation, the CIA also promoted 12 tone music via the CCF-sponsored International Conference of Twentieth Century Music in Rome in 1954. However 12 tone music was about as popular as a 4 AM car-alarm concert. It only demoralized the assembled CCF freeloaders. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom did have success with another musical project. West Germany was now part of the free world, but its musical world was full of Nazis. Protests had made Walter Gieseking give up a late 40s Carnegie Hall date, and Jewish musicians forced the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to back out of a contract with Wilhelm Furtwängler. In the good old days, conductor Herbert von Karajan opened his concerts with the beloved party anthem, the Horst Wessel Lied. A Zionist group demonstrated against him when he appeared in New York in 1955, but the ACCF convinced the American Federation of Musicians to oppose such protests. In the Committee's name, ex-Trotskyist James T. Farrell declared von Karajan's past politics "deplorable," but the demo "ignored the fact that the Berlin Philharmonic...symbolizes the courageous resistance of the people of Berlin to Communist Totalitarianism." The book is not without weaknesses. Saunders is sometimes too much the muscle-bound researcher. She overloads us with quotes about events, written years later, by other writers, personally uninvolved in them. Sometimes its hard to follow who is saying what about who, and when. Occasionally she buries a quote in an end-book footnote instead of developing it in the story proper. Arthur Schlesinger's admission, in a memo to John Kennedy, about serving "as a periodic CIA consultant," is too important for such minor treatment. Nevertheless her documentation certifies him to have been a prime accomplice of the Agency in its suborning of the intellectual world. She is writing about things before her time and her lack of substantial practical political experience is occasionally evident in her interpretations of those events. Braden claims he forgot that he had taken a swearing-in oath of secrecy. The White House and the CIA knew in advance that his article was about to be published but didn't try to stop him. Braden told her that he "always had it in the back of my mind that they wanted it (patronage of the anti-Communist left - LB) killed, but I can't prove it." She accepts this. But one of the major casualties of his exposé was the AFL-CIO. It is silly to think that they wanted to let him humiliate its then head, George Meany, whose docility in the domestic class struggle was precious to them. We are in the speculative realm here, but it is more reasonable to believe they thought he would publish it, no matter what they did. In the end, such errors of interpretation will not detract from the impact of the book. Saunders' interviews make it must reading for anyone interested in any aspect of CIA. It is easy to see that it will soon make a serious impression on the art world. MoMA's got a lot of explaining to do. Unhappily for its present administration, their predecessors did that for them. (c) Lenni Brenner 2003 ________________ Lenni Brenner is the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and The Lesser Evil: The Democratic Party

                                                   ONCE UPON      a TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002