Con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a tru­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art, the great Eng­lish lit­er­ary crit­ic William Emp­son once wrote, “the rea­son an Eng­lish audi­ence can enjoy Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­dist films is that the pro­pa­gan­da is too remote to be annoy­ing.” Per­haps this is why Amer­i­can artists and bohemi­ans have so often tak­en to the polit­i­cal iconog­ra­phy of far-flung regimes, in ways both roman­tic and iron­ic. One nation’s tedious social­ist real­ism is another’s rad­i­cal exot­i­ca.

But do U.S. cul­tur­al exports have the same effect? One need only look at the suc­cess of our most banal brand­ing over­seas to answer in the affir­ma­tive. Yet no one would think to add Abstract Expres­sion­ist paint­ing to a list that includes fast food and Walt Dis­ney prod­ucts. Nev­er­the­less, the work of such artists as Jack­son Pol­lock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Koon­ing wound up as part of a secret CIA pro­gram dur­ing the height of the Cold War, aimed at pro­mot­ing Amer­i­can ideals abroad.

The artists them­selves were com­plete­ly unaware that their work was being used as pro­pa­gan­da. On what agents called a “long leash,” they par­tic­i­pat­ed in sev­er­al exhi­bi­tions secret­ly orga­nized by the CIA, such as “The New Amer­i­can Paint­ing” (see cat­a­log cov­er at top), which vis­it­ed major Euro­pean cities in 1958–59 and includ­ed such mod­ern prim­i­tive works as sur­re­al­ist William Baziotes’ 1947 Dwarf (below) and 1951’s Tour­na­ment by Adolph Got­tlieb above.

Of course what seems most bizarre about this turn of events is that avant-garde art in Amer­i­ca has nev­er been much appre­ci­at­ed by the aver­age cit­i­zen, to put it mild­ly. Amer­i­can Main Streets har­bor under­cur­rents of dis­trust or out­right hatred for out-there, art-world exper­i­men­ta­tion, a trend that fil­ters upward and peri­od­i­cal­ly erupts in con­tro­ver­sies over Con­gres­sion­al fund­ing for the arts. A 1995 Inde­pen­dent arti­cle on the CIA’s role in pro­mot­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ism describes these atti­tudes dur­ing the Cold War peri­od:

In the 1950s and 1960s… the great major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans dis­liked or even despised mod­ern art—President Tru­man summed up the pop­u­lar view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hot­ten­tot.” As for the artists them­selves, many were ex- com­mu­nists bare­ly accept­able in the Amer­i­ca of the McCarthyite era, and cer­tain­ly not the sort of peo­ple nor­mal­ly like­ly to receive US gov­ern­ment back­ing.

Why, then, did they receive such back­ing? One short answer:

This philis­tin­ism, com­bined with Joseph McCarthy’s hys­ter­i­cal denun­ci­a­tions of all that was avant-garde or unortho­dox, was deeply embar­rass­ing. It dis­cred­it­ed the idea that Amer­i­ca was a sophis­ti­cat­ed, cul­tur­al­ly rich democ­ra­cy.

The one-way rela­tion­ship between mod­ernist painters and the CIA—only recent­ly con­firmed by for­mer case offi­cer Don­ald Jameson—supposedly enabled the agency to make the work of Sovi­et Social­ist Real­ists appear, in Jameson’s words, “even more styl­ized and more rigid and con­fined than it was.” (See Evdokiya Usikova’s 1959 Lenin with Vil­lagers below, for exam­ple). For a longer expla­na­tion, read the full arti­cle at The Inde­pen­dent. It’s the kind of sto­ry Don DeLil­lo would cook up.

William Emp­son goes on to say that “a Tory audi­ence sub­ject­ed to Tory pro­pa­gan­da of the same inten­si­ty” as Russ­ian imports, “would be extreme­ly bored.” If he is cor­rect, it’s like­ly that the aver­age true believ­er social­ist in Europe was already bored sil­ly by Sovi­et-approved art. What sur­pris­es in these rev­e­la­tions is that the avant-garde works that so rad­i­cal­ly altered the Amer­i­can art world and enraged the aver­age con­gress­man and tax­pay­er were co-opt­ed and col­lect­ed by suave U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cers like so many Shep­ard Fairey posters.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack­son Pol­lock 51: Short Film Shows the Painter Cre­at­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ist Art

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

MoMA Puts Pol­lock, Rothko & de Koon­ing on Your iPad

Rauschen­berg Eras­es De Koon­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness