When the CIA Bankrolled Modern Art

Since taking office, the Trump administration has made no secret of its assault on the arts. Over the last month alone, executive orders have shut down the Institute of Museum & Library Services, slashed staff and grants from the humanities endowment, and demanded the removal of “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian. As this cultural expulsion continues, there is no better time to revisit one special moment in American political history: when the art world’s greatest patron was none other than the CIA.

At the advent of the Cold War, the US had a problem: modern American art wasn’t attracting widespread approval, particularly in Washington. In 1946, when the State Department spent $49,000 (about $850,000 today) on an exhibition displaying modern American art abroad, protest was so strong that the tour was cancelled early, with one congressman declaring, “I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash.” But beyond merely celebrating abstraction with taxpayer money (itself a double whammy for the American public), the frequent ties of abstract artists to radical left circles made the concept of such government funding and appraisal downright blasphemous amid the Second Red Scare. And yet the US had a duty to prove cultural superiority over the Soviets. How could America present itself as the world’s leading cultural force when American modernism was so detested and vilified from within?

The CIA recognised this issue and found a solution: fund the arts, but in secret. For seventeen years in the 1950s and ‘60s, they enacted their ‘long-leash’ policy, working as a silent benefactor to the abstract expressionism movement already flourishing in the New York art scene. The agency saw this movement (which included artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko) as the perfect artistic vehicle for their ideological mission, in stark juxtaposition with the Soviet Union’s doctrine of socialist realism, which still conformed to strict pattern and figuration. To the CIA, it didn’t matter that many Americans hated this art for its loud, incomprehensible forms and striking nonconformity — what mattered was that so did Moscow. As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And the two became the best of friends. From a reasonable distance, the agency paved the way for expressionism and America to become the centre of the modern art world. They founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), posturing it as an “autonomous association of artists” through which to fund the movement and promote positive intellectual criticism. And they found the perfect institutional partner in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, whose ties to US intelligence included museum presidents Nelson Rockefeller and J.H. Whitney.

Perhaps the best example of the covert operation at work comes through the exhibition The New American Painting, which toured Western Europe in 1958-59. When the Tate Gallery in London wanted to extend the exhibition to their museum, they found the costs too steep to do so. But suddenly the money appeared. A group called the Fairfield Foundation, through its president, American millionaire Julius Fleischmann, had donated the extra funding. The money was not his own, of course, but the CIA’s, with Fairfield Foundation merely a conduit for the funds. This was their common practice: approach a New York millionaire, set up a foundation in their name, then funnel the money through. Piece of cake.

But does this make Jackson Pollock a secret agent? Thankfully, no. Much of the reason for the CIA’s careful distance was to keep the support hidden from the artists themselves, who were often self-proclaimed anarchists who would have revolted against the weaponisation of their art as what Nelson Rockefeller called “free enterprise painting”. Nevertheless, the agency’s patronage helped make Pollock, Rothko, and others household names, exposing them to Europe and forever changing the story of Western modern art.

In a way, the CIA’s long leash is not dissimilar from Trump’s recent efforts, as different ways to control culture. It is a reminder that, while the artist speaks for themselves, so too does their promoter. Whether the Renaissance papacy or US government, art remains subject to its patron’s politics. But the movement also demonstrates that, to be a powerful nation, one needs a powerful culture. Funding for the arts cannot be relegated or ignored in any nation calling itself a culturally rich democracy.

Image from Wikimedia Commons