Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War
For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when 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- com- munists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
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CIA and Tavistock Institute have always had a close relationship, since the CIA (now more likely the DHS) contracts Tavistock for the bright ideas.
This particular article was released as “news” in order to create the impression that the cultural fuckery that they are involved in is mundane (“high art”), when it’s anything but. They create most of modern culture, which is no small feat.
One might say the “news” gives a “new” yes to the DA-DA movement?
Yes, surely, DADA.