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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-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 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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @08:22PM
The modern art in question did have its roots in russia. It took several decades to escape from tsarist russia, and reach western europe, and then a few more to reach the US. If the CIA thought it could make the US appear to be cutting edge by being 50 years behind the curve, then that shows how stupid the CIA are. They only got anywhere by being the 800 pound gorillas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @11:20PM
One may read about Wassily Kandinsky, an early abstractionist, and "the difficulties he suffered in revolutionary Russia" in http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7403 [tate.org.uk] . There was a schism between him and the constructivists [wikipedia.org], and he fled the USSR. Another account of what happened to him is at http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/ [wassilykandinsky.net] which says that his paintings were removed from Soviet museums.