Today I learned that the popularity of American avant-garde worldwide turns out to be the result of a CIA program—at least in part. During the height of the Cold War, starting in 1950, the CIA secretly funded magazines, concerts, and exhibitions throughout Europe through the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” and front organizations (the most famous being the Fairfield Foundation). The idea was simple: to demonstrate that the free West produces bold experimental art, while the USSR produced only state-controlled socialist realism. For example, when London’s Tate Gallery couldn’t afford the “New American Painting” exhibition in 1959, a “generous patron” Julius Fleischman suddenly appeared—though the funds actually came from the intelligence budget.
The most astonishing fact is that the artists themselves had no clue. Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, who came from the left-wing bohemia of the 1930s, despised the government and the era of McCarthyism, and would have considered it insulting to work for the intelligence. The CIA didn’t propose: they didn’t pay the artists or dictate anything, they simply “promoted them in the dark,” paying for the infrastructure of fame through two or three layers of intermediaries. It reached the point of absurdity. While one hand of the government secretly transported their canvases across Europe as a symbol of American freedom, the other—the FBI and conservative congressmen—kept files on the modernists and branded their art as “communist smears.”
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 