US vs Europe Art Rumble, 1945-1965

[MosesPresley]

Nice find.

I bought the album when it first came out, but I never knew about the Rauschenberg cover.

There appears to be a few different versions too. I found this one on e-bay.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Talking-Heads-Speaking-In-Tongues-RAUSCHENBERG-LTD-NM_W0QQitemZ4728210983QQcategoryZ306QQssPageNameZWD1VQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

So far, this version is a wee bit more affordable. $29.99

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by molly bloom



Don't forget that the C.I.A. and friends (including Nelson Rockefeller, destroyer of Rivera's mural) were backing American Abstract Expressionism:



http://www.answers.com/topic/abstract-expressionism

Rich people have been patrons of the arts for a long time. Does everything any Rockefeller did (post war) get attributed to the CIA? From Rockefeller center, to Colonial Willamsburg?


As for the CIA pushing American art, whats wrong with that? I would suggest that we should be doing cultural promotion in, for ex, the middle east right now. And of course the article you cite says it was done from 1950 on - after Abstract Expressionism had become established.

[lord of the mark]

wiki : Association for Cultural Freedom

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)) was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. In 1967, it was revealed that it was established and funded by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and it was subsequently renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF). At its height, the CCF/IACF was active in some thirty-five countries and also received significant funding from the Ford Foundation.


Creation of the CCF
The Congress was founded at the Titania Palace in West Berlin in 26 June, 1950 to fine [b[ways to counter the view that bourgeois democracy was less compatible with culture than communism.[/b] (LOTM - sounds reasonable to me)


Involvement with the CIA
In 1967, Ramparts magazine and the Saturday Evening Post reported on the CIA's funding of a number of anti-communist cultural organizations aimed at winning the support of Soviet-sympathizing liberals worldwide. These reports were lent credence by a statement made by a former CIA covert operations director admitting to CIA financing and operation of the CCF.

n July, 2004, the Australian political party Citizen's Electoral Council (CEC), a member of the Lyndon LaRouche movement, released a pamphlet called Children of Satan III—The Sexual Congress For Cultural Fascism, claiming that the CCF was a CIA cultural warfare unit sponsoring hideous modernist and postmodernist "art" in an effort to undermine the population's ability to think, and claimed Jackson Pollock was a supporter of the CCF, to that end.


Note the Wiki article above has two external links at the bottom - both appear to be to Larouche websites.

How many wiki articles are the creation of determined groups like the Larouchies, I wonder?

[lord of the mark]

From the New Criterion:

Supporting the indispensible
by Peter Coleman


I sat in on only one meeting of the board of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, the uneasy successor to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had collapsed in 1967 amid the disclosure that the CIA had been funding its activities. This was in Paris in June 1970, the twentieth anniversary almost to the week of the foundation of the Congress in the British sector of occupied Berlin. Representing Quadrant, the Australian monthly, I sat among the observers with the other editors: Melvin Lasky (Encounter), Leopold Labedz (Survey), François Bondy (Preuves), Rajat Neogy (Transition)—recently released from a Kampala prison—and Hoki Ishihara (Jiyu).

The morning began slowly with dispiriting reports on cultural freedom from India and Indonesia to Uganda and Nigeria and some proposals for estimable seminars. But the meeting flared into life in a sharp confrontation between the French poet Pierre Emmanuel and Labedz, whose Survey was one of the splendors of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In both anger and anguish, Labedz complained that the International Association would not face the facts of its failures. There had been no “end of ideology,” he said, no “convergence” in the Cold War, no liberalization in the USSR, no new “world-wide community of intellectuals.” Instead, there had been “a long march through the institutions” that threatened to destroy the universities, politicize cultural life, and appease the Soviet Union. We had no answer to the barbarism of the New Left. Throughout the 1950s, the Congress had exposed the Soviet Union and its fellow travelers. But now we were détentistes— to the despair of writers, artists, and intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. We lacked, he concluded, our former clarity of purpose.

In the tense silence that followed, Edward Shils suggested an adjournment. The next morning, Pierre Emmanuel replied on behalf of the board. A long-bearded poet-prophet, he spoke—for precision, he said— in French. We had all been moved, he began, “par l’accent passionné de notre ami Labedz.” Yet he could not agree with him. He welcomed the New Left, despite its violence. It was trying to fill a spiritual emptiness in life: “the man who lands on the moon is a man of nothing.” His own son-in-law in Latin America had, he said, became a Maoist apostle of tabula rasa, of a new beginning from zero. We must not turn away from these young people. But if we are not to be mere tricheurs, what are we to tell them? We cannot just talk about the barbarism of the New Left.

Discussion was desultory and inconclusive, and the chairman Alan Bullock soon moved to other business. The minutes record: “No consensus emerged.” It was an epiphanic moment and summed up for me the tensions within the Congress/International Association since its foundation. A movement of and for liberals and social democrats, it was always split between its anti-Communists and its non-Communists, between its Cold Warriors and its accommodationists. The former prevailed in the first and successful years and the latter in the years of decline.

The opposing assessments of the Congress were clear enough over thirty years ago when the controversy over CIA funding first exploded. Its partisans pointed to its role in the defeat of Stalinism; its critics claimed its influence was small. The one saw it as a story of idealism and courage, the other as a gravy train. The one shrugged off CIA funding, the other insisted it was the real theme. Pecunia non olet, cried one: money doesn’t smell. He who pays the piper calls the tune, replied the other.

My book The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (Free Press, 1989) acknowledged the Congress’s historic success. Now, a new book by Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, brings up to date the contemptuous, leftist perspective. [1] Since the CIA is her story, she sets out to trace its tentacular reach from Hollywood to MOMA, from Radio Free Europe to PEN International. Her research has delivered some new names, for example, Lawrence de Neufville, the CIA official who recruited Michael Josselson to administer the Congress. She also provides some amusing odds and ends (CIA agents, she says, wrote Fodor travel guides as a cover) and some scuttlebutt (Sonia Orwell is one target).

Saunders also revisits the curious case of Tom Braden, the officer who put together the International Organizations Division in the CIA and later published the most destructive of all the attacks on the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This attack was an article in the Saturday Evening Post of May 20, 1967 giving details of CIA funding of student, labor, and cultural organizations, and boasting that it had an “agent” in Encounter. The Congress was dissolved soon after the article’s appearance. (An editor in Uganda was jailed and one in Japan had his home bombed. In India, the government ordered an inquiry.) Since Braden had signed a secrecy agreement and the CIA had weeks of notice of the article, why had it not taken steps to restrain him before publication or punish him afterwards? Saunders speculates that the CIA may have wanted to be rid of the liberal congress and used Braden. She quotes John Hunt who worked for both the Congress and the CIA: “Maybe [Richard] Helms called him and said ‘I’ve got a job for you.’” Another view is that Braden actually thought his article would help the Congress: its title—“I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral’”—was crude but not without bravado.

The persistent weakness of Who Paid the Piper? is Saunders’s restricted research and imagination. She seems to have no foreign languages; she does not cite Michael Hochgeschwender’s major study of the Congress in Germany—Freiheit in der Offensive? (1998)—or Pierre Gremion’s valuable anthology Preuves, une révue européenne à Paris (1989). More significantly, she has no grasp of the nature of the Cold War tensions of the late 1940s when Communists and their fellow travellers expected soon to be able to welcome Stalin’s tanks in the streets of Paris and Rome, and many non-Communist intellectuals thought it prudent to adapt to this supposed wave of the future. But some, especially the old refugees from fascist and Communist concentration camps who rallied to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, were prepared to resist and, if necessary, to go down fighting.

The threat of a world-wide Gulag has receded, and with it the passion of the Cold Warriors. But for Saunders most of them were always ridiculous if not fraudulent figures. She speaks with some generosity of Michael Josselson, the presiding genius of the Congress and a CIA man—she was probably under the influence of his widow Diana Josselson whom she especially thanks (no doubt to Mrs. Josselson’s distress) for her time and help. But she describes the distinguished writer and editor Melvin Lasky as “lupine,” “ill-mannered,” and “oily.” Nicholas Nabokov, she says, “faked” a heart episode. Stephen Spender only pretended to be “watery” and “silly” to get what he wanted. According to her, Lionel Trilling was “a pathetic anglophile”; Whittaker Chambers “elevated the art of snitching to new heights” (while Alger Hiss, of course, was not a spy!); and the classic book The God That Failed was a “sham.”

Saunders’s basic theme is that the CIA was a great corrupter. It funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, treated it as a front, and placed men in key positions to ensure control. But what is her evidence? To win over the world’s intellectuals to the liberal democratic cause, the Congress developed four programs—international conferences and festivals; national committees; a network of magazines of high quality and small circulation; and support for intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain.

Saunders’s case is strongest in relation to the conferences and seminars. While some were of high standards and put important themes and phrases into general circulation (“the end of ideology,” economic growth, destalinization, the Third World), most of the debates were mediocre. Yet their main point was not Socratic dialogue—there wasn’t any—but the informal, personal encounters across national boundaries. After one conference in Bombay, W. H. Auden said that these encounters, “even if forgotten, may enter the structure and fabric of one’s being.” They intimated the emergence of a world-wide liberal community, and only fools or philistines would dismiss this as unimportant. The national committees were more pragmatic. The most active of all (with Sidney Hook, James T. Farrell, and Diana Trilling) was in New York and was no CIA tool. It was in permanent conflict with the Congress in Paris and—as Saunders shows—the CIA acknowledged its turbulent independence. The same is true, if less dramatically, of the Indian and Australian committees, but Saunders does not mention them. The Congress’s Central European Program—books and subscriptions, travel and publication in the West for writers of the Soviet bloc, and help for refugees starting a new life—was an unqualified success. Raymond Aron thought it was the most influential of all the Congress programs. But it does not fit Saunders’s theme and she does not mention it, either.

The network of excellent “little magazines” such as Encounter, Survey, Preuves, and Der Monat was another great achievement. As evidence that the CIA controlled these publications, Saunders once more recalls Encounter’s widely debated rejection of an article by Dwight Macdonald attacking American life. The truth is, however, that the piece was rejected not because it was critical of America—Encounter routinely carried more telling criticism of America (by, for example, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley)—but because it was a poor article. The angry exchanges on editorial policy in the 1950s between the editor Irving Kristol and Michael Josselson show beyond doubt the independence of Encounter.

Saunders does not even suggest control, actual or attempted, over Labedz’s Survey, let alone over smaller magazines such as Michael Polanyi’s Science and Freedom (England), James McAuley’s Quadrant (Australia), Nissim Ezekiel’s Quest (India), or Rajat Neogy’s Transition (Uganda). She appears not to have read Der Monat or Preuves. This world-wide network with its unruly editors published many of the most independent writers of the day—Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, Robert Conquest, Stuart Hampshire, Arthur Koestler, Walter Laqueur, Richard Lowenthal, Czeslaw Milosz, Edward Shils, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Lionel Trilling, George Urban … the list goes on and on. In their contribution to understanding totalitarianism in a period of lies and illusion, these magazines were compulsory reading. They are still a rich historical resource.

When there was talk of closing down Encounter at the time of the CIA controversy in the late 1960s, forty of England’s leading writers from Kingsley Amis to Arnold Wesker signed a letter to the editor Melvin Lasky describing the magazine as “indispensable” and concluding: “our support remains undiminished.” Saunders does not mention this letter. Irving Kristol once said to me that it had been easy to found Encounter in 1953 because “There was nothing to read in England then.” What is one to say today, now that Encounter is gone?

It was clearly a bad idea to have the bills paid by a secret service. Yet there was no alternative in the emergency of 1949–1950. At that crucial moment, some of America’s leaders saw the importance of helping anti-Communist liberals work out their ideas without interference. They should be honored for it, although not for continuing the secret funding for seventeen years. George F. Kennan summed up the situation with his familiar perspicacity and balance:

It is unfair that it [the CIA] should be so bitterly condemned for its failures, and should then go unpraised when it does something constructive and sensible. And the Congress [for Cultural Freedom] would itself have been remiss if it had failed to take money which came to it from good intent and wholly without strings or conditions.
It is symptomatic of the shabbiness of Who Paid the Piper? that Saunders should dismiss Kennan as an agent of corruption and a Cold Warrior.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by lord of the mark

Rich people have been patrons of the arts for a long time. Does everything any Rockefeller did (post war) get attributed to the CIA? From Rockefeller center, to Colonial Willamsburg?

Do you want to ratchet back the hysteria there ?

I'm simply making a comparison between covertly funded and promoted American artists and independent European artists- unless you really think M.I.5, M.I.6, the DGSE et cetera, were promoting Hockney, Blake, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Unlikely, I think....


I can't recall in my post attributing everything to the C.I.A. , via the Rockefellers, but it's always worth being reminded of the seemingly necessary linkages between private individuals and corporations and American government agencies and the direction of foreign policy- Guatemala and United Fruit, anyone ?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by molly bloom




Do you want to ratchet back the hysteria there ?

I'm simply making a comparison between covertly funded and promoted American artists and independent European artists- unless you really think M.I.5, M.I.6, the DGSE et cetera, were promoting Hockney, Blake, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Unlikely, I think....


I can't recall in my post attributing everything to the C.I.A. , via the Rockefellers, but it's always worth being reminded of the seemingly necessary linkages between private individuals and corporations and American government agencies and the direction of foreign policy- Guatemala and United Fruit, anyone ?

You implied, and have done again, that the post war strength of American art was in significant part due to the CIA. Yes Rockefeller gave money to patronize artists - Im sure wealthy europeans patronized european artists - hell, im sure wealthy americans patronized European artists. I fail to see how patronage from Rockefeller makes American artists less "independently funded" than european artists. As for the CIA itself, its support was quite limited - essentially the bailed out the congress for cultural freedom, which mainly set published some magazines, and set up symposia for intellectuals abroad. AFAICT it was NOT a principle source of funds for the abstract expressionists.

European art through the ages was patronized by the church, by royal courts, and by aristocrats. The Russian Constructivists were patronized by a govt that was running brutal death camps.


I think Americans can be justifiably proud of America's post war cultural triumphs - we need to realize that American culture is NOT all pop culture, or vulgarity. I guess pointing that out triggers a need to bring up politics in some people.


"it's always worth being reminded of the seemingly necessary linkages between private individuals and corporations and American government agencies and the direction of foreign policy- Guatemala and United Fruit, anyone ? "

No, quite frankly, it ISNT worth it. Guatemala and United Fruit have nothing to do with the discussion at hand. Linkages between dominant forces in society and governments, and their foreign policies, are part and parcel of the history of mankind. The US does not need to be ashamed of the history of its foreign policy - but thats NOT what this was meant to be about.

There are some folks here in the US lately, who cant manage to talk about anything happening in europe without going off on a screed about "transnational socialists", the allegedly undemocratic nature of the EU, etc. Aside from whatever issues i have with their analyses, my biggest complaint is that they dont recognize that NOT ALL OF LIFE IS POLITICS. Or at least not the paranoid, gotcha politics of this type. There was going on in New York in the 1940s was political in the sense that it was an expression of a new sensibility, in a new age.

[lord of the mark]

and why, pray tell, is it hysterical to offer a different point of view on the Congress of Cultural Freedom?

Maybe its worthwhile to remember what the CIA was up against, and why American liberals and Democrats supported its necessary work.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


You implied, and have done again, that the post war strength of American art was in significant part due to the CIA. Yes Rockefeller gave money to patronize artists - Im sure wealthy europeans patronized european artists - hell, im sure wealthy americans patronized European artists. I fail to see how patronage from Rockefeller makes American artists less "independently funded" than european artists. As for the CIA itself, its support was quite limited - essentially the bailed out the congress for cultural freedom, which mainly set published some magazines, and set up symposia for intellectuals abroad. AFAICT it was NOT a principle source of funds for the abstract expressionists.

I'm restricting myself to the time period YOU set- so Renaissance patronage by either church or state is out, as is everything else up until 1945- and that includes El Lissitsky and Malevich.

It's a lot easier for an artist to succeed if they have patronage- private or state, but there I was thinking that American culture was about individualism and striking free and doing your own thing, but instead its actually about your country's secret service acting as art dealer and promoter- or the political friends of your country's secret service doing so:

Rockefeller was the perfect choice to head a commission investigating the CIA. Questioned during his nomination hearing last fall by Sen. Hatfield: "Do you believe that the Central Intelligence Agency should ever actively participate in the internal affairs of another sovereign country, such as in the case of Chile?" Rockefeller replied,

"I assume they were done in the best national interest."

According to CIA head William Colby's testimony, the CIA tried-with $8 million-to change the election results in Chile when it seemed a Marxist, Allende, would win. American corporations didn't like Allende because he stood for nationalization of Anaconda Copper and other businesses. Anaconda Copper owed a quarter of a billion dollars to a group of banks led by Chase Manhattan, whose chairman is David Rockefeller, Nelson's brother. Now we are catching on to the meaning of "national interest."

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Rockefeller_BoysClub.html

So out goes bad old Mexican mural paintings with their subversive explicit figurative 'message' and instead we have safe abstract expressionism, measured and sold by the yard....


See if you can find for me the sources of funding for the European artists I mentioned in the same period- any slush funds from the British Secret Service, or the French, or Danish ?

You implied, and have done again, that the post war strength of American art was in significant part due to the CIA.

No, I simply pointed out it makes painting an easier prospect if you have a government or rich sponsors promoting your work. Relative 'strength' or 'quality' doesn't come into it.

I think Americans can be justifiably proud of America's post war cultural triumphs - we need to realize that American culture is NOT all pop culture, or vulgarity. I guess pointing that out triggers a need to bring up politics in some people.

If that's aimed at me, then you guess incorrectly- I made a 'pilgrimage', which I don't think is too strong a word, to Canberra in 1998 explicitly to see 'Blue Poles' in the flesh.

And I'd stake my library of Phaidon and Thames and Hudson books on art and my collection of monographs that I know more about the art scene in the States, during the war and post-war, than you.

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by molly bloom

I'm restricting myself to the time period YOU set- so Renaissance patronage by either church or state is out, as is everything else up until 1945- and that includes El Lissitsky and Malevich.

The time period was set for the purpose of a comparison of artists, not for discussing the general question of whether artists rely on patronage.

s a lot easier for an artist to succeed if they have patronage- private or state, but there I was thinking that American culture was about individualism and striking free and doing your own thing,

OMG! even in the individualist USA, artists benefit from patrons. Guess we're not as exceptional as some made out. Nice straw man.

but instead its actually about your country's secret service acting as art dealer and promoter

except as far as i can tell they didnt act that way - they subsidized a group that ran some magazines and some symposia - nothing much to do with the commercial success of abstract expressionists.

- or the political friends of your country's secret service doing so:

Rockefeller would have been patronizing art in the absence the CIA, or the cold war. Its the kind of thing rich people do.


See if you can find for me the sources of funding for the European artists I mentioned in the same period- any slush funds from the British Secret Service, or the French, or Danish ?

I presume they were funded in large part by wealthy people, as were most American artists. No difference there.


Of course culture in europe in the post war period WAS heavily subsidized by the state, national theaters, opera companies etc. I suppose its possible there was none to painting or sculpture. In the past ive seen the US CRITICZED for its lack of state support to the arts. I guess youre damned if you dont, damned if you do.

If that's aimed at me, then you guess incorrectly- I made a 'pilgrimage', which I don't think is too strong a word, to Canberra in 1998 explicitly to see 'Blue Poles' in the flesh.

And I'd stake my library of Phaidon and Thames and Hudson books on art and my collection of monographs that I know more about the art scene in the States, during the war and post-war, than you.

You obviously have studied art much more than I have, and I suppose you can easily trump my adolescent afternoons at MoMa and the Guggenheim - those afternoons probably explain why i turned into such a political troglodyte


But your knowledge of art, displayed here, only made your red herring political comments more jarring.

[lord of the mark]

"Among the industrial countries, the United States is unique for its extremely low public funding for the arts. In all of the countries of Europe, the vast majority of arts funding is provided by the government. These policies are under assault, but it is unlikely that they will significantly change.

In France, one percent of the national budget is spent on culture each year, and this year's package is up 5.9 percent -- three times inflation -- at 2.79 billion euros. The US cultural budget, by comparison, is about 140 million dollars. The French cultural budget is thus well over 20 times higher than the NEA, even though France has less than a fourth the population of the United States. On a per capita basis, the French cultural budget is approximately 90 times higher.

The 2005 US budget is 2.4 trillion dollars. If the US spent one percent on culture like France, cultural funding would be 24 billion instead of about 140 million. That would make the NEA budget 171 times higher.

Europe's forms of public funding allow the arts to flourish in ways that are hardly imaginable in the United States. Germany, for example, has 23 times more full-time year round orchestras per capita than the USA. Even allowing for the most generous estimates, Germany has 28 times more year round opera houses per capita than the USA. (Actually we don't have any year round opera houses, but I added up the partial seasons to make an overall estimate.)

Europe's public funding is also tied to a similar *consistent and long term commitment* to arts education.

[For much more on the comparison of European and American arts funding models, see my article "Marketplace of Ideas" on the ArtsJournal.com website at: http://www.artsjournal.com/artswatch/ ]"


i cannot find similar comparisons for the period 1945-65, Im sorry.

[molly bloom]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by lord of the mark

Originally posted by molly bloom

I'm restricting myself to the time period YOU set- so Renaissance patronage by either church or state is out, as is everything else up until 1945- and that includes El Lissitsky and Malevich.

But your knowledge of art, displayed here, only made your red herring political comments more jarring.

Where's the American figurative 'political' satirical art in the period you highlight ?

What happened to the likes of:

Jack Levine

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright

Philip Evergood

Ben Shahn ?

Of those, I suspect some Americans might recognize Ben Shahn's name, possibly from the time when he painted 'The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti', but that was pre-World War II.

The notion that Rockefeller and friends had no 'political' motive in their collecting or promoting of art is frankly naive in the extreme- instead of the likes of the troublesome Mexican muralists (who ironically influenced Pollock's early style, if not content) such as Orozco and Siqueiros and Rivera, with their explicit challenging social content and critique of society, we get drip paintings, colour fields and abstract expressionism.

Another of Levine's famous canvases is titled "Welcome Home," in which he depicts a corpulent, Blimpish general's boozy, broad-sy homecoming from the wars. The painting was included in a U.S. State Department show which was sent to the Soviet Union and caused a headline-making flap for him at the time.

"The House UnAmerican Activities Committee was between victims," Levine tells us, "and so they subpoena'd me to testify, on a charge that the painting was unpatriotic."

Levine wisecracked at the time: "Here we were, corrupting all those Russians toward communism."

Eventually, the brouhaha blew over, but what ticked off the painter was Eisenhower's dismissal of "Welcome Home" (which now is hanging in the Brooklyn Museum) as "a lampoon, not a real painting."

"What did Ike know," he muses. "After all, he painted by numbers."

An 'unpatriotic' painting.... good grief.


Ivan Albright's: 'And God Created Man In His Own Image':