What’s the distinction between the USA of America and a cup of yogurt? In case you depart the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a tradition. So goes one in every of many jokes lengthy in circulation in regards to the supposed American tendency towards low-minded, expedient philistinism. I grant, as an American myself, that such humor surrounds at the very least a grain of fact. However there was a time when the federal authorities of the U.S., a corporation not usually accused of extreme high-mindedness, took an lively position in selling the nation’s home-grown avant-garde — an acceptable time period, notes Lucie Levine at JSTOR Every day, because it “started as a French navy time period to explain vanguard troops advancing into battle,” and American trendy artwork had develop into a continuation of politics by different means.
“Up till World Warfare II, America had by no means produced massive, influential artwork actions like in Europe,” says the narrator of the Conspiracy of Artwork video above. After the conflict, “one thing sudden occurred: a brood of radical American painters helped make New York Metropolis the middle of the artwork world.”
Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock: they and different artists “captured the world’s consideration with large-scale works of pure shade and kind.” This motion got here to be referred to as summary expressionism, and within the eyes of the newly established Central Intelligence Company, it got here to indicate promise as propaganda. If proven overseas, it might operate as propaganda, highlighting “the variations between American and Soviet politics” — and extra particularly, “the attraction of American tradition over Soviet Tradition.”
“Was Jackson Pollock a weapon within the Chilly Warfare?” asks the New Yorker‘s Louis Menand. Whereas Pollock was certainly promoted overseas with CIA cash (often supplied by layers of organizational misdirection), you don’t have a look at a portray like Lavender Mist and “take into consideration ‘creative free enterprise’ or the CIA, or the cultural politics of Partisan Overview. You consider how a painter might have taken all he had skilled throughout a inventive threshold that nobody had crossed earlier than, and produced this specific factor.” However its “significance for a sure strand of Chilly Warfare cultural politics is a part of the story of the way it bought to us, a era or extra later, and that historical past is price figuring out.” It’s additionally price asking, ought to the USA as soon as once more discover itself face-to-face with a formidable political and cultural adversary, whether or not it is going to be ready to draft a couple of Pollocks again into service.
Associated content material:
How the CIA Secretly Funded Summary Expressionism Throughout the Chilly Warfare
Watch Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock, the 1987 Documentary Narrated by Melvyn Bragg
How the CIA Helped Form the Artistic Writing Scene in America
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embrace the Substack publication Books on Cities, the e book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
