A modest attempt to atone for my tastes

I don’t keep up with modern art as I should. In fact, the way I carry on against Abstract Expressionism, most urban sophisticates would consider me a backward troglodyte, if not a metaphysical innuendo. My problem is basically a very selfish one. I know what I like, and I don’t like Abstract Expressionism. I tend to avoid the modern art sections of art museums in the same way I avoid foods I dislike by not going to bad restaurants, not ordering unpalatable-looking dishes on menus, etc. My tastes may be grounded in ignorance, but the problem with that explanation is that learning about Abstract Expressionism has not made me like it, any more than learning more about liver and hard boiled eggs would make me like them more.

However, today I did learn something about Abstract Expressionism that I did like!

It was promoted and used as a tool against Communism by the CIA during the 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.

What I especially love is the irony that many of the artists being promoted were Communists or Marxists themselves:

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.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the “long leash” – arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

Nice. And since the art was very unpopular among ordinary American ignoramuses like yours truly, and as the artists themselves would have been genuinely outraged had they known they were being used as pawns in the war against Communism, the CIA had to carefully conceal its role:

“Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I’d love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!” [former case officer Donald Jameson] joked. “But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.

“In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another.”

To pursue its underground interest in America’s lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. “Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes,” Mr Jameson explained, “so that there wouldn’t be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn’t have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps.”

Pity the poor American realists of the time like Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood! And imagine the reaction of their advocates like Thomas Craven. Had he known, he’d have shit regionalist bricks.

Anyway, once I recovered my composure, I was filled with newfound respect for an art form I had hitherto disliked, along the lines of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Today America continues to fund imperialist decadence at home and abroad.

Who knew?

Anyway, I decided that some sort of personal atonement was needed, and I figured I would start by revisiting an artist who particularly bores me.

Mark Rothko.

His paintings of rectangles sell for tens of millions of dollars, and he and other modern artists have been accused of being part of “Cultural Marxism” sicced on our culture by the likes of Gramsci and Marcuse, with the whole operation ultimately being some sort of KGB project which took on its own life and ruined American culture. I don’t buy into such all-encompassing conspiracy theories, mind you, but I like the idea of the CIA deploying Gramscians against the very people who were behind them. Kind of a Hall of Mirrors, no?

Anyway, one dark painting that Rothko did for the Seagram Building especially caught my attention:

At the time, Rothko compared himself to Michelangelo:

The painting comes from one of three series of canvases, painted by Rothko in 1958–59, produced as a commission for murals for The Four Seasons Restaurant in New York‘s Seagram Building on Park Avenue.

Rothko’s original conception for the work became increasingly sombre. He later said, “After I had been at work for some time I realised that I was much influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo‘s walls in the staircase room of the Medicean Library in Florence. He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after …”

The original feeling he was after had more to do with appetites.

While on the SS Independence he disclosed to John Fischer, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, that his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room….” He hoped, he told Fischer, that his painting would make the restaurant’s patrons “feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.”

Hey, I can readily identify with that! Whether that painting had the Commies butting their heads against the wall I do not know. However, much as I realize reactions to art are all very personal, I just can’t shake the feeling that “Black on Maroon evokes” — even anticipates — a well known modern logo:

All of which has me wondering about something else. If Rothko’s image upset the Commies, perhaps the marriage equality symbol will upset some of our enemies today.

In that spirit, I propose fusion of the old and the new elements. May the CIA make love on its knees in the war against appetites!

MORE: It seems I was correct to have corrected the conventional placement of Rothko’s “Black on Maroon” from vertical to horizontal.

Who gets to decide these things?

As to why they are displaying it the wrong way at the Tate Museum, I suspect they don’t want people to notice what I noticed.