Abstract Intelligence & Clandestine Expression
The CIA & the Arts
Every edit is a lie. — Jean-Luc Godard
- How did you transport the canvases? Some of those Jackson Pollacks are quite large.
- Oh we didn’t, the CIA did. They fitted-out the planes. They were marvelous…
This conversation I overheard in the Academicians' Room, the private club of the Royal Academy of Arts, one rainy midday in the dour city of London. Outside, empty high-rises concealed the parked cash of an octopus of transnational landlords, transforming the city’s skyline into a panorama of broken glassy teeth. But for a few indistinct figures sheltering in a doorway, the central distinct might be uninhabited. As I contemplated this prospect of municipal decay, I realized that it bore an uncanny resemblance, especially when seen through the patterned glass window, to one of those muggy and depressing paintings by Mark Rothko.
The two Royal Academy club members were referring to a series of travelling exhibits which, starting in 1956 and sponsored by the CIA with the New York Museum of Modern Art, toured Europe to showcase the formal freedom of contemporary American art. Works by Pollack, KIine, and De Kooning were used to counter the popularity of Soviet musicians at the time. Culturally, the US looked pretty backward. The wake of McCarthyism made America seem intolerant, paranoid, and rabidly right-wing despite all its protestations of liberalism and democracy. In the Third World, Washington sided with the colonial oppressor, earning it the undying hatred of native liberation movements. Given all this, CIA wisely hunted for assets on the Left, preferably disillusioned communists and Trotskyites still bitter over Stalinism. Counting also on a naïve concept of self-expression which has characterized the Western artist’s ego for centuries, it had little trouble recruiting.
Luckily also for Langley, the Purges and the Second World War had either murdered, silenced, or exiled the greatest artists of the old Russian avant-garde. When the Agency decided to become a patron of the arts, the wild and brilliant genius of the early USSR, with its Futurists, Constructivists, Suprematists, Formalists, and Zaumists, was long gone. State-sponsored Socialist Realism was an easy target because anything looked exciting when compared to its stiff and drab productions. Yet CIA still needed some kind of ideology to promote as an alternative to the utopian promise of international socialism. Like Aquinas when faced with Islam, they realized they had no philosophy and needed to invent one. Self-expression and freedom, they argued—murky enough concepts, vague enough to sound pretty as long as you didn’t ask what they meant—were only possible under capitalism, American capitalism being the best and most vital. Neath forspacious skies of liberty, you could hack away at your art without worrying about nosy secret police. You could make things ugly or beautiful. You might even make some money.
In New York, CIA seized on Abstract Expressionism, an art movement which expressed the self by obliterating it. It proved an excellent instrument for covert actions. The Agency created a milieu to show these works and it manipulated the art market around them, channeling funds to and from its various field operations into galleries, exhibits, and mass media. Works of the big players of the school were imbedded in CIA-run journals like Encounter and The Paris Review. Compromised European art magazines reprinted interviews with the artists, giving their provocations a radical veneer at loggerheads with jive-ass Stateside elements that were so embarrassing for the CIA (HUAC and Ku Kluxery, prudish art critics, John Birchers). Harnessing the nihilism of the poet-war period—perhaps an inevitable turn after the prior generation of artists had been literally wiped out or made wandering exiles—the Company sold its artists as the logical conclusion of the Modernist interrogation of the image and of the use of art itself. After the camps, history seemed impermeable and any depiction of reality looked like cheap kitsch. At least that is how the story goes.
One of the many figures hovering around the New York scene in the mid-1950s was Richard Brown Baker, a former OSS and CIA man who fancied himself a poet. Early on, Baker had recognized the value of Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art (apparently, he was the third person ever to buy a Lichtenstein). He hung out with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, had tea with Joseph Albers, and recorded everything in a voluminous diary. Baker also wrote a memoir of his old days with the OSS. He was not impressed with the cloak-and-dagger world. Espionage was just a typing pool of half-baked bookworms being bossed around by incompetent and unimaginative men playing at cowboys. When the OSS was reshuffled to form the CIA in 1949, Baker stayed on a few years then quit. And perhaps that was the last he saw of his old colleagues. Yet spooks and ex-spooks seem to land on the arts like bluebottles, cropping up in places as eccentric and as esoteric as their peculiar personalities. Perhaps like spycraft, the arts offer a gaudy sense of intrepid failure even if the glamour of success proves elusive. The upbeat and charming Brown did get morose at times. He had to self-publish his books and occasionally lamented that he was a lowly collector. Still, he kept buying art until he died, went to good parties, told good stories, and maintained a catholic sense of gambling on what was in. In the 1970s, he went with Photorealism, but also owned some of the crass products of the Chicago Imagists. He ended, predictably enough, with Damien Hurst. The Richard Brown Baker Collection is now at Yale, the traditional home of American spooks. Yale was also the birthplace of the heavily ideological American Studies program, founded by Professor Norman Pearson, friend and wartime colleague of CIA luminaries Alan Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan.
The new style of painting needed promoters and streetwise theorists, especially because the canvasses themselves presented almost nothing (which was the point, after all). Clement Greenberg was the most important of these mouthpieces, an intellectual with the trademark swagger and studied anti-intellectualism of the tough-guy artsy Yank. Like many, Greenberg passed through Marx and Trotsky back in the 1930s. He came out a Cold Warrior, championing individual experience over theoretics and the free market over a classless society. Once a columnist for the Left Nation, Greenberg later joined the CIA-funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom (Pollack did too. For the latter, it was probably for girls and booze, not anticommunism). Greenberg also wrote for Commentary, linked to the Agency via endowments from its Fairfield Foundation cut-out and its increasingly right-wing editor, another former Communist, Norman Podhoretz. Greenberg got fired for womanizing. Podhoretz went on to attack the Black Panthers and Guevara. He is still around, calling himself a ‘paleo-neoconservative’ and stumping for sinister causes like Pro-Life and Israeli ethnic cleansing.
Clement Greenberg had anticipated Thatcherism and Reaganism in many ways. For him, there was no such thing as society. Personal emotions are all that is important: The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience. Reflection is an Asiatic paralysis to pure doing, as frigid and distant as Siberia when compared to the hot emotive power of bold American frontiersmanship. Painting must only refer to itself—there is nothing outside its apparition. History exists only insofar as it is a position from which we can perceive a radical break (Greenberg’s claims to continuity are a marketing ploy, a language copped from nationalism to legitimize the new regime in aesthetics). Everything is immediate, or it will be not at all. Greenberg maintained that even when Abstract Expressionism became a mannered school, it was still magically immune from manipulation as a political object. Nothingness cannot be commodified. As he said: The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility. So what is this sensibility? Quite literally, it is suicide.
Along with the mysteries of painting and plastic, CIA also embraced the written word. PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists) International was another Agency project, though it was founded back in 1921 as an apolitical fellowship according to its charter, written by the English novelist John Galsworthy. War, socialism, and to some degree, fascism, put pressure on this precious impartiality. Nonpartisan PEN became lost in the CIA’s corridor of mirrors, emerging as an organ for soft power propaganda against the transparent ghoul of killjoy international communism. It wasn’t very good at concealing its ulterior ideological motives. According to his autobiography, PEN’s first American President, Arthur Miller, wondered if “our State Department or CIA or equivalent British hands might be stirring this particular stew.” Miller was finally persuaded to take the job in 1965, but remained suspicious (at least until his plays were banned four years later in the USSR due to his support for Soviet dissidents). Money for the financially-insecure PEN was obtained via CIA asset George Minden, the man behind the distribution of samizdat literature behind the Iron Curtain. Its donors were a roll-call of notorious CIA financial vehicles: the Ford Foundation, The Farfield Foundation, and the International Writers’ Fund—with a few pennies from the non-Agency UNESCO tossed in for camouflage.
The Paris Review began publishing the same year as the Agency’s Iranian coup d'état, 1953. Its co-founder was CIA asset and novelist Peter Matthiessen. George Plimpton, another co-founder, was also dodgy: his correspondence revealed that he not only knew money came via the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom but collaborated with them in pushing the narrative of the West as the savior of Pasternak and smuggler of Zhivago to the free world. During this same period, the Agency undertook other revisions: it fixed Italian elections against the forerunning Partito Comunista Italiano, helped shore-up the power of the right in Greece, ousted democratically-elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, and began the early moves in what would become the Vietnam war.
On its literature front, CIA overthrew the earlier American socialism of Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. Henceforth, writers would be spies confessing the turmoil and inner bitterness of their solitary lives. Collective experience was abandoned in favor of the articulation of the morbidly personal—a depressing and impotent realization that the transformation of the outer world was impossible and things were most honestly explored by excavating the ruins of an enervated consciousness. At Iowa University, the founder of the Writers Workshop, Paul Engle, received money from Company fronts to school young authors in the grammar of the Self as an independent social and economic agent. This inscribed Self preferred “sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.” American literature became phonebooks of paranoid misty forms, untrustworthy memories, self-conscious illiteracy, and glib suburban bitchiness. The famous rule is show, not tell—which sounds like a description of the engineering of spectacular events in spycraft.
I was a stranger to myself. — John le Carré
If there was a new Self, a lonely psychological center, then the old subjects must be sacrificed. In painting, this subject could only mean the image itself. The death and subsequent prohibition of images in Abstract Expressionism meant that, though the painters knew it not, that subject which the artists thought they had banished forever, the image, stealthily returned as a dybbuk hiding the true commodity of the work. It was not the paintings, which were soon enough worth millions, but the figure of the artist himself where the fetish really resides. Under the slashes, spatters, washes, the palette of putrid runny colors, the invisible image of the artist rises up to supplant the imageless picture. The paintings were irrelevant before this haunted form standing next to the frame, an alienated being divorced from painting who now directs the mysterious process of transforming these artworks into leveraged entities. Nothing else exists but this process, which is effectively concealed by violent acts upon the canvass—solitary, wholly singular, hiding in plain view, alone in the icy search for American redemption.
If CIA made Lumumba a martyr, then it also demanded that its unwitting assassins in culture martyr themselves. How? By allowing nothing but the action of the brush on the black ops of an empty canvas, the raw spontaneity of the gesture made by solo operatives, works of a doomed hand dooming all painting. Academic cant about ‘depth’ or the primacy of the ‘gestural’ is a cover—the work is supposed to be meaningless. It is the empty sign as a world statement, which statement carries the power of declassified crimes, mercenary force, the cynicism of throwaway assets whose clandestine objectives are the most hidden and most shattered subject of all. It was an organic outgrowth as well, quite in the grain of the American style of fame and fortune and the cult of celebrity. It ingested CIA without CIA having to offer much beyond money. The operation was directed at internal as well external targets, perhaps the internal most of all. In the end, the Abstract Expressionist was a public figure, an icon with much in common with that other American Master—the Serial Killer.
Back in 1950, Clement Greenberg had already called Abstract Expressionism the suicide of painting. In painting-as-suicide, Rothko and Arshile Gorky followed their final directive because for these absolutely free men, there could be no other option. No airlift was possible. No one really comes in from cold. Frank Olsen fell out of a hotel window in 1953. Frank Wisner put his son’s shotgun to his head in 1965. William Colby lasted until 1996, when he apparently stepped off his canoe and disappeared into the Potomac. Consider the paintings of the whole school. Do they not seem like visualizations of the CIA’s attempts to wipe clean and alter memory via its infamous MKUltra program? Or the strile fantasies of its interventions, coups, attempts to reshape reality via arms drops, sponsored ‘opposition’, and targeted assassination? If these projects were disastrous in politics, they were very successful in art.
Where ideology and finance coalesce in propaganda and the market, you will find the hidden hand of the Agency. Barnett Newman’s isolated color fields are kill ratios, RAND charts, and military lettuce adorning the planes of artillery projection. De Koonig is a partial clone of (part of) Duchamp, a cybernetic program of grim washes and ripped flesh. Of all of them, De Kooning loathes the human figure the most. You are conned into thinking you see something, anything… Maybe the funeral of Chagal or Matisse. Kline is the valorization of debris. Our cities have come to resemble his carbonated superhighways, his pseudo Japanese swizzles stamped like sweatshops over the tomb of negative space. The childlike images of Cy Twombly are prairie nostalgia, heavy-mannered and sentimental, an exhausted pioneer opposition to the serpentine vitality of Native Indian arts. Pollack’s ‘Action Paintings’ are the Company’s direct warfare imprint, the manipulation of internal forces against themselves in an unwilling host country. Were they inspired by Los Alamos, by jungle countercoups, the wages of Operation Condor? Clyfford Still is obsessed with ordinance, with surveillance equipment and the inevitableness of nuclear war. Pollack and he are the height of End Times Expressionism. There is also an abiding American Puritanism in their paintings, a machine-prosecutor which silently accuses the very object of its labors of cosmopolitan corruption. Motherwall simply plagiarizes all the others. Or they plagiarize him. He is the general with dark glasses waving from the motorcade. And it is astonishing that when looking at all these squirts and sputters, geysers and clusters, that you begin to realize that nothing has really been left to chance. How could this be? Because in these suffocating spaces, history is complete and beyond the reach of human touch. As in any color revolution, the pictures seem jinxed somehow by actors behind the scenes. In the final analysis, ‘Pure’ painting ends up as ‘pure’ politics. That is, painting without a subject—just as pure Politics is politics without Class.
There was no particular masterplan for a CIA-created Cold War art in America, but rather a dialectical relationship wherein the Agency was able to control unintended consequences, the eccentricities of chance, and the flightiness of vast egos. The whole thing was a cultural psyops production. Most of the time, it operated of its own accord. But it must be remembered that CIA’s far more important operations, such as the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, were miserable failures on every level. CIA failed to detect India’s testing of an atomic bomb, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union came as an utter surprise to these masters of intelligence. So this little homeland victory in the art world is pretty meagre in comparison to the Agency’s useless grand plans to alter history. Aside from boring art, the main yield was a market used to launder funds and store hemorrhaging moneys. When it comes to most contemporary arts, the public is quite right to ignore what never concerned it in the first place. Walking the contemporary art galleries, there is a general suspicion that we are somehow being conned. Cold museum walls hide use-value and provenance. They conceal how the object was acquired (stolen), to what ends it is employed, and who decided on its import. Museums hide from the public the matter of every object they proudly display. So where is the CIA exactly? Where are the cameras and the honey pots? Minutes of secret meetings in the Cedar Tavern? None of it happened because of them, yet it all happened because they were there. Little of it was their doing, but only because everything was done for them.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Clement Greenberg or George Plimpton were directly on the payroll, or even that Greenberg’s ideas have a distinct theoretical overlap with the military counterintelligence theories of David Galula. It does not matter that CIA operations like Gladio in Europe were equal sources of scam artistry and organized crime as much as they were an arms depot for fascist sleeper cells. The Agency’s cynicism extends to every facet of its business. Sometimes, it simply gathers intelligence for intel’s sake, storing it away out of habit. Which is similar to that old criticism that American postwar art was simply a modish revival of l'art pour l'art. And if you believe that expression and emotion are all that counts, then perhaps you also trust in miracles. There is a place for slick subversion too: If Plimpton took cash from spooks, it just shows how goddam clever he was. But is it true that everyone in the Unification Church still receives a free subscription to the Kenyan Review? You hear strange things...
As a coda, CIA has its own personal art collection and exhibit spaces. Sadly, the Agency seems to have retreated back to kitsch despite Clement Greenberg’s warnings. They’re all about Norman Rockwell and Frank Frazetta these days, as this catalog indicates. The name of the show is predictable: The Art of Intelligence. Naturally, CIA also has a hidden collection, contrived by Alan Dulles himself. Rather than some dead Brutalist government bureaucracy, the founding father had wanted the service to resemble a lush Ivy League campus like his beloved Yale. He got the plumb contemporary art collection of Vincent Melzac on loan. Melzac was later rewarded with an Agency Seal Medallion when he donated the paintings outright. Information about this cooler and more furtive collection can be found here, and shows that CIA admires the Washington Color School. At least that appears to be the case.