“Autumn Rhythm” cost the Metropolitan Museum of Art $30,000. It was an unprecedented sum for a contemporary artist in 1957, painter Jackson Pollock having died a year prior at age 44 in a car accident less than a mile from his home.
The 17.5-foot-wide painting was created in 1950, the last of three years comprising the “drip period” that produced most of his best-known work. Pollock created the piece over a two-day period at his Long Island home. Moving right to left above the canvas, he began by dripping black lines, followed by brown and white, and, ultimately, the slightest hint of teal.
“Painting is self-discovery,” Pollock would say of his method. “Every good artist paints what he is.”
What is, perhaps, most remarkable about Pollock and the abstract expressionist movement for which he served as a figurehead, is the remarkable speed which we he rose the ranks of the art world. In 1949, Life Magazine ran a headline asking, “Is he the Greatest Living Painter in the United States.” It was a rhetorical question. The magazine’s answer was, decidedly, “yes.”
Not everyone agreed. In fact, abstract expressionism was polarizing even by modern art standards. Writing in 1957, critic Frank Getlein suggested that a gallery exhibiting a piece by Barnett Newman, “could have saved a good chunk by getting the plan and having the thing run off by the janitors with rollers.”
The style did, however, find perhaps its biggest champion outside the studios of New York City where it was birthed. “Never for one moment did American art become a conscious mouthpiece for any agency as was, say, the Voice of America,” art historian Max Kozloff reflected in 1973. “But it did lend itself to be treated as a form of benevolent propaganda for foreign intelligentsia.”
For decades, rumors persisted about the CIA’s involvement in the promotion of abstract expressionism.
“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,” former case officer Donald Jameson told the media in the mid-90s. “And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticized that much and that heavy-handedly was worth support one way or another."
The spy agency utilized a “long leash” approach toward promoting the expressly American movement as a key example of the country’s artistic superiority over the Soviet Union.
The decision to weaponize modern art dates to the CIA’s founding in 1947. The international exhibition, “Advancing American Art” was planned for that same year, but ultimately canceled as then-President Truman problematically noted, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." The sentiment echoed much of the establishment’s general resentment toward contemporary art, but the agency pressed on. Under the leadership of CIA official (and future Eight is Enough author) Tom Braden, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was tasked with turning American art into weapons of cold warfare.
“I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches,” Braden revealed in an 1967 Saturday Evening Post article immodestly titled, ‘I'm glad the CIA is immoral.’ “And then there was Encounter, the magazine published in England and dedicated to the proposition that cultural achievement and political freedom were interdependent. Money for both the orchestra's tour and the magazine's publication came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it.”
While Braden chose not to reveal the spy agency’s connection to modern painting at the time, its promotion of abstraction expressionism may well have been its greatest victory of all. The CIA sponsored several high-profile exhibitions, including “The New American Painting,” a European tour spanning the final two years of the 50s. The “long-leash” approach enabled the agency to prop up the work without the involvement of the painters themselves. The artists – many of whom were left and left-leaning New Yorkers – likely wanted little to do with the anti-communist propaganda.
"It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognize art and to support it," Braden would say in a bit of a victory lap several decades later. “And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilization has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn't been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn't have had the art."
Sources:
Modern art was CIA 'weapon' https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
Was modern art a weapon of the CIA? https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 by Jackson Pollock https://www.jackson-pollock.org/autumn-rhythm.jsp#prettyPhoto
I’m Glad the CIA is ‘immoral’ http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/braden_20may1967.html
American Painting During the Cold War http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/kozloff.pdf