JACK
THE DRIPPER'S CAREER MADE THROUGH CLOAK AND DAGGER
Abstract Painting as a Cold War Weapon?
Of all the saints and martyrs in the pantheon of modern
art, "action painter" Jackson Pollock is the one grabbing
the most attention lately. The hagiography extends to his
Long Island home where, in the words of art critic Robert
Hughes, you can find his relics: "the holy Coffee Can with
a bunch of the Miraculous Brushes sitting in it; the
sanctified shoes, encrusted in paint." The painter's halo
has been burnished even brighter lately, with the recent
biopic starring Pollack lookalike Ed Harris.
I never got Pollock's drippy paintings. They look quite
meaningless to me, like something a temperamental Siamese
might do on the rug if it met with a gallon of housepaint.
I suppose that's the whole point: Pollack's explosions
became a cottage industry for thinkers. Critics could read
virtually anything into them, and they did: Roscharch blots
from the American collective unconscious; beat-poet
graffiti about the Bomb, or even chaotic illustrations of
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. But there's another
angle to Pollock and his paintings that isn't found in the
standard biographies or the accompanying catalogues: the
spy angle. This astounding chapter in twentieth century
history is told by Frances Saunders, arts editor of the
British magazine New
Statesman, in her book
The
Cultural Cold War.
Some background:
into the shambles of Postwar Europe, America arrived like
an avenging street preacher, carrying cartons of cigarettes
and the doctrine of John Foster Dulles. The contest between
the US and the Soviet Union wasn't just for real estate,
but for the moral high ground. In this department Soviet
propaganda was having some success: America was painted as
a land of Negro-lynching southerners, and fat bankers
dragging money bags behind them like Scrooge McDuck.
The Central Intelligence Agency decided to counter the
misperception of America as a cultural backwater by getting
into the arts. From the fifties to the sixties, America's
spook network poured millions upon millions into junkets by
symphony orchestras, authors, and artists. Money was
laundered through funding bodies such as the Rockefeller
and Ford Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
and front organizations like the Farfield Foundation and
the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Through myriad projects,
from big-money prizes to magazines such as Encounter and
international conferences, the beneficiaries included
luminaries from both sides of the pond: WH Auden, AA Milne,
Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, Robert
Lowell, Henry Luce, Andre Malraux, Mary McCarthy, George
Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., Stephen Spender, and many others -
including Jackson Pollock. While many were unwitting
participants in the CIA's cultural cold war, Saunders
asserts that others were willing collaborators. (There is
no evidence that Pollack had a clue what was going on.)
With the lure of cash, the CIA intended to co-opt the
anti-communist left with a vision of the West - and the US
in particular - as being on the forefront of
existentialism, avant-garde music, and abstract art.
Pollack was perfect to promote for the latter, for several
reasons. For one, he wasn't some effete dandy from a rich
East Coast family; he was a prole from Wyoming with
chiseled features. (With little effort, you could imagine
Pollack wielding an M-16 as much as a brush.) His
particular oeuvre -abstract expressionism - was frowned on
by Stalinists as bourgeois decadence, making it a
ready-made weapon. Plus, it was impossible for political
sentiments to intrude into work as non-representational as
Pollock's, ensuring whatever message the paintings
contained weren't likely to go off in untoward populist
directions.
Through its various founding bodies and public relations
outlets, the CIA got to work promoting the doctrine of
abstract expressionism as the Word, and Jackson Pollock as
its Prophet. I don't have the space to do justice to the
full story; for that you'll have to consult Saunder's witty
and well-written book. Suffice to say it's an instructive
tale. An alcoholic painter from Cody, Wyoming, whose career
was pushed by spooks in Langley, Virginia? I don't think
you could find a weirder plot than that on The Lone Gunmen.
Geoff Olson
