Abstract art as a Cold War psy-op, from “Aftermath” by Harald Jähner:
The insistence on figurative painting in the GDR made it easier for Western artists to present themselves as an aesthetic alternative and establish abstraction as the West’s trademark artistic style. Seen as the art of freedom, it acquired a charisma that was effectively a political statement, and was all the more convincing in that it did not have to explicitly present itself as such. It represented a playful celebration of being, which embodied pure vital energy, and was played out freely on large canvases. And because of the excessive application of paint, which was trowelled, trickled and applied in thick encrusted layers, abstract painting represented an extravagance which in a sense appealed to a higher form of affluence and continued to shape the post-war era almost as a kind of inner compulsion.
The American propaganda strategists recognised very quickly that art could be very useful in the promotion of democracy. Like the Soviets, they grasped the importance of painting for post-war nation building, but unlike them they found it harder to guide art in a suitable direction. For them, abstract art was a good aesthetic programme for the denazification of the imagination, but even better than that, it was well suited to standing up to the Soviets and giving West Germany an aesthetic identity of its own. By means of abstract painting the Americans were able to make “Socialist Realism look even more stylised, more rigid and confined than it actually was,” the American CIA agent Donald Jameson said. The Americans put a huge amount of energy into encouraging abstract art. They organised grants for young painters, financed exhibitions and bought paintings in large quantities. At the same time, private initiatives and state sponsorship went hand in hand. Often high-ranking military officers bought art and recommended individual artists to the various funding bodies.
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“If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot,” President Truman had said in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947, confident of the thunderous applause this statement would receive from the majority of Americans. That didn’t prevent his Cold War strategists from seeing that very same art as the best way of putting America effectively on the world stage. Certain that Congress would never authorise the funds required to export that art, the CIA turned abstract expressionism into a clandestine operation. So it was that artists who were mocked in the US Congress as heretical daubers were deployed by American foreign policy experts for aesthetic propaganda. Rothko, Pollock and Motherwell might have seen themselves as homeless radicals and lonely individualists at home, but abroad a concerted exhibition effort turned them into ideal representatives of America.
