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Ancient

925 Silver Collection

Extreme Tension: Art Before and After the Berlin Wall

By Matthew Kangas

February 1, 2025

Part I: How American Art was Politicized during the Cold War      

  

Installation view of Jackson Pollock paintings at “The International Program of the Museum, of Modern Art,” 1959.
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

It’s hard to imagine now, as we face four years of potential government de-funding of the NEA and NEH, that the U.S. government after World War II became a leading, if secret, funder of numerous artistic ventures, including exhibitions, theatre companies, magazines, music festivals and even individual artists. At the time it was justified in the name of anti-communism and used to promote liberal democratic values as a counter to extensive efforts by the Soviet Union to seduce and convert left and neutral leaning West European intellectuals and opinion-makers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. If you are too young to have been there it might seem hard to believe. But it’s true.


How do we know this? Starting with an “Artforum” article by Eva Cockcroft in 1974, Euro-touring exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism were exposed as underwritten by the Central Intelligence Agency through a huge front organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which lasted between 1950 and 1979. Subsequently, two other authors wrote deep-dive studies of exactly how, who and for how long these interventions continued. They revealed efforts to combat the Cominform, the Soviet-based global front for propaganda. As stated in a Wikipedia entry, “The Cominform initially included the Communist parties of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania Yugoslavia (expelled in 1948), France, and Italy. The organization was dissolved in 1956, during de-Stalinization.


Joan Mitchell, “Untitled,” c. 1960, oil on canvas, 66 x 78 5/8”. Courtesy © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Many of Cominform’s activities in the Iron Curtain nations, which (they hoped) would soon include Italy and France, involved overt financial support of cultural organizations. Frances Stonor Saunders, in her book, “Who Paid the Piper?,” (published in the U.S. in 1999 as “The Cultural Cold War”) and Louis Menand in “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War” (2021) both revealed and confirmed the CIA’s involvement, with Menand refuting and correcting some of Saunders’s claims. They put the propaganda wars into a perspective that reinforced the widespread, embarrassing secrecy on the part of the U.S. in the battle for the hearts and minds of postwar Europeans.


Why was the CIA involved in such covert propaganda in the first place rather than less secretive funding agencies? Because, unlike the satellite countries, France, Italy, and America (as well as the United Kingdom) had neither a cultural ministry nor (in the case of the U.S.) an NEA until 1965. By that time, tens of millions of dollars had already been spent and allocated to Congress for Cultural Freedom and its covert entities that included the prominent British magazine, “Encounter,” the German monthly “Der Monat,” and the French publication, “Preuves.”


Morris Louis, “Beta Zeta,” 1960-61, acrylic on canvas, 100 3/8 x 172 7/8”.
Courtesy of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. © VC Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

In addition, within the United States, private publishers, chiefly Frederick A. Praeger, were publishing social science and cultural studies written by foreign and domestic scholars supporting democratic and capitalistic programs for social sciences, agriculture, foreign policy, and economics. (Disclosure: my first job in New York after college was as editorial assistant at Praeger after the CIA subventions of “Praeger Special Studies” had been revealed in 1967.)


While classical and avant-garde music, ballet, and literature were among the recipients of such subventions, the purpose here is to examine how the visual arts were affected before and after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. At first, Abstract Expressionist touring exhibitions in Western Europe were targeted and indeed made possible with the full collusion of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. These were later supplemented by other surveys, including Pop art and group shows of American artists living in Europe, such as Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.


Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Helicopter String Quartet,” 1984,
Dutch Grasshoppers aerobatics team flying Alouette helicopters, Ramstein, Germany.

The Museum of Modern Art became the American organizer for CIA funded shows abroad because one of its founding families, the Rockefellers, chiefly Nelson, along with their friends and employees, cooperated fully, if behind the scenes, setting up paper nonprofit groups that became funnels for distributing funds. Thus, instead of Cominform, the U.S. had, among others, the Farfield Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shelter Rock Foundation, and the Lazarus Foundation.


Art within the Congress for Cultural Freedom took on greater urgency after the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961. It would eventually come down in 1989 in the immediate prelude to the fall of the Soviet Union. East German artists who gradually emigrated or escaped to the West and became well known include Gerhard Richter, Neo Rauch, and Georg Baselitz. They joined West German artists such as Joseph Beuys and Rebecca Horn who shifted away from Abstract Expressionist painting to another wing of American art: performance art, something the Cold War bureaucrats never anticipated.


Alan Kaprow, “Sweet Wall, Berlin,” 1970, Happening. Empty plot near Berlin Wall sponsored by Galerie René Block.
Courtesy of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. © VC Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

It was a series of concerts by John Cage at Darmstadt, West Germany, in 1958, however, and subsequent exhibitions by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in French and German art galleries and museums that affected avant-garde art and music in both the German Democratic Republic, i.e., East Germany, and the Federal Republic of West Germany. One composer influenced by Cage was Karlheinz Stockhausen, who wrote a string quartet to be performed in four helicopters and remains best known as a key pioneer of electronic music.


Similarly, Allan Kaprow, godfather of Happenings, created “Sweet Wall” (1970) in West Berlin, sponsored not by the Congress for Cultural Freedom but by art dealer René Block. Hungarian artist Endre Tót was allowed to leave the Iron Curtain satellite and travel to the divided city to make his own Wall graffiti intervention, “1/2 Dozen Berlin Gladness” (1978).


Konrad Klapheck, “The Power of Oblivion,” 1968, oil on canvas, 61 x 43 1/4”. Courtesy of Artforum.

One amusing contradiction of the export and underwriting of New York School exhibitions, which purported to display democratic values of freedom and individualism, was the torrent of attacks by conservative American politicians against Abstract Expressionism during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. On the one hand, elite art collectors and industrial oligarchs like Nelson Rockefeller, Ralph Hanes (of underwear fame), and Julius Fleischmann (of yeast fame) were pouring their money into the Congress for Cultural Freedom to amplify government projects which promoted the values of liberal democracy.


On the other hand, irate Philistine Republican politicians were so incensed by an art style they could not understand that they claimed it was a “communist conspiracy” to undermine those same values. Michigan Congressman George Dondero went so far to write in 1952 that the movement was an insidious plot that “threatened American art museums.” The narrative that the center of international art had moved from Paris to New York was never simple, even before 1989.


To come, Part II: How German Art was Re-Unified


Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.
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