Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

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For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.

Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.

The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.

The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.

"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.

"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. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."

To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."

This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.

This organisation put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).

Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.

The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

Now in his eighties, Mr Braden lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.

"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."

He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."

If this meant playing pope to this century's Michelangelos, well, all the better: "It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it," Mr Braden said. "And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilisation 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."

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.

But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.

* The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.

Covert Operation

In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London.

The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds.

So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device."

Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.

Pollock painting

During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety, a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.

A new trading platform that launched in London today is the latest art exchange that seeks to democratize art by allowing people to buy and sell shares of individual artworks, but will it work?

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My Art Invest, a new trading platform that launched in London today, is the latest art exchange to attempt to democratize art by allowing people to buy and sell shares of individual artworks. One share of Bansky’s spray paint on canvas Heavy Artillery Elephant, for example, can be yours for €120 ($166), while a share of Rome Pays Off, a Jean-Michel Basquiat screen print, one of an edition of 85, costs €166 ($229).

Buyers can either hold onto their shares until all the shares are sold and My Art Invest founder Tom-David Bastok sells the work, distributing any profits, or they can opt to offer their shares for sale, at any price they see fit, on the My Art Invest exchange.


In theory, that is. As Melanie Gerlis reports in The Art Newspaper, “Attempts to divide works of art into equal shares, emulating companies that trade on a stock exchange, have proved problematic at best.” This is a diplomatic way of putting it, because as far as I can tell, every other attempt to set up an art exchange has failed miserably.


One of the more recent ones, Art Exchange, which launched in Paris in 2011, opened for business promising to make the art market more liquid by giving buyers an easy exit strategy, yet not a single art share has changed hands on the exchange since then.

Why is this model so difficult to pull off? One reason is that, unless you can actually trade your art shares, you make no return on your investment until all the shares in a work are sold, allowing the artwork itself to be sold, which could take “an estimated four or five years,” according to the My Art Invest website.


That is if the artwork can be sold at all, much less for a profit. The website does not address what happens if all the 100 or more shares in each artwork do not sell. Are buyers then holding on to a share certificate worth exactly zero indefinitely? Gerlis reports that since 2011 Bastok has already sold 200 paintings this way in his native France, where the company has already launched online, but has any cash has been distributed to investors?


If not, then the jury is out and the only reason one might still participate is if there is viable secondary market for buyers to resell their shares in the meantime. Is there? No, because according to the company’s website, “you have to wait until all the shares in an artwork have been sold in the primary market” first.


It’s true that My Art Invest offers buyers a couple of benefits that other art exchanges haven’t. The first is that a selection of the 100 works available to purchase will be shown in an East London gallery, which opened tonight with a street art exhibition featuring Banksy and Shepard Fairey. Would-be buyers can enjoy the works up close, and if they are so inclined, tap their share orders into one of the iPads made available.


The second is that if any one buyer purchases 25% of the shares in one art work, they can have that art work in their home for three months of the year. “We are different from other [art share schemes] because our aim is simply to be more democratic. We are making the art market more affordable and accessible,” Bastok told Gerlis.


Yet there’s a catch here. To take the art home, you must own at least 25% of the shares, have proof of an installed and working security alarm, appropriate insurance and pay a deposit equivalent to 150% of the price of the whole artwork, according to the website. For the most expensive works (which range from £500 to £100,000), you’d have to have £150,000 ($251,000) lying around in order to enjoy it at home for three months, however many shares you own in it.


Making the art accessible is certainly a great idea, because most art exchanges put their art in a vault, where the chance of buyers enjoying it is nil. Perhaps by showing works in a gallery, Bastok will be able to succeed where others have failed by developing a community of active buyers, and eventually sellers, for his exchange. With so much uncertainty about when any buyer can exit their investment, though, that could be tough.





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The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In "Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.

Perched on a façade over the northern entrance of a 300-year-old cathedral in Salamanca, Spain, is a carved figure remarkably reminiscent of a modern astronaut. Construction of the cathedral was started in 1513 and completed in 1733.

Instantly, the mind questions what the eyes see. Theories of ancient aliens, time travel, the supernormal power of foresight, and many other ideas come to mind. And, although the world today still holds many mysteries, the mystery of the Salamanca Cathedral Astronaut has a much more down-to-earth explanation.

Salamanca, Spain, is home to two cathedrals. The “Old Cathedral,” simply known as “Catedral Vieja,” which was constructed in about the mid-12th century. As such, it may be one of the oldest cathedrals in Europe.

The other cathedral, known as the “Catedral Nueva” or “New Cathedral,” which is no longer new by today’s standards but was new when it was first called such.



It’s on the New Cathedral’s entrance that the astronaut appears, running laterally, parallel to the entrance. He sits perched on a stalk complete with boots, helmet, and what appears to be a breathing apparatus on his chest with tubes stretching to a pack on the rear of his suit. He is grasping with his right hand what appears to be a vine acting as a harness of sorts running across his waist. His left hand is grasping a nearby leaf for support. His face reflects a rather bewildered expression.

But, how could this be? Astronauts didn’t exist when the cathedral was constructed. It would appear that the carving is actually part of restoration that was done to the cathedral in 1992. At that time, the “Puerta de Ramos” (this is the name of the New Cathedral’s entrance) had seen significant damage over the past few centuries.

The addition was purportedly added by stonemason Miguel Romero and possibly overseen by Jerónimo García de Quiñones, according to Ancient Code: Deciphering History Together. Following tradition, restoration on cathedrals often includes something from modern times, in this case, the restorers chose the figure of an astronaut.

However, supporters of alternative theories believe the astronaut was indeed carved much earlier and that the restoration work merely repaired the damaged astronaut. The mystery lies in the fact the photos of the façade before the restoration and witness accounts of the Puerta de Ramos have become hard to find, adding weight to the controversy.

The astronaut was damaged in 2010 by vandals, according to Ancient Code. The pictures in circulation showing the astronaut with a missing right arm and damaged face are pictures of the damage. The damage has since been repaired.



The city harbors other anomalous carvings. Another such carving is part of the University of Salamanca’s façade. The façade is a very detailed and intricate stone carving depicting all manner of figures and designs. Within the carving is hidden a scull with a frog on top of the head of the skull. This carving is rather old as the façade was commissioned in 1529. It is believed to represent Prince Juan, who died at the young age of 20 in 1497. The frog is believed to represent the physician who treated him, according to the Cultural Travel Guide.

the source

Chicago plastics manufacturer Stefan Edlis faced more than $20 million in U.S. capital gains taxes by selling his Andy Warhol painting to billionaire Steven A. Cohen eight years ago.



He paid zero. Half of the proceeds from the $80 million sale of Warhol’s 1964 “Turquoise Marilyn” were tax exempt as an asset of Edlis’s private foundation, he said. The other $40 million was used to buy more paintings, which was permitted under a long-standing provision in the tax code that allows investors to defer capital gains by buying similar property of equal or greater value.

Wealthy collectors are saving millions of dollars with this tax break by rolling profits from the sale of artworks into buying more art. These so-called 1031 exchanges have increased in popularity as art prices have surged, attracting the scrutiny of lawmakers in Washington who are calling for the repeal of the provision on collectibles.

Edlis, who along with his wife, Gael Neeson, gave 42 artworks valued at about $400 million to the Art Institute of Chicago last week, said he has used the 1031 exchange for most of his sales and acquisitions of art during the past 10 to 15 years.

“It is a great tool for upgrading, concentrating or a change of focus,” the 89-year-old Edlis said in an e-mail.

Buy Boat?

The Edlis-Neeson Foundation has given $28.9 million in grants to cultural institutions and nonprofits, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, since its inception in 2007 to 2013, the last publicly available figures, according to its tax returns.

“What would I do with the money?” he said in a telephone interview. “Buy a big boat? Buy an island in the Caribbean? I am an art investor so investment in art was the most logical thing. Almost 90 percent of my net worth is in art. I’m over-invested.”

Unlike donations to museums and private foundations, which allow collectors to receive tax deductions on the full market value of art, these like-kind exchanges are the only mechanism available to American collectors who want to reinvest in the art market without immediately paying taxes, said Diana Wierbicki, partner and global head of art law practice at Withers Bergman LLP.

“It’s a very good financial tool for extending the value of your art holdings,” said Dean Valentine, a Los Angeles-based collector who said he has done several 1031 exchanges in the past 18 months. “Whatever profit you make can be reinvested in art instead of going down the government drain.”

Horses, Planes

Since 1921, section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code has enabled investors to roll profit back into their businesses by deferring taxes. Most common in real estate, the exchanges have been done with race horses and airplanes. Warhols and Picassos have been part of the fray since the 1980s.

While legal, 1031s have been under attack by lawmakers. President Barack Obama’s 2016 proposed budget calls for a repeal of tax deferrals on collectibles and new limits in other areas.

“Stefan Edlis has been generous but many people who will take advantage of this will not be generous,” said Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art.

Storr said the tax deferral on art transactions should be repealed because it protects the rich and feeds a speculative market.


the source

Midway through the Museum of Modern Art’s enormous Willem de Kooning exhibition, the curator’s effort at sobriety, balance and perspective breaks down. Lined up on one wall, side by side, like a platoon of drunken and painted harlots, de Kooning’s landmark 1950 “Woman” paintings take over and spread their mayhem in every direction. They leer and squint and mock, and the power of their presence overwhelms the judicious argument that has been carefully superimposed on this methodical retrospective: That de Kooning’s career is best understood as a series of formal problems and solutions, a painterly quest to rethink how abstraction and representation can coexist, how the two-dimensional surface of the canvas can contain both the flat patterning impulse of abstraction and the illusionist three-dimensional space hard won by painters working centuries before de Kooning first picked up a brush.



Once again, the infamous “Woman” paintings — often cited as evidence of de Kooning’s misogyny — dominate the discussion. So much so that the most shocking conclusion one might take from this show, the hit of the New York season since it opened Sept. 18, is that they are somehow self-portraits, vivid self-representations in drag of a painter who may well have felt he was pimping his own talent in as many directions as his women are twisted, pulled, stretched and broken.



the source

Traditionally Xing Yi was an armed art. Students would train initially with the spear, progressing to shorter weapons and eventually empty-handed fighting. This gradually changed throughout the 20th century, as the emphasis in most traditional Chinese Martial Arts shifted from the use of weapons to fighting empty-handed. Weapon diversity is great in many lineages, with the idea being that an experienced Xing Yi fighter would be able to pick up almost any weapon available (or an object to use as such) irrespective of its exact length, weight and shape.

Surreal digital paintings

Optical Illusions by Chema Madoz

One morning, when JR awoke, an image lingered from his dreams: The wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and above it a young kid peering curiously over.

A child just 1 year old, who has "no idea that's a wall that divides people — he has no idea of the political context," JR imagined. "What is he thinking?"



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