Anti-communism reactions were so severe, at times we allowed a milder form of censorship on American soil. Leading the charge was Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, whipping Congress into a hysterical anti-communist frenzy for an entire decade, between 1947 and 1957.
We all know that part of the story, but there’s more. While McCarthy was doing his thing, Michigan Congressman George Dondero was trying to end modern art.
Dondero’s opinion of modern art is often quoted in art history articles: “Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country and smiling people and our material progress. Art that does not glorify our country, in plain, simple terms, breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government and those who create it and promote it are enemies.”
Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr wrote an article addressing these criticisms. In “Is Modern Art Communistic?” he made the key point that modern art had been banned in the Soviet Union since the early 1920s, so how could it possibly be communist? Modern art was never communist, but it was called communist by people who didn’t like it. And congressmen like George Dondero were trying to censor modern artists by excluding them from state-sponsored art exhibits.
That 1946 State Department collection I wrote about last week included work from several modern art pioneers, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Max Weber and Arthur Dove. But all Congress saw was a bunch of communist hacks. They claimed that 20 of the 45 artists represented “various shades of communism,” and accused the State Department of subversion. The planned international exhibition was cancelled, the man who put together the exhibition was fired and the paintings were sold at auction.
George Dondero took things further and appointed a subcommittee of the Committee on Public Works to remove federally funded murals considered “an insult to every loyal American,” starting with the Russian-born Refrigier’s mural.
The art community was appalled; people across the country flooded the House subcommittee with letters calling for freedom of expression. Refrigier’s murals remained, but not without one hell of a fight.
Problems continued into the '50s. Sports Illustrated and Neiman Marcus co-sponsored a Sport in Art exhibition for the Olympics. Somebody please tell me what the hell is subversive about a picture of people playing baseball? A winter scene with ice skating? Old people fishing? No? Nothing? Here again, it wasn’t about the work, but the artists' perceived beliefs.
What should have been a beautiful display of artistic freedom and international cooperation turned to scandal. Conservatives stationed themselves next to controversial paintings in the Dallas Museum, telling people these were “the works of Reds.” Sport in Art never made it to the Olympics.
Art historian Jane de Hart Mathews says the cancellation of Sport in Art was “simply the latest in a long line of aborted exhibitions.” By the mid-'50s, it was clear that government control of the arts was disastrous.
Some suggest abstract expressionists may have chosen to avoid any clear subject matter to avoid censorship. The truth is more complicated.
After the disastrous 1946 State Department exhibition, Secretary of State George C. Marshall said there would be “no more taxpayers’ money for modern art.” Yet abstract expressionists continued their experiments in paint; Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery and MOMA promoted modern art, and abstract expressionism by extension, in friendlier settings.
MoMA introduced American and European audiences to abstract expressionism in the late '50s with the touring New American Art exhibit.
In the exhibit catalog, Barr wrote that abstract expressionists “defiantly reject the conventional values of the society which surrounds them, but they are not politically engaged even though their paintings have been praised and condemned as symbolic demonstrations of freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude.”
Several sources suggest the CIA also supported abstract expressionism in a covert ideological war, and evidence exists that the CIA encouraged creative endeavors during the Cold War. The most oft-cited example is the exposure of the organization's invention of Encounter magazine in 1967 — something undisclosed at the time.
Frances Stoner Saunders disclosed CIA ties to MoMA in The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters — basically, a former MoMA employee went on to work at the CIA, a few of the MoMA trustees were on the board of a CIA front called the Farfield Foundation, and MoMA president Nelson Rockefeller had ties to the intelligence community. The connections are there, but strong evidence of collusion isn't — but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Some say abstract expressionism could have only happened in America, because in the '50s, only here in the U.S. did artists have freedom to paint what they wanted. They could be right. The abstract expressionists may not have been consciously trying to win an ideological war for the U.S., but their work certainly helped prove that freedom of expression is alive and well.
This article appears in Jan 10-17, 2019.