CIA, Cold War & The Arts

I’ve been reading articles about the theory – I think it’s maybe more than a theory at this point? – that the CIA covertly had a hand in promoting the rise of Abstract Expressionist art, and helping move the global cultural center of gravity from Paris to NYC in the fight against Communism during the Cold War. Frances Stonor Saunders has a book about this, and also this 1995 article in The Independent about all this. Interesting quote I wanted to save:

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.”

There’s also a famous opinion piece that Braden wrote in 1967 that goes into some of this CIA cultural activity in more detail in his own words, though does not explicitly mention Abstract Expressionism.