Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

[Delenda Carthago]

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8307106.ece/ALTERNATES/w460/pollockTateModern.gif

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.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html

[Delenda Carthago]

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

You dont say...

[Invader Zim]

You dont say...

This thread is really old news. The article in the OP was written back in 1995 - probably when you were still in diapers.

[crazyirish93]

Not old news new to me considering its the first time i have seen or heard of it..

[Tolstoy]

I dont see what this proves, true, genuine cultural expression is stronger than a bunch of contrived "Socialist Realist" paintings that were upheld in the USSR. The CIA should have helped promote said artworks naturally. Seriously, when is supporting Marxist economics a reason to like supression of creative freedom?

[Paul Pott]

Are we really surprised that the CIA supported a genre of art against the USSR using the usual suspects of 'leftist' dupes? This is the first time I've ever heard of any of this, and honestly the thing about making Orwell's book into an animation doesn't surprise me in the least. Not the fucking least. Who knows what else they had their hands in, maybe even inside the Soviet Union itself.

[Delenda Carthago]

I dont see what this proves, true, genuine cultural expression is stronger than a bunch of contrived "Socialist Realist" paintings that were upheld in the USSR. The CIA should have helped promote said artworks naturally. Seriously, when is supporting Marxist economics a reason to like supression of creative freedom?
So "strong" that it took a worldwide network sponsored by CIA to achieve its goal. Sure thing bro.:thumbup1:

[Delenda Carthago]

This thread is really old news. The article in the OP was written back in 1995 - probably when you were still in diapers.
:grin:

Thats so funny. You(for those who dont know, the supporter of snitchin on "stalinists") are trying to devaluade me by saying that you are older than me. Thats so sweet.:D

Lucky for all of us, in my 30s I ve seen more class struggle than you ll see in a lifetime. So...:rolleyes:

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Hmm I wonder what steps the ussr could have taken to undermine this kind of operation.

[Sasha]

There is already a thread with this article: http://www.revleft.com/vb/cia-weaponised-modern-t180423/index.html?t=180423

[Questionable]

I dont see what this proves, true, genuine cultural expression is stronger than a bunch of contrived "Socialist Realist" paintings that were upheld in the USSR. The CIA should have helped promote said artworks naturally. Seriously, when is supporting Marxist economics a reason to like supression of creative freedom?

This line of thinking presumes that "creative freedom" exists in a vacuum and is not influenced, nor does it influence, the class struggle. It is idealistic and not rooted in a Marxist conception of art.

[Fred]

The most interesting question this raises is whether the modern art in question is thus devalued by the CIAs sponsorship. I think it is a bit Stalinist to declare art "socialist" or "anti-socialist" especially when we are not speaking of the written word. So does this change anyone's thinking about Pollack, De Kooning, Japer Johns, et al.? It would make a huge difference to me if I knew they were producing their art with the idea of fighting communism -- but apparently they were not.

For some reason I am reminded of Mozart getting the Hapsburg court to produce Le Nozze de Figaro. Here was a very reactionary regime agreeing to stage an adaptation of a play by Beaumarchais that was decidedly hostile to monarchy and the nobility. Does that in any way detract from what Mozart created (IMHO the greatest opera ever composed)? It is not a clean analogy, because the Hapsburg's were absolutely not using the opera to combat republicanism or any such thing. But the general question: how does this affect how we might think about these artworks is pertinent.

[Sasha]

Like said in the other thread, this says a whole lot more about Stalinisms dispicable attitude about and murderous surpression of the avant-garde born from the Russian revolution than about that of the CIA.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

I dont see what this proves, true, genuine cultural expression is stronger than a bunch of contrived "Socialist Realist" paintings that were upheld in the USSR. The CIA should have helped promote said artworks naturally. Seriously, when is supporting Marxist economics a reason to like supression of creative freedom?

Nothing exists outside of class society. Even art must become a great field of class struggle.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Didn't the USSR go through its own (short-lived?) period of abstract modernism? Around about the time when "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_the_Whites_with_the_Red_Wedge)" was created, right?

So what the fuck happened? Why did they end up getting lumbered with the lifelessly conservative waxworks of socialist realism?

[adipocere]

The most interesting question this raises is whether the modern art in question is thus devalued by the CIAs sponsorship...So does this change anyone's thinking about Pollack, De Kooning, Japer Johns, et al.?


The sponsorship by the CIA helps to explain a lot. The art is still mostly terrible - my opinion hasn't changed a bit, though I had always had the feeling that modern art was entirely contrived for/by the Western Rich to collect as a way to claim high culture from the Europeans. The fact that it sucked was an aside - it was as valuable as a few valuable people buying it said it was. I guess I wasn't too far off the mark.

Edit: Article reminds me of Pussy Doodles (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgSueDeDtWM)

[Sasha]

You have no idea what you are talking about, read something about the Russian avant-garde, it was a revolutionary movement by dedicated revolutionaries. No suprise that the contrarevolution went out of its way to destroy it.
Like said in the other thread, read about Svevolad Meyerholt and give me onr single excuse for what happend to him, one single one, I dare you.

[Delenda Carthago]

You have no idea what you are talking about, read something about the Russian avant-garde, it was a revolutionary movement by dedicated revolutionaries. No suprise that the contrarevolution went out of its way to destroy it.
Like said in the other thread, read about Svevolad Meyerholt and give me onr single excuse for what happend to him, one single one, I dare you.
OK lets talk about that.

What are you reffering to? Proletkult? LEF? RAPP? VAPP? The futurists in general? Constructuvists in general? Who?

Is Majakowski amongst that avant-garde? Who was the one that brought the spotlight on Majakowski?What is your opinion on Majakowski's self-critisism? What do you think on Eisenstein's view on documentarism? Was RAPP's critisism right on your opinion on LEF? What was Lenin's position on art? What was Stalin's? Was Zdanov's critisism right on the after War artists?


You seem to be informed on the issue, lets analyse it a bit.

[Thirsty Crow]

Didn't the USSR go through its own (short-lived?) period of abstract modernism? Around about the time when "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_the_Whites_with_the_Red_Wedge)" was created, right?The Russian avant-gardes were a lot more diverse in their formal procedures than the notion of "abstract modernism" might suggest (and of course, a lot of the diversity actually comes from the differences in artistic media - painting, theater, literature), but it is possible to detect a common pattern. One of the elements of that pattern is concern with and support of social revolution. Ironically, the artistic "movement" called futurism, sharing many common characteristics, took on radically different directions in Italy and Russia for instance.


So what the fuck happened? Why did they end up getting lumbered with the lifelessly conservative waxworks of socialist realism?That's a hell of a complicated matter. And any answer suitable for a discussion forum will need to be brief and very schematic.

In short, this was the result of the same process that gave us the wonders of the finally consolidated party-state (although it was being continually shaken periodically shaken by labour struggle and problems with labour discipline, among other things; on this I'd recommend the following: http://libcom.org/history/labor-discipline-decline-soviet-system-don-filtzer) and the economic mechanisms underpinning it, the official doctrine of Marxism-Leninism and in the realm of cultural life, socialist realism.

The basis for the latter, or more broadly, for the formation of any official, state sponsored art ideology, is to be sought in:

1) the before mentioned substitutionism resulting in the formation of the party-state (of course, I do not claim that this process was devoid of very particular and concrete material causes of its own, it is not a matter of bad will or bad ideas); if the class is reduced to the party, then it is obvious that the latter must not leave any side of social life to chance and potential corrupting influence - art included

2) the so called dialectical materialism and its associated philosophical theory of truth, resulting in the so called reflection theory - effectively reducing artistic work to the same goal as that of knowledge of what really goes on (reflecting objective reality)

If you're interested in the latter, I'd recommend works by Lukacs. (edited, I mistakenly wrote "former")

[Sasha]

name dropping/painfully obvious jiujitsu attempt

nice try, my question first;
whats the excuse for the murderous suppression of many revolutionary artists, for the willful destruction of whole genres of art, not the rationale for the elevation of socialist-realism but for the murders, the berufsverboten, the slander and the libel, the extortions, the threats to loved ones, etc etc
stalinoids always have a nice comfortable dogmatic excuse lined up for every dead dissident except when it comes to the field of the arts.
maybe it is all too reminiscent of bookburnings, reichskulturkammers and entartete kunst?

[nizan]

Is this really surprising? David was on the payroll of Bonaparte in 1800, state entities realize the power of diffuse ideology.

[Invader Zim]

:grin:

Thats so funny. You(for those who dont know, the supporter of snitchin on "stalinists") are trying to devaluade me by saying that you are older than me. Thats so sweet.:D

Lucky for all of us, in my 30s I ve seen more class struggle than you ll see in a lifetime. So...:rolleyes:

Says the person, who was, when they arrived here an anarchist and then switched to Stalinism - sure you're in your 30s. But, that wasn't my point - rather to illustrate just how old the article is, that it is almost old as the average demographic age of this boards members.

[Delenda Carthago]

nice try, my question first;
whats the excuse for the murderous suppression of many revolutionary artists, for the willful destruction of whole genres of art, not the rationale for the elevation of socialist-realism but for the murders, the berufsverboten, the slander and the libel, the extortions, the threats to loved ones, etc etc
stalinoids always have a nice comfortable dogmatic excuse lined up for every dead dissident except when it comes to the field of the arts.
maybe it is all too reminiscent of bookburnings, reichskulturkammers and entartete kunst?
The whole issue of the Art and Cultural history in USSR is, as everything else a VERY, VERY complicated thing which your numb brain have nor the knowledge or the interest to understand. You prefer to use easy to digest formulas like "uuuh, the stalinists blahblahblah" and voila, everything is the way you want them to be.You know, its just the mean people that took over. Like a good kids fairytale. Sadly for you, History never did, and never will act according to your idealisms, thats why you will never ever ever will be relevant outside your miniworld.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Seriously, when is supporting Marxist economics a reason to like supression of creative freedom?

Did you read the article? The whole premise of the hipsterish 'creative freedom' in the arts was artificially manufactured by the CIA. It didn't spring out of creative thought - it was coerced.

[Delenda Carthago]

Did you read the article? The whole premise of the hipsterish 'creative freedom' in the arts was artificially manufactured by the CIA. It didn't spring out of creative thought - it was coerced.
To be fair, it wasnt created by the CIA, but it took the central social role it got by the promotion of CIA. And that creates of course the question: how "free" is a free will that is being formed by secret State agensies.

And to obviate the capitalist puppet of the forum: no, its not the same thing that happened in USSR, since there you knew and you were explained after a social dialogue about the issues of Art. It wasnt a secret process that happened behind close doors.

[Invader Zim]

The whole issue of the Art and Cultural history in USSR is, as everything else a VERY, VERY complicated thing which your numb brain have nor the knowledge or the interest to understand. You prefer to use easy to digest formulas like "uuuh, the stalinists blahblahblah" and voila, everything is the way you want them to be.You know, its just the mean people that took over. Like a good kids fairytale. Sadly for you, History never did, and never will act according to your idealisms, thats why you will never ever ever will be relevant outside your miniworld.

So you have no reply to the points raised and only have insults and general troll responses to Psycho's post. No surprises there.

[Delenda Carthago]

So you have no reply to the points raised and only have insults and general troll responses to Psycho's post. No surprises there.
Yes. I dont have anything to say. Because its so clear that I dont know nada about the issue, so that very well targeted question "for the murderous suppression of many revolutionary artists" just locked me down.:thumbup1:

We dont have to talk about who, were, what. If someone is a "revolutionary artist", that all we need. Bad, bad "stalinists".:crying:

[Invader Zim]

Because its so clear that I dont know nada about the issue

The fact that you're being sarcastic elevates this to a whole new level of irony.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

To be fair, it wasnt created by the CIA, but it took the central social role it got by the promotion of CIA. And that creates of course the question: how "free" is a free will that is being formed by secret State agensies.

And to obviate the capitalist puppet of the forum: no, its not the same thing that happened in USSR, since there you knew and you were explained after a social dialogue about the issues of Art. It wasnt a secret process that happened behind close doors.

So because the Soviets were more open about their control of art for political purposes, that somehow makes it better?

Nope, I don't think so.

[Delenda Carthago]

So because the Soviets were more open about their control of art for political purposes, that somehow makes it better?

Nope, I don't think so.
First of all, it makes it "better" because of the purpose. I dont know if you think that workers power is "the same" with capitalists power, but for those of us that is not, its already enough. And if art does not help the libaration of humanity, during the revolution, it is on the other side.

Seconldy, I really dont know how you have in your mind that "control".Simply a bureocrat in an office forbiding things that he doesnt like? Because that was not the case. For example, LEF had an open "war" with RAPP. Stalin himself brought the spotlight after Majakowski's death back to him, labeling him "the poet of the revolution". And still, nobody stoped RAPP from applyin critisism on LEF, and actually it was LEF that "lost" that ideological battle and btw Majakovski himself joined RAPP.
When after the war Zhdanov applied critisism to the musicians of USSR that their focus was not on the important things that were happening on the country(ie construction of socialism) and that therefore they didnt helped revolution that way, there was a public discusion on the subject. And I can name many other examples.
So yes, comparing that to secret undercover procedures like the ones the West did, of course there is a superiority of USSR.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

First of all, it makes it "better" because of the purpose. I dont know if you think that workers power is "the same" with capitalists power, but for those of us that is not, its already enough.

The ends don't justify the means, even if I were to accept for argument's sake that control of artistic expression in the USSR had anything to do with securing power for workers. If one has to use state power to get people to produce the "right" art, then one is doing it wrong. Art reflects society, not the other way around. A revolutionary society on the whole produces revolutionary art, it doesn't need any prodding from a state apparatus to do so.


And if art does not help the libaration of humanity, during the revolution, it is on the other side.

Or as George W. Bush put it, "you're either with us or against us" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-23kmhc3P8U). Such rhetoric is employed to justify all kinds of authoritarian nastiness, and I see no reason why it's different this time round just because it's also draped in a red flag.

Your statement also ignores the varieties of artistic expression. Tell me, since the "Sunflowers" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflowers_%28Van_Gogh_series%29) series makes no political statement that I can discern, so how would similar artistic expressions hinder the liberation of humanity in any context?


Seconldy, I really dont know how you have in your mind that "control".Simply a bureocrat in an office forbiding things that he doesnt like? Because that was not the case.

I'm not aware of the specifics, but I don't have to be, because knowing that the USSR was a class society, is enough to say with certainty that control of artistic expression was for the purposes of maintaining class relations, not abolishing them.


For example, LEF had an open "war" with RAPP. Stalin himself brought the spotlight after Majakowski's death back to him, labeling him "the poet of the revolution". And still, nobody stoped RAPP from applyin critisism on LEF, and actually it was LEF that "lost" that ideological battle and btw Majakovski himself joined RAPP.
When after the war Zhdanov applied critisism to the musicians of USSR that their focus was not on the important things that were happening on the country(ie construction of socialism) and that therefore they didnt helped revolution that way, there was a public discusion on the subject. And I can name many other examples.
So yes, comparing that to secret undercover procedures like the ones the West did, of course there is a superiority of USSR.

The West also claims to allow for "public discussion" and it's not as if the USSR was above employing dirty tricks, even if they weren't the same ones the West uses. Given that workers were also exploited in the USSR, what's the difference in material terms?

[Thirsty Crow]

The West also claims to allow for "public discussion" and it's not as if the USSR was above employing dirty tricks, even if they weren't the same ones the West uses. Given that workers were also exploited in the USSR, what's the difference in material terms?Dirty trick? To talk about public discussion as something other than a farcical ideological label in relation to the period in question is a farce on its own.

[Sasha]

So yes, comparing that to secret undercover procedures like the ones the West did, of course there is a superiority of USSR.

yet again, what about people like meyerholt who where seceretly carted off and executed on fabricated charges?
either it was because he was a radical artist who didnt want to conform, or because he was jewish or both.
sorry but the only people in the west who pulled that shit where nazi's and fascists.
no superiority to be found in that company...

[Delenda Carthago]

Well, this is a lot of posts with a lot of gibberish to answer to. And since I dont have the time nor the will to occupy myself with it, I will leave it to this text to do it for me. After all, its always better to speak on documents than uneducated smart ass opinions.

http://www.sovlit.net/lefandmarxism/


So, we have a situation where LEF(I shall remind again, the artist group that big bad wolf Stalin himself was most found of) is beeing accused by marxists and non-marxists artists in a public discusion.

Again. In a country that, if we take the bozos in revleft seriously, "there was a total control over art in order to maintain the class domination in the society" and a society in which EVERYTHING was done according to the personall favors of the "dictator" Stalin, we had a public forum about LEF, where everyone attacked it.


Obviously back then people didnt read revleft to learn that all this was a farce on its own.

[Delenda Carthago]

Btw, its quite interesting that while the thread was on CIA's tactics to attack USSR, some people choose to attack USSR too.

Quite interesting, one would say. You think they might be supporting USA on other issues too? I hope not!

[Sasha]

Dude....
I asked one simple question; what is the acceptable reason behind the blackbagging en murder of Meyerhold?
Is there no way you can just say "there isn't and it was right that he was rehabilitated"

[Delenda Carthago]

Dude, if I had a big bag of fucks, none I would give about your questions. Mostly because you are an smart ass and an imperialist apologist, and secondly because up until now I havent bumped into the case of Meyerhold. All I know about him is that he was a friend of Majakowski's and he was convinced as a trotskyist. So what?

[Consistent.Surprise]

My take away is at least the transparency of the USSR versus the covert operation of the CIA. The first third of my life was Cold War Era & never was the possible connection made when looking at Rothkos when growing up.

I studied art history (been trying to find books on Russian art history focusing on architecture) but we never made a possible connection in my Modern Art class to the ideas in the article.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Well, this is a lot of posts with a lot of gibberish to answer to. And since I dont have the time nor the will to occupy myself with it, I will leave it to this text to do it for me. After all, its always better to speak on documents than uneducated smart ass opinions.

http://www.sovlit.net/lefandmarxism/

Three posts which are rather short by Revleft standards is not "a lot", that is merely a feeble excuse on your part to avoid having to address our points.


So, we have a situation where LEF(I shall remind again, the artist group that big bad wolf Stalin himself was most found of) is beeing accused by marxists and non-marxists artists in a public discusion.

Why should it matter that Stalin liked LEF? He was one person.


Again. In a country that, if we take the bozos in revleft seriously, "there was a total control over art in order to maintain the class domination in the society" and a society in which EVERYTHING was done according to the personall favors of the "dictator" Stalin, we had a public forum about LEF, where everyone attacked it.

I never said that control of artistic expression in the USSR was total, nor did I say that it was done solely at the behest of Stalin. It's a pretty sad reflection on you that you have to resort to such blatant strawmen.

Now, are you going to address my points (I'm particularly interested in why you think still life drawings of flowers can be counter-revolutionary), or are you going to bluster and evade once more?

[Sasha]

Dude, if I had a big bag of fucks, none I would give about your questions. Mostly because you are an smart ass and an imperialist apologist, and secondly because up until now I havent bumped into the case of Meyerhold. All I know about him is that he was a friend of Majakowski's and he was convinced as a trotskyist. So what?

When 65 year old invalid dedicated Bolsheviks who made historic fundamental contributions to art in a way that goes diametrically against the dominant US form are tortured and then killed without any ground except a refusal to cave to reactionism you don't give a fuck. Thanks, thats an clear answer at least.
so glad your not an anarchist anymore, the stalinoid kool-aid really agrees with you...

For those that do want to learn something about the life and death of an revolutionary hero:
The Russian Revolution of 1917 made Meyerhold one of the most enthusiastic activists of the new Soviet Theatre. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became an official of the Theatre Division (TEO) of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, forming an alliance with Olga Kameneva, the head of the Division in 1918-1919. Together, they tried to radicalize Russian theatres, effectively nationalizing them under Bolshevik control. Meyerhold came down with tuberculosis in May 1919 and had to leave for the south. In his absence, the head of the Commissariat, Anatoly Lunacharsky, secured Vladimir Lenin's permission to revise government policy in favor of more traditional theatres and dismissed Kameneva in June 1919. [4]

After returning to Moscow, Meyerhold founded his own theatre in 1920, which was known from 1923 as the Meyerhold Theatre until 1938. Meyerhold confronted the principles of theatrical academism, claiming that they are incapable of finding a common language with the new reality. Meyerhold’s methods of scenic constructivism and circus-style effects were used in his most successful works of the time: Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnanimous Cuckold, and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin's Tarelkin's Death. Mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and Mayakovsky was said to write The Bed Bug especially for him; Meyerhold continued to stage Mayakovsky's productions even after the latter's suicide. The actors participating in Meyerhold’s productions acted according to the principle of biomechanics (only distantly related to the present scientific use of the term), the system of actor training that was later taught in a special school created by Meyerhold.

Meyerhold gave initial boosts to the stage careers of some of the most distinguished comic actors of the USSR, including Sergey Martinson, Igor Ilyinsky and Erast Garin. His landmark production of Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (1926) was described as the following:

Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles at odds with the American method actor's conception. Where method acting melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to create the character’s internal motivation, Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes. He had actors focus on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion physically. Following Stanislavski's lead, he said that the emotional state of an actor was inextricably linked to his physical state (and vice versa), and that one could call up emotions in performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. He developed a number of body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters. (Stanislavski was also at odds with it, because like Meyerhold, his approach was psychophysical).

Meyerhold inspired revolutionary artists and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, who studied with Meyerhold. In his films, he used actors who worked in Meyerhold’s tradition. Eisenstein cast actors based on what they looked like and their expression, and followed Meyerhold's stylized acting methods. In Strike, the bourgeois are always obese, drinking, eating, and smoking, whereas the workers are more athletic.

Meyerhold was strongly opposed to socialist realism. In the early 1930s, when Joseph Stalin repressed all avant-garde art and experimentation, his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people. His theatre was closed down in January 1938; the ailing Constantin Stanislavski, then the director of an opera theatre now known as Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, invited Meyerhold to lead his company. Stanislavski died in August 1938.
Arrest and death

Meyerhold's mugshot, taken at the time of his arrest by Soviet police

Meyerhold directed his theatre for nearly a year until his arrest in Leningrad on 20 June 1939. Shortly after that, on 15 July, his wife, the actress Zinaida Reich, was found murdered by multiple stab wounds in their Moscow apartment. Later that year Meyerhold was brutally tortured [6] and forced to confess that he worked for Japanese and British intelligence agencies. He later recanted the confession in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov.

The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov: “ The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap... For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain… When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour's time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.
”
He was sentenced to death by firing squad on 2 February 1940, and executed the next day. The Soviet government cleared him of all charges in 1955, during the first wave of de-Stalinization. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vsevolod_Meyerhold

so nice that the height of a war on fascism stalins regime still found it a priority to torture and murder renowned artists (and their wives) for being "antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people".

Edit: also, besides being a mayor contribution to modern, more proletarian theater in general, Meyerholds work has been an important predecessor to Augusto Boal's "theatre of the oppresed": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Oppressed

[Invader Zim]

When 65 year old invalid dedicated Bolsheviks who made historic fundamental contributions to art in a way that goes diametrically against the dominant US form are tortured and then killed without any ground except a refusal to cave to reactionism you don't give a fuck. Thanks, thats an cleat answer.

What do you expect from that troll? It still amazes me that people get restricted, warned and banned for poor choice of words, most recently 'girl' as opposed to 'woman', but apologists and defenders of murder and torture are left unchallenged by the BA.

[Delenda Carthago]

Well... Thats kinda akward. First Noxion says that "Stalin doesnt really matter, its just one person"(which is right though) and then psycho posts me a... wikipedia(:rolleyes:) text that says that Stalin himself took all the descisions.

Now, what the hell am I supposed to answer? :confused:

Psycho dude, I still dont know nothing about the person that we speak about, so I cant speak on the incident, other that he contributed to the creation of "The Theatre of the Oppresed". If you think that reading a wikipedia article means that you know about such an issue, you are more dumb than I already think. Thanks for the info though.

[Delenda Carthago]

What do you expect from that troll? It still amazes me that people get restricted, warned and banned for poor choice of words, most recently 'girl' as opposed to 'woman', but apologists and defenders of murder and torture are left unchallenged by the BA.
I told you before...

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[Sasha]

Psycho dude, I still dont know nothing about the person that we speak about, so I cant speak on the incident, other that he contributed to the creation of "The Theatre of the Oppresed". If you think that reading a wikipedia article means that you know about such an issue, you are more dumb than I already think. Thanks for the info though.

yup, my 3 years as an student of the theatre arts consisted entirely of reading wikipedia articles... :rolleyes: ever considered that most people do not think that some context void name and acronym dropping makes you win an argument?
maybe i just linked to the Wikipedia article exactly because it is the shortest factual rundown for people not wanting to get through the shelves of books i have on the subject?!?
just acknowledge that when it came to the suppression of the modern arts the Stalinist regime had a despicable contra-revolutionary conduct or give up on the argument dude, you are only digging yourself deeper...

[Delenda Carthago]

yup, my 3 years as an student of the theatre arts consisted entirely of reading wikipedia articles... :rolleyes: ever considered that most people do not think that some context void name and acronym dropping makes you win an argument?
maybe i just linked to the Wikipedia article exactly because it is the shortest factual rundown for people not wanting to get through the shelves of books i have on the subject?!?
just acknowledge that when it came to the suppression of the modern arts the Stalinist regime had a despicable contra-revolutionary conduct or give up on the argument dude, you are only digging yourself deeper...
Ok. Since you have better sources, care to share with us?

Because you know, in case you missed it, I brought actual documents about what I say. When I say about social dialogues, I brought a document on that. You on the contrary, are playing around with a single name which I already said I dont know about, making it a central rule. This is how you "studied" theatre arts in general?

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Well... Thats kinda akward. First Noxion says that "Stalin doesnt really matter, its just one person"(which is right though) and then psycho posts me a... wikipedia(:rolleyes:) text that says that Stalin himself took all the descisions.

Now, what the hell am I supposed to answer? :confused:

Doesn't it occur to you that since psycho and I are different persons, we might be making different arguments?

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Yeah, the efficacy of shitty "avant garde" art for CIA propaganda says more about the suppression of art in the Soviet Union that it does about "abstract art". Is this actually interesting to anyone?
It's like, "Look! On our side of the Iron Curtain, you will be free to pursue your most banal 'creative' drives!" Meanwhile, of course, the West made every effort to crush or co-opt any subversive cultural experiments (http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sp/assault.htm).
So, for all intents and purposes the relationship was reciprocal: both the $U and U$ essentially collaborated against any expression of autonomous proletarian cultural developments.
Zzzzzzzzzzz . . .