Adam Void
When asked if I would write something about the Mexican Muralist movement, I responded with the only bit of information that I had in my mental database on the subject. “Barney Rosset told me that the Mexican Muralists were intentionally suppressed by the CIA, who promoted the Abstract Expressionists in a post war effort to remove subversive concepts and elevate formalist art making.” I was pretty sure that this would not go over very well and that I wouldn’t have to write anything. I’ve been overworked lately and had a feeling that nobody wanted to touch this subject with a ten-foot pole. Instead, they said “Yes”, and I said “Yes”.
I met Barney Rosset through my best friend at the time, Rami Shamir. I was working closely with my friend to publish his first book, Train To Pokipse, which was the final piece that Barney edited before he passed in 2012. Barney was the publisher of the historically counter-cultural Grove Press, who helped publish many beat-era notables along with Che Guevara’s biography and other works deemed worrisome by the CIA. Barney’s wife in those early days was the foundational painter, Joan Mitchell, one of the few women around the table at the Cedar Tavern. Barney liked to tell of the time his office was taken over by CIA sponsored protesters and how he sued the CIA for ten million dollars for wiretapping his phones. 1 Among his many stories was the one of how Clement Greenberg’s push of the Abstract Expressionists was a CIA supported deliberate cultural shift away from the social realist work of the Mexican Muralists. I put this information nugget in the back of my mind and would bring it up in conversation, dropping bits of treasure here and there, but never digging deep enough to find any support for it. Now, with help from the Freedom Of Information Act web-searches, we can find a few declassified documents that can help support this wild assertion. Dive with me.
The Mexican Muralist movement started in the early 1920’s in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. The method of painting and the subject matter were a calculated reaction to Mexican independence. Its form of application (painting on walls rather than canvas) and style (sweeping human-led dramas) reached back to the traditional practices of their people, while the subject matter was celebratory, aspirational, and promoted the ideals of the new regime. The three main artists associated with this movement are known as the big three, “Los Tres Grandes”, a nickname stolen from the three largest automakers in the US the decade prior. Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siquieros all painted larger than life, sweeping murals depicting labor struggles, while also being involved in political actions that affected Mexico and the balance of power for the world at that time.
While all of this was happening in Mexico, the US government was keeping a close watch on how their neighbors were influenced by Soviet ideologies. In a 1927 FBI document, Diego Rivera’s specific itinerary and methods of travel were detailed; going from San Antonio to NYC via passenger train, a steamship to France, and by train again through Berlin to Russia for the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution. 2 The same report alleges that Rivera was working on finding support for a Communist propaganda campaign in the US. For reference, Rivera had just completed a series of frescoes at the Chapingo Autonomous University in Texcoco, Mexico. One of these, “The Liberated Earth with The Powers of Nature Controlled by Man”, depicts a harmonious cycle of earth and heavens, united by the spinning windmill harvesting grains sowed by the muscular worker, ignited by the flame of the gods. A silhouetted woman and child are in the foreground. The woman, a reclining spectator and the child pulling itself up to standing position on the literal machinations of labor. All of this happening below the horizon line of a reclining mother nature, with a dead tree in one hand and the other in a peaceful raised position, birds flying up and toward her, the winds of the heavens blowing back down to the ground. 3 It’s a beautiful painting that seems to be rooted in mythology rather than living in an actualized reality. In contrast, this is the same year as Edward Hopper’s “Automat” was painted, itself a major work of American Realism, depicting a lonely woman in a cafe at night.
Interestingly, not much shows up in the FOIA searches on the Mexican Muralists during the 1930’s except in one New York Times article from May 15th, 1933. In it, a scene is depicted where two picket lines meet; a group protesting the veiling of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural triptych, and members of the Communist Opposition (Lovestonites). The opposition crowd booed a speaker when referring to Rivera as “Mister”, yelling to instead call him “comrade”. 2 The murals in reference were three giant frescoes depicting a contrast between the political and economic ideologies of Capitalism and Communism. The centerpiece was titled “Man At The Crossroads.” The upper portion of the piece shows two factions faced in war, soldiers from the Capitalist side dressed in gas-masks holding bayonets high, while the other side is dressed in Bolshevik proletariat garb with heads covered in red scarves and boxy hats. The crowds are flanked by statues; on the Communist side, a decapitated figure in a robe, on the Capitalist side another robed figure wearing a crucifix and missing his hands. At the center is an industrial-era working man in the literal gears of the machine. An atomic electron path filled with symbols of science and astronomy emanating from him. His machine piped directly into the ground where it is flanked by the crops that fuel humanity. Further to the left and right are paintings of historical figures from both ideologies. 4 Diego Rivera painted Lenin into this mix, which upset Nelson Rockefeller, prompting the protests and the eventual destruction of this triptych before it could be finished. 2
Just three years later, in 1936, with the looming specter of Fascism on the global front (Italy invading Ethiopia, the Olympics were held in Nazi occupied Germany, and a military coup failed in Imperial Japan) a US group called the American Artists’ Congress invited David Siquieros to teach experimental painting techniques in New York City under the title of “Siquieros Experimental Workshop”. The methods explored included spraying automobile paint with a spray gun on wet cement 16 and dripping paint on a horizontal canvas from a spinning lazy Susan.15 It has been confirmed that a young Jackson Pollack was among the students participating in this workshop, even working on a mobile float and banner for a May Day parade.15 This coincidental connection between the pioneering Mexican Muralist and a young New York artist may have spawned the beginnings of the next cultural movement.
Soon after this in 1939, the US joined World War II. By the official end of the war in 1945, the Cold War ideological battle between the US and Russia was just heating up. McCarthyism was everywhere and the US government was paying increasingly more attention to the new red scare, pinpointing public figures that had ideological differences from the state and shutting them down in a form of cultural cancellation. At this same time, a new experimental, formalist, and expressive painting style was emerging from the NYC underground. The term, “Abstract Expressionism”, was first coined by Robert Coates in a 1946 New Yorker review of a three-person show from Pollack, Gorky, and de Kooning. 5 The next year, in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was officially acknowledged, formed as a government agency whose main purpose was to collect information through human intelligence and covert action.6
Let’s introduce an important new character in this story. According to a FOIA CIA file from 1949, a gentleman named Vincent Melzac moved to Washington DC from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was a former trustee for the museum in Fort Wayne and began a connection with the American University (a highly government connected institution) in DC with the chair of their art department, William Calfee. Together, they would visit painter, Jack Tworkov in New York City where he would connect them with the artists associated with this new Abstract Expressionist movement. 7 The events that would proceed from this relationship have shaped the role of American painting in the history of Modern Art.
At this certain point, all the data begins to be overwhelming. Ever year shows a cultural rise of new American painting and an abandonment of realism in the arts. The Mexican Muralists continue to create works during this time but have reached a career pinnacle and ultimate conclusion.
- 1949 – Another CIA file shows all three of “Los Tres Grandes” scheduled to attend the Communist sponsored Congress for Peace and Democracy in Mexico. 8
- 1949 – Rivera was being honored at the Palacio de Bellas Artes with a 50-year retrospective of his paintings. 9
- 1949 – September of that year, Jose Orozco passes away due to heart failure at age 66.
- 1950 – Sigueros and Rivera are among the first Mexican contingent in the Venice Biennial.
- 1950 – CIA develops Congress for Cultural Freedom, to promote the new American art. 14
- 1952 – Harold Rosenberg publishes the article “American Action Painters” with Art News.
- 1953 – Melzac organizes very well received show at the Baltimore Museum of Art featuring de Kooning, Tworkov, Guston, Vicente, and Pollack. 7
- 1955 – Clement Greenberg’s essay “American Type Painting” was published in the Partisan Review.
- By the mid-fifties, the Mexican government was beginning to shift away from Communism and as a result, made it difficult for the muralists.
- 1957 – Melzac shows many of the same group of artists and many of the future “Washington Color Painters” at a show at the Watkins Gallery at American University. 7
- 1957 – Diego Rivera dies from heart failure at the age of 70
- 1958 – 1959 – The CCF and MoMA (co-founded by Nelson Rockefeller’s mother, Abby) launch the exhibition, “New American Painting”, which travels throughout Western Europe promoting the new American painter movement. 14
- 1960 – Siquieros was arrested in Mexico under the charge of “social dissolution” and sentenced to four years in prison. 13
- 1960 – The chairman of the fine arts division of the CIA had developed a relationship with Melzac, where he loaned $895,000 worth of paintings to be hung at the offices of the CIA. This relationship continued with multiple loans through 1977 11, and again in 1982 when Melzac was awarded the CIA Agency Medallion for support of the organization. 12
What can be determined as facts after all this digging through formerly confidential government files? Could I prove that without a doubt, Barney’s tossed out statement about the CIA being responsible for the major post-war shift in art and culture from political realism to formal expression was the truth? Well, not fully. We can prove that the FBI and later, the CIA were monitoring the Mexican Muralists because of their ties to Socialist ideologies and governments. We know that there was a brief period of cultural crossover during the onset of global Fascism where attention was focused elsewhere, and figureheads of social realism were able to directly influence Abstract Expressionism. I did not find any conclusive evidence that Clement Greenberg was directly connected with the CIA, but it is possible to see the connections between Vincent Melzac’s artistic interests and the CIA’s creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
All this known, we still cannot fully connect the fall of one movement and the rise of the other to an orchestrated plot to silence a rival global political system. Barney Rosset remained razor sharp in his final years. He saw the connections as it happened and had to deal with the real consequences of the silencing of alternative viewpoints by government entities. His battles against censorship and for free speech remain a life-lesson and a lodestone for my creative work. Those values remain important as we enter the current political era. We should remain ever vigilant to be aware of what government operations are happening in the arts and in the world around us, as they have happened in the world before us.
Citations
0. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rami-shamir-interview_b_3710947
1. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01314R000100570027-4.pdf
2. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/16592669
4. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Libro_Los_Viejos_Abuelos_Foto_68.png
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP87-01130R000100100005-4.pdf
8. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP82-00457R002500370007-1.pdf
9. https://inverarteartgallery.com/artist/diego-rivera/
10. https://www.theartstory.org/critics-greenberg-rosenberg.htm
11. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP87-01130R000100130004-2.pdf
12. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP87-01130R000100100008-1.pdf
13. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP75-00149R000700270011-7.pdf
14. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt-1909623
15. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-pollock-siqueiros-fought-fascism-radical-art