CHAPTER KUU
“If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot,” declared President and racist-in-chief Harry Truman. Further, “I don’t pretend to be an artist or a judge of art, but I am of the opinion that so-called modern art is merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people.”
The year was 1947. Highly publicized congressional hearings had condemned the US State Department’s Advancing American Art, as a waste of taxpayer funds. This huge exhibition—pushing anticommunist PR about free expression in capitalist America—had been touring to international acclaim since 1946. Now it would be recalled, its hundred-and-seventeen paintings sold off cheap.
Simultaneous with this anti-modern-art grandstanding by conservative US politicians, Kurt Schwitters, over in the English Lake District, successfully solicited three thousand dollars from the Kaufmann Family—modern-art-loving Pittsburgh department-store magnates. Now Schwitters was awaiting the money’s disbursal by his financial intermediary, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), in New York.
Art historian Adrian Sudhalter delicately explains,
The issue was entrusted to the museum’s legal counsel and drawn out for many months…. The complexities of postwar international law delayed the delivery of the fellowship to Schwitters for over a year…. Schwitters proposed constructing a…Merzbau in England, and of using part of the scholarship to underwrite a recording of his Ursonate, the second of his two life works…. Sadly, Schwitters only received the first two payments of his fellowship, in increments of $250, before his death in January 1948. Two more payments in the same amount were used to underwrite his burial.
“Used to underwrite his burial.” Schwitters meets Kafka.
But really: what made MOMA sit on Schwitters’ money for a year, when he was living in poverty and could not afford medical treatment?
What “postwar international law” prevented rapid disbursal of US funds to an artist living in ally England who’d personally corresponded with his US patrons?
Let’s be honest. MOMA was paranoid word would leak they’d sent funds to a crazy German abstract artist overseas, giving an opening to the New York Post and right-wing politicians.
Two years later, the Central Intelligence Agency was the secret founder of Congress for Cultural Freedom. CCF toured Abstract Expressionist exhibitions internationally, resuming the propaganda war contrasting America’s “free enterprise painting” with the Soviet Union’s state-mandated representational style, Socialist Realism.
The CIA didn’t seek authorization to found CCF: they already knew that their political bosses—just like Soviet and Nazi leaders—despised abstract art.
According to Porter McCray, who in 1953 became director of the (also secretly CIA-funded) MOMA International Program,
This was the context in which [founding MOMA curator] Alfred Barr felt compelled to write a scathing article in a 1952 issue of the New York Times Magazine titled, “Is Modern Art Communistic?,” which compared statements about modern art made by Eisenhower, Truman, and Churchill to those made in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Valerie Caris Blitz creates an action painting in accompaniment to a performance of Ur Sonata, in Rebecca Migdal’s Gonzo Comix Loft. Holyoke, 2009. (Rebecca Migdal’s painting depicting Mammon bursting through the sidewalk of a town just like Holyoke can be seen to the left.)
