"The Abstract Expressionists...had worked for the Federal Arts Project under Roosevelt's New Deal, producing subsidized art for the government and getting involved in left-wing politics. Foremost amongst them was Jackson Pollock, who in the 1930s had been involved in the Communist workshop of the Mexican muralist David Alfalo Siquieros. Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes and several other Abstract Expressionists had all been Communist activists..."Where Dondero saw in Abstract Expressionism evidence of a Communist conspiracy, American's cultural mandarins detected a contrary virtue: for them, it spoke to a specifically anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent, it was the very antithesis to socialist realism. It was precisely the kind of art the Soviets loved to hate. But it was more than this. It was, claimed its apologists, an explicitly American intervention in the modernist canon. As early as 1946, critics were appplauding the new art as "independent, self-reliant, a true expression of the national will, spirit and character.
It seems that, in aesthetic character, US art is no longer a repository of European influences, that it is not a mere amalgamate of foreign "isms", assembled, compiloed and assimilated with lesser or greater intelligence.'
It seems that, in aesthetic character, US art is no longer a repository of European influences, that it is not a mere amalgamate of foreign "isms", assembled, compiloed and assimilated with lesser or greater intelligence.'
"Elevated as chief representative of this new national discovery was Jackson Pollock."
Frances Stonor Saunders: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
The New Press, New York - 2000
pagg. 253-254
catalogazione: una delle librerie di Susan
Frances Stonor Saunders: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
The New Press, New York - 2000
pagg. 253-254
catalogazione: una delle librerie di Susan
