Miles Williams Mathis: The Cultural Cold War

by Miles Mathis

When artists are made the slaves and the tools of the state, when artists become chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested, and creation and genius are destroyed. – President Eisenhower, 1954

Eisenhower said the above in his “Freedom of the Arts” address at MoMA for its 25th anniversary gala.

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and achieved the five-star rank as General of the Army. Eisenhower planned and supervised two of the most consequential military campaigns of World War II: Operation Torch in the North Africa campaign in 1942–1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

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Yes, MoMA and the Rockefellers could even afford to hire the President to read their scripts.

Miles Williams Mathis: More on the Rockefellers – Library of Rickandria

Although he was intending to condemn Russian realism and promote Abstract Expressionism, we can now see that his words were upside down, as usual.

Most of the 20th century was upside down to the truth and this is just one more example.

RICHEST in 20th Century – Library of Rickandria

For his words are a perfect description of Modernism and its purposeful subordination of art and artists to:

• politics
• Theory
• financial speculation

This subordination was not engineered from Moscow.

It was engineered from New York City and DC.

And it turned out to be even worse than Eisenhower warned.

If progress had only been arrested, how happy we would now be.

Due to the engineered collapse of art in the 20th century by:

• speculators
• propagandists
• paid academics

and New-World-Order architects, we have regressed no one knows how many centuries.

Ought we be fearful of a New World Order? – Library of Rickandria

We can see from these before and after photos what Eisenhower’s “freedom of the arts” really meant.

It meant the freedom of art to devolve from something large and beautiful into something small and meaningless.

It was an early example of Newspeak, telling you one thing while selling you the inverse.

Miles Williams Mathis: George Orwell Faked his Death – Library of Rickandria

This has now been proven.

It is no longer a theory or an opinion.

Documents have been declassified, agents have gone on record, and fully researched books have been written.

We now know exactly which artists were slaves (all the famous ones) and which artists were propagandists (all the famous ones).

We can only guess at the genius destroyed, since most of it was never allowed to see the light of day.

Thousands of talented artists have been

• suppressed
• ignored
• slandered

and ultimately lost to history.

Some quit, some killed themselves, and others just faded out.

Frances Hélène Jeanne Stonor Saunders FRSL (born 14 April 1966) is a British journalist and historian.

I have referenced the work of Frances Stonor Saunders in three previous papers, including her 1995 article in the London Independent and her 1999 book Who Paid the Piper/The Cultural Cold War.

During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, they were expected to turn out works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost.

Who paid the piper? : the CIA and the cultural Cold War – Anna’s Archive

While using parts of her research, I nonetheless mentioned several times that I found her work to be a probable diversion.

In other words, I think it is likely the book was either suggested by Intelligence, overwritten by them, or written in full by them with only her byline.

I come to this conclusion from several facts, which I will now share with you.

The first curious fact is that this book which is sold as an exposé of the CIA managed to be reviewed by top mainstream sources, including the London Times and the London Review of Books.

CIA: Central Intelligence Agency – Library of Rickandria

Her initial article also managed to get published by the London Independent.

Since Intelligence owns the London press just as it owns the US press, we must assume Intelligence is trying to spin information that has already been leaked.

With more research, that is precisely what I found.

Saunders admits that much of the information in her book was leaked or published in various places decades earlier, and though it has been suppressed since then and is now barely remembered, it means her research is not new.

In this context, her article and book appear to be the somewhat late effort to spin old information, for reasons unknown to me.

It seems to me they would have been better off keeping quiet about it, but I don’t know what undercurrent they might have been trying to quell in the late 1990’s.

The Nineties – Library of Rickandria

Probably they know their own jobs better than I do.

Another thing that leads in this direction is her bio, which is almost non-existent.

Both parents were in the British peerage, which is in itself a red flag in this case.

The first thing on her bio is this CIA exposé, which she produced at age 29.

So, there is an 8-year gap in her bio, from age 21 to age 29.

She then became an editor at the New Statesman, another red flag.

Her own book ought to tell us that, since it admits most of these journals had been taken over by Intelligence soon after WW2 (or even before).

Miles Williams Mathis: More WWII Fakes – Library of Rickandria

But the warning is even easier to hear when we find that Saunders was at the New Statesman under the leadership of Ian Hargreaves, a big supporter of Tony Blair.

Blair, like Bush and Obama, was just a puppet of Intelligence.

But it is the content of the book that is the real indication it was written to whitewash and spin information.

Although she and her editors manage to compile a lot of old evidence that someone like me can use to his own purposes, most people reading the book will not be able to take the information they receive and sew it into their own shirts.

Most readers will take the information as Saunders gives it to them, and Saunders is careful in most cases to make Intelligence look not-so-bad-after-all.

I have already shown in my previous papers how ridiculous the main thesis is:

that Modern Art was sold as part of the Cold War, to combat Communism and the backward ideas about art professed by the Russians.

Miles Williams Mathis: Reading the Signs – Today’s Lesson: Karl Marx – Library of Rickandria

I agree that the Soviets were wrong about just about everything, including politics and art, but that doesn’t make the US position right.

Miles Williams Mathis: Marx’s Wife & other things – Library of Rickandria

Saunders helps sell the peculiar idea that a government either has to outlaw “decadent art”—as the Soviets did—or promote it wildly, as the US did.

She helps those she quotes at Intelligence gloss over the possibility that we might have done neither.

We might have promoted the American art of the time in proportion to its merits. . . which was not much.

Or, since we were supposed to be an example to the world of free-market capitalism, we might have let the free markets promote the art of the time, letting the buyers and the public decide its merits.

Instead, we chose to propagandize it to the greatest extent possible, outdoing any propaganda Hitler or Stalin ever dreamed of.

Miles Williams Mathis: Hitler & Top Nazi Genealogy – THEY WERE JEWS! – Library of Rickandria

We then tried to sell this propaganda as pure simply because it was ours.

“Their propaganda is manipulation; our propaganda is just ‘fair promotion’ of ‘free enterprise.’”

I have shown the main thesis of the book is false, since the art they chose to promote wasn’t chosen based on merit, much less on its ability to fight Communism or make the US look creative.

The works were chosen because the Rockefellers had already invested in them, and the Rockefellers controlled both the museums and the CIA.

ROCKEFELLER BLOODLINE – Library of Rickandria

That information is buried in the book, but since it isn’t highlighted or stressed, readers will tend to miss it.

In this paper I wish to continue pulling apart the book by concentrating on chapter 16, “Yanqui Doodles.”

It is in this chapter that Saunders finally gets to the paintings of:

Paul Jackson Pollock (/ˈpɒlək/; January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an American painter. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was widely noticed for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. A reclusive and volatile personality, Pollock struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. Pollock died at age 44 in an alcohol-related single-car collision when he was driving. In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and the Tate Gallery in London.

Mark Rothko (/ˈrɒθkoʊ/ ⓘ ROTH-koh; Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) was an American abstract painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color, which he produced from 1949 to 1970. Although Rothko did not personally subscribe to any one school, he is associated with the American abstract expressionism movement of modern art. Born to a Jewish family in Daugavpils, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Rothko emigrated with his parents and siblings to the United States, arriving at Ellis Island in late 1913 and originally settling in Portland, Oregon. He moved to New York City in 1923 where his youthful period of artistic production dealt primarily with urban scenery. In response to World War II, Rothko’s art entered a transitional phase during the 1940s, where he experimented with mythological themes and Surrealism to express tragedy. Toward the end of the decade, Rothko painted canvases with regions of pure color which he further abstracted into rectangular color forms, the idiom he would use for the rest of his life. In his later career, Rothko executed several canvases for three different mural projects. The Seagram murals were to have decorated the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, but Rothko eventually grew disgusted with the idea that his paintings would be decorative objects for wealthy diners and refunded the lucrative commission, donating the paintings to museums including the Tate Gallery. The Harvard Mural series was donated to a dining room in Harvard‘s Holyoke Center (now Smith Campus Center); their colors faded badly over time due to Rothko’s use of the pigment lithol red together with regular sunlight exposure. The Harvard series has since been restored using a special lighting technique. Rothko contributed 14 canvases to a permanent installation at the Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas. Although Rothko lived modestly for much of his life, the resale value of his paintings grew tremendously in the decades following his suicide in 1970. His painting No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) sold in 2014 for $186 million.

Willem de Kooning (/də ˈkuːnɪŋ/ də KOO-ning, Dutch: [ˈʋɪləm də ˈkoːnɪŋ]; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a US citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried. In the years after World War II, De Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as abstract expressionism or “action painting“, and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, John Ferren, Nell Blaine, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart. De Kooning’s retrospective held at MoMA in 2011–2012 made him one of the best-known artists of the 20th century.

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Trained in philosophy, Motherwell then became an artist regarded as among the most articulate spokesmen and the founders of the abstract expressionist painters. He was known for his series of abstract paintings and prints which touched on political, philosophical and literary themes, such as the Elegies to the Spanish Republic.

and others.

Before we get to the analysis of the text, let me just say that I agree that the Abstract Expressionists aren’t very decadent.

I have always found them more boring and pointless than decadent.

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (UK: /ˈdjuːʃɒ̃/, US: /djuːˈʃɒ̃, djuːˈʃɑːmp/; French: [maʁsɛl dyʃɑ̃]; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, Futurism and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matisse) as “retinal,” intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind. Duchamp is remembered as a pioneering figure partly because of the two famous scandals he provoked — his Nude Descending a Staircase that was the most talked-about work of the landmark 1913 Armory Show — and his Fountain, a signed urinal displayed in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition that nearly single-handedly launched the New York Dada movement and led the entire New York art world to ponder the question of “What is art?”

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They tie into the adjective “decadent” not in the way Duchamp did before them or Warhol would after them.

Andy Warhol (/ˈwɔːrhɒl/ ⓘ; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol is considered one of the most important American artists of the second half of the 20th century. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67), and the erotic film Blue Movie (1969) that started the “Golden Age of Porn“.

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That is, they don’t obviously try to tear down culture by any direct attack.

They still give you colors and shapes, some of which might be called interesting in a small way.

However, they are decadent in the sense that they were used by critics and others to continue the destruction of art, by the loss of old conventions.

They aren’t morally decadent; they are aesthetically decadent.

They represent the decay and loss of old standards, old conventions, and all the means the artist historically used to create:

• beauty
• meaning
• depth

and subtlety.

Remember, Abstract Expressionism wasn’t and isn’t sold as just another artistic possibility.

It was sold by critics like Clement Greenberg as the historical replacement for old aristocratic art—meaning high realism.

Clement Greenberg (/ˈɡriːnbɜːrɡ/) (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.

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Even the artist Ad Reinhardt—Greenberg’s archenemy—said that Abstract painting was:

“the last painting that anyone could paint.”

Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt (December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967) was an American abstract painter and art theorist active in New York City for more than three decades. As a theorist he wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for his “black” or “ultimate” paintings, he claimed to be painting the “last paintings” that anyone can paint. He believed in a philosophy of art he called Art-as-Art and used his writing and satirical cartoons to advocate for abstract art and against what he described as “the disreputable practices of artists-as-artists”. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and part of the movement centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism. He was also a member of The Club, the meeting place for the New York School abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s and 1950s.

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The new art was promoted as superior in every way, immediately mothballing all art that had come before.

It was the art of a new century, the art of America!, the art of the future, blahblahblah.

So, in promoting Abstract Expressionism and Modernism in general, the salesmen in Intelligence were at the same time forbidding the old realism.

Saunders’ book and Tom Braden’s lengthy quotes in it only tell you about the promotion side; they forget to tell you about the suppression side.

They forget to tell you that while they were promoting Modernism, they were implicitly forbidding anyone from painting the old way.

The old painting was dismissed as outdated, regressive, undemocratic, and generally small minded.

No, they didn’t outlaw realism, but any artist of the time who wished to be noticed got the message very clearly:

do not paint in the old way anymore.

If you do, we won’t like you.

I will be told that was a blessing:

we didn’t want any more of that Nazi realism or Communist realism.

We didn’t want that arid, stiff, poster-art, selling the party-line.

But again, that kind of argument creates the illusion of only two possibilities.

You are led to believe that you must either promote poster-art realism that glorifies the State, or you must promote Modernism.

I beg you to remember that all of the high realism before 1900 falls into neither category.

RICHEST in 19th Century – Library of Rickandria

In arguing against Modernism, I am not promoting Soviet realism or Nazi illustration.

Miles Williams Mathis: More Nazi Fakes – Library of Rickandria

The mainline argument in the book, like the argument of the 20th century, is a finessed argument.

It presents the choice as being between one of two categories, and real art isn’t in either category.

But let us return to Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism was chosen as the lead for the book for the same reason it was chosen as the lead for the CIA.

Since the decadence of AE is far less obvious than the decadence of most other Modern Art, the CIA and Saunders can dodge the decadence question.

Most people think of decadence in terms of moral decadence.

If they even know what aesthetic decadence is, it doesn’t mean anything to them.

Decadent movement – Wikipedia

So, most readers will look at a Pollock and say,

“well, I don’t like it, but I don’t see how it is decadent.

If the CIA wants to promote that to combat Communism, OK.”

Miles Williams Mathis: Engels & Owen – Library of Rickandria

Most readers won’t understand why the Soviets were saying AE was decadent, why they were banning art, or why the US was promoting it.

As long as the CIA can spin this as some patriotic crusade, most people will give them a pass.

But what Saunders and the CIA are leaving out is the other art of the 20th century, which Intelligence also promoted.

Saunders keeps your eyes on Pollock and Rothko, and off:

Duchamp

Piero Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo (July 13, 1933 – February 6, 1963) was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work eschews normal artist’s materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement in order to “tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values”. His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism that was changing Italian society (the Italian economic miracle) after World War II. Italian artists such as Manzoni had to negotiate the new economic and material order of post-war Europe through inventive artistic practices which crossed geographic, artistic, and cultural borders. Manzoni died of myocardial infarction in his studio in Milan on February 6, 1963. His contemporary Ben Vautier signed Manzoni’s death certificate, declaring it a work of art.

Lucio Fontana (Italian: [ˈluːtʃo fonˈtaːna]; 19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor, and theorist. He is known as the founder of Spatialism and exponent of abstract painting as the first known artist to slash his canvases – which symbolizes an utter rejection of all prerequisites of art.

Hermann Nitsch (29 August 1938 – 18 April 2022) was an Austrian contemporary artist and composer. His art encompassed wide-scale performances incorporating theater, multimedia, rituals and acted violence. He was a leading figure of Viennese Actionism.

Marc Quinn (born 8 January 1964) is a British contemporary visual artist whose work includes sculpture, installation, and painting. Quinn explores “what it is to be human in the world today” through subjects including the body, genetics, identity, environment, and the media. His work has used materials that vary widely, from blood, bread and flowers, to marble and stainless steel. Quinn has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Fondation Beyeler, Fondazione Prada, and South London Gallery. The artist was a notable member of the Young British Artists movement. Quinn is internationally celebrated and was awarded the commission for the first edition of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2004, for which he exhibited Alison Lapper Pregnant. Quinn’s notorious frozen self-portrait series made of his own blood, Self (1991–present) was subject to a retrospective at Fondation Beyeler in 2009. Quinn lives and works in London.

Damien Steven Hirst (/hɜːrst/; né Brennan; born 7 June 1965) is an English artist and art collector. He was one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom’s richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended. Death is a central theme in Hirst’s works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep, and a cow) are preserved, sometimes having been dissected, in formaldehyde. The best-known of these is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a clear display case. In September 2008, Hirst made an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and bypassing his long-standing galleries. The auction raised £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde. Since 1999, Hirst’s works have been challenged and contested as plagiarized 16 times. In one instance, after his sculpture Hymn was found to be closely based on a child’s toy, legal proceedings led to an out-of-court settlement.

and the Chapman Brothers.

Iakovos “Jake” Chapman (born 1966) and Konstantinos “Dinos” Chapman (born 1962) are British visual artists, previously known as the Chapman Brothers. Their art explores deliberately shocking subject matters; for instance, in 2008, they produced a series of works that appropriated original watercolours by Adolf Hitler. In the mid-1990s, their sculptures were included in the YBA showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. In 2003, the two were nominated for the annual Turner Prize but lost out to Grayson Perry. In 2013, their painting One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved III was the subject of Derren Brown‘s Channel 4 special The Great Art Robbery. In 2022, with the announcement of Jake Chapman’s solo show Me, Myself and Eye, it was disclosed that the Chapman brothers had ended their professional association. Jake Chapman made reference to mutual “seething disdain” and told the Guardian they were both “sick of the partnership” and were “no longer having fresh ideas together”.

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Since thousands of promoted 20th century artists—including many in 1950’s and 60’s—have explicitly and vocally been trying to be both morally and aesthetically decadent, it must look odd to argue that Modern art is not decadent—as Saunders does in chapter 16.

It is a mystery to me how 20th century art can be promoted as gloriously decadent for 90 years, but when a Congressman or Harry Truman says he doesn’t like it because it is decadent, he is a “philistine.”

[I can’t even show you Nitsch, since you may have just eaten.

If you search on him, be warned]

When the Soviets say this art is decadent, they are out-of-touch and backwards and regressive and anti-democratic.

No, they have just read the artists’ own press releases, where they brag about how decadent they are.

Painters and writers have been bragging about their decadence since the time of Baudelaire, so when we see historians like Saunders clicking their tongues at those who have found it decadent, we can only laugh.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (UK: /ˈboʊdəlɛər/, US: /ˌboʊd(ə)ˈlɛər/; French: [ʃaʁl(ə) bodlɛʁ] ⓘ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhythm and rhyme, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire’s original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist.

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This is not to say that I think Duchamp or any of the rest should have been banned.

They should have just been ignored.

Since it is too late for that, they must be exposed for what they were: closeted fascists destroying art on purpose, at the behest of even more closeted masters in Intelligence.

I must say this goes for the Abstract Expressionists as well as the Dadaists before them and the post moderns after them.

Although they may not have been as decadent as some, they were still fascists.

• Pollock
• Motherwell
• Calder

and Baziotes were all members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom [ACCF], which was an Orwellian name for yet another CIA organization.

The figurative artist Ben Shahn called it the ACCFuck.

Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.

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Although its stated purpose was to promote art as free expression, it actual purpose was to promote the art the Rockefellers had invested in, and since these member/artists had been invested in, they were happy to join that promotion. =

However, this promotion also entailed the anti-promotion of everything else, so that abstract painting became the new religion.

As Saunders puts it,

The Museum of Modern Art, described by one critic as the “overgeared cartel of Modernism,” held tenaciously to its executive role in manufacturing a history for Abstract Expressionism.

Ordered and systematic, this history reduced what had once been provocative and strange to an academic formula, a received mannerism, an art official.

I encourage you to have that quote in mind as you re-read my under title quote from Eisenhower.

Rather than being the antithesis of propaganda or slave art, the art of the 1950’s (and after) was actually its perfect representation.

It was part of a “manufactured history” promoted by a cartel.

It was “official art.”

Not only was it promoted by the state, but it was promoted covertly by a secret state agency.

If nothing illegal or unseemly was going on here, why keep it all in the dark?

New York Times art critic John Canaday said,

“an unknown artist trying to exhibit in New York couldn’t find a gallery unless he was painting in a mode derived from one or another member of the New York School [Abstract Expressionism].”

And Peggy Guggenheim—a Rockefeller competitor— apparently had an even better grasp of the situation, saying,

“the entire art movement had become an enormous business venture.” [p. 274].

Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim (/ˈɡʊɡənhaɪm/ GUUG-ən-hyme; August 26, 1898 – December 23, 1979) was an American art collector, bohemian, and socialite. Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim collected art in Europe and America between 1938 and 1946. She exhibited this collection as she built it. In 1949, she settled in Venice, where she lived and exhibited her collection for the rest of her life. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in the city.

---

Since these leading artists of the New York School like Pollock and Motherwell were members of CIA organizations, they could not have been on any “long leash.”

These were dogs leading their masters, yapping and leaping.

Almost a decade before the ACCF, Rothko and Gottlieb had founded the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in 1940, which was already fiercely anticommunist before the US declared war on Japan.

“Rothko and Gottlieb led these efforts to destroy Communist presence in the art world.” [p. 277]

This by itself proves two things.

One, in earlier chapters, CIA agents like Tom Braden told us that the US had secretly promoted leftist artists during the Cold War to fight Communism.

Thomas Wardell Braden (February 22, 1917 – April 3, 2009) was an American CIA official, journalist–– best remembered as the author of Eight Is Enough, which spawned a television program–– and co-host of the CNN show Crossfire.

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This was supposed to be ironic or something, but it turns out to be false.

The few artists that had ever been red or pink hadn’t been pink since the 1920’s.

The ones sold to us as leftist after WW2 weren’t leftists then, and weren’t leftists before the war.

It wasn’t McCarthy who turned them, or new-found patriotism.

McCarthyism – Wikipedia

It was the desire to get noticed by the Rockefellers and MoMA.

Rothko and Gottlieb were acting as little McCarthys in 1940, purging the artworld of opposition.

So much for freedom of expression.

Two, we were also sold the idea that this art propaganda only started after the war, as part of the Cold War.

But we see that isn’t true, either.

If Rothko and Gottlieb were founding an anti-Communist artist organization in 1940, then this whole program couldn’t have been started after the war or by the CIA.

There was clearly covert promotion of Modern art before the war, by pre-CIA intelligence as well as by MoMA.

So, the argument of Saunders and the CIA doesn’t add up.

Neither does their attack on Truman and the post-war Congress.

Although I normally don’t have much use for Harry Truman, when he says Modern art looks pathetic compared to Rembrandt or Holbein, I can only agree.

Saunders quotes him as saying,

The Dutch masters make our own modern-day daubers and ham and egg men look just what they are.

That is simply a true statement.

Saunders doesn’t try to refute it by any cogent argument or direct comparison, putting a Pollock next to a Rembrandt, for instance.

She only jumps immediately into this:

Those European vanguardists who had fled the Fascist jackboot were now startled to find themselves in an America where modernism was once again being kicked about.

The “Ancient Discoveries” of the European “Supermen” – Library of Rickandria

This was, of course, consistent with the cultural fundamentalism of figures like McCarthy, and part of the confusing process by which America, whilst advocating freedom of expression abroad, seemed to begrudge such freedoms at home.

I almost doubt that Saunders wrote those particular sentences.

Frankly, I would bet they were inserted into her draft at some point by Intelligence.

Most of Saunders’ book is on or least near the mark, and even where it is off, she in only subtly turning you from the truth.

But here, all subtlety is gone.

The fact that Truman preferred Rembrandt to Pollock has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph McCarthy and his Communist witch hunts.

Truman didn’t dislike Pollock or any of the others because they were Communists.

He says it very clearly in his own words:

he dislikes them because they don’t impress him in any way as artists.

Beyond that, promotion of the Abstract Expressionists or other Moderns had absolutely nothing to do with freedom of expression.

I am all for freedom of expression, and I think all people who are creating art for their own purposes should be allowed to do it.

But that doesn’t mean I think they should be promoted by the CIA just because they have done it, or made rich and famous because they have done it.

Remember, freedom of expression applies to the audience as well.

The audience should be free to express their dislike for Modernism if they honestly do dislike it, without being attacked as philistines.

Saunders—or whoever wrote those sentences—is implying that those like Truman who disliked Modernism were “kicking it about” or denying the artists freedom to create.

But neither Truman nor anyone else ever suggested Modernism should be banned.

Almost without exception, those in Congress or in the press who were against Modernism in the early years were simply making the argument that it shouldn’t be promoted with tax dollars.

Miles Williams Mathis: U.S Tax Income – Library of Rickandria

They thought the US should either be promoting really fine art or no art at all.

There is no “jackboot” involved in either idea. In reality, the jackboot involved is in forcing people to like Modernism when they don’t: taking their tax dollars under the threat of jail, then spending that money to promote art they strongly dislike, as part of expensive propaganda initiatives their representatives haven’t voted on.

That is what is anti-democratic.

The jackboot is also involved in funding decades of domestic propaganda for Modernism in:

• magazines
• trade journals
• professional journals
• academic journals
• books
• TV

and film.

The jackboot is involved in telling several generations of art students they cannot create any realism and be taken seriously.

The jackboot is involved in calling the art market pluralistic and free, and then consciously excluding any form of realism from that market for many decades.

The jackboot is involved in a century of bold lies, by which artists and the public are told Modernism is being promoted to:

• advance freedom
• encourage expression
• celebrate diversity

and air important political issues, when in fact we find the opposite has always been true.

After the unmasking, we see that Modernism was promoted mainly to protect the investments of the Rockefellers, but that when there was an agenda beyond that purely financial one, it was an agenda of:

• destabilization
• stupefaction
• liquefaction
• misdirection

and obliteration.

It was the century-long program of taking everything solid in art, atomizing it, and selling us back the fragments at a vicious mark-up.

Large parts of chapter 16 in Saunders’ book look to have been inserted later by external hands.

Great swaths of it don’t even parse like her common sentence structure.

On p. 253, we get this:

This was not a propitious time for modernists.

Most vulnerable to the attacks of the Dondero caucus [in the Congress] was a group of artists that emerged in the late 1940s as the Abstract Expressionists. . . .

They were linked by a similar past: most of them 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.

The problem with that argument is that Congress was almost as marginalized in the late 1940s as now.

No one was listening to Rep. Dondero or anyone else in Congress.

Then as now, Congress was just a backboard against which Intelligence hit its tennis balls.

Saunders admits that on the next few pages, where we are reminded that by 1946, a whole gaggle of critics (already being underwritten by the Rockefellers in various ways) were praising these artists to the skies.

It is these critics who were being read by academics and gullible progressives.

Those interested in art weren’t reading the Congressional record, they were reading Partisan Review and Commentary and the Nation—and assuming, naively, that these magazines were independent.

Saunders also admits that Pollock got his centerspread in Life Magazine in 1949 thanks to the CIA pressuring Henry Luce.

Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967) was an American magazine magnate who founded Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines. He has been called “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day”. Born in Shandong, China, to parents from the United States who were serving as Presbyterian missionaries, Luce moved to the US at the age of 15 and later attended Yale University. He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of millions of Americans. Time summarized and interpreted the week’s news; Life was a picture magazine of politics, culture, and society that dominated American visual perceptions in the era before television; Fortune reported on national and international business; and Sports Illustrated explored the world of sports. Counting his radio projects and newsreels, Luce created the first multimedia corporation. He envisaged that the United States would achieve world hegemony, and in 1941 he declared the 20th century would be the “American Century“.

The Order of Skull & Bones – Library of Rickandria

America’s Secret Establishment – An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones – Library of Rickandria

So, to say this was,

“not a propitious time for Modernists”

is just hooey.

And we see from the quote above that other things in this chapter don’t add up.

Although all bullets for the book tell us it blows the whistle on CIA influence after the war, it is clear these people were being promoted and subsidized before the war and before the CIA was ever founded.

Look again, these artists were “subsidized” under the New Deal.

The New Deal was before the war, in the 1930’s.

As another example, we know Clement Greenberg was promoting Modernism fiercely before the war, and again, Saunders admits it, quoting from his “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” article of 1939 in the Partisan Review.

That is before the war and before the CIA, so none of this started in 1947.

Year One – 1947, the Year that Changed Everything – 70 Years On – Library of Rickandria

Despite the fact that Partisan Review and Greenberg were saying the same things—at least regarding art—in 1948 that they were saying in the 1930’s, why are we supposed to believe they were bought in the 1940s and independent in the 1930s?

It is pretty obvious they were bought all along.

After 1947, the Rockefellers paid Greenberg and Partisan Review via the CIA; before that they paid them directly.

Although we now know Greenberg was just a puppet, he was pathetic, talentless puppet.

And if I hear one more time about how Greenberg was a

“brawling, boozing, one-man slugfest,”

I think I am going to cough up a lung.

Greenberg was a short, bald, paunchy little creep even when he was young, and he looks like the kind of guy who only punched women and those in lower weight classes. *

Miles Williams Mathis: Radiohead – Spook Babies – Library of Rickandria

Max Ernst (/ɜːrnst/; German: [ɛʁnst] 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an “undesirable foreigner” while living in France. Ernst was born in Brühl. He began painting in 1909 while studying at the University of Bonn, and later joined the Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists. Ernst’s work often featured ironic juxtapositions of grotesque elements with cubist and expressionist motifs. He had a fascination with birds, often including his alter ego, Loplop, a bird, in his work. He eventually settled in France and achieved financial success in the 1950s. He died in Paris on 1 April 1976.

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My favorite story is how Greenberg started shoving the tiny Max Ernst, only to get clocked by the long-armed Nicholas Calas.

Nicolas Calas (Greek: Νικόλαος Κάλας) (May 27, 1907 – December 31, 1988) was the pseudonym of Nikos Kalamaris (Νίκος Καλαμάρης), a Greek-American poet and art critic. While living in Greece, he also used the pseudonyms Nikitas Randos (Νικήτας Ράντος) and M. Spieros (Μ. Σπιέρος).

“Clement Greenberg (1909-94) dominated the American art scene and is still considered the most influential American art critic of the twentieth century. He almost single-handedly established Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists at the center of art in the West, and set the tone for art criticism for half a century to come. This biography, based on unpublished and previously unavailable documents, interviews, and archives, presents a story of imagination and grandiosity, of vision and excess.” “Alice Goldfarb Marquis presents Greenberg’s complex relations with numerous friends, lovers, and rivals, including Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Harold Rosenberg. She also recreates the heady art scene in America from the 1940s through the 1980s, detailing how a generation of critics, with Greenberg at the helm, used personal conviction and innate notions of taste to define the course of modern art.”–BOOK JACKET

Art Czar : the rise and fall of Clement Greenberg : a biography – Anna’s Archive

In 1961, the 52-year-old Greenberg got caught with a left jab from the 57-year-old de Kooning and wasn’t able to respond.

From my research, none of these fights ever got past one punch, so as usual it looks like a lot of posturing by armchair critics and fighters.

Despite the fact that Greenberg is a minor character in her book, Saunders implies he—of all the people who pulled the Rockefeller oars (except possibly the Trillings)—was the most unctuous, the most reviled, and the most insincere.

Which gives me an opening I missed the first time I counter-critiqued “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”

Clement Greenberg

Coming to Greenberg from the assumption that Modernism was trying to sell itself as leftist and progressive, I hadn’t been able to understand his assertion that the avant garde 

“belonged to the ruling class,”

or that,

“it had always remained attached [to this ruling class] by an umbilical cord of gold.”

GOLD: For Humans & Others… – Library of Rickandria

But now that I understand that Greenberg was actually a conservative and a fascist, I see what he means.

He is constructing a subtle apologia for his groveling at the feet of the Rockefellers.

Art had always belonged to the ruling class, according to Greenberg, so why should he or his artists have any qualms about accepting their gold?

Leaving aside the moral or political aspects of that idea, we see a huge contradiction here.

If the avant garde belongs to the ruling class, then the famous division of the avant garde from old “aristocratic” art evaporates, doesn’t it?

This division—which Greenberg helped to manufacture—has been one of the defining divisions of the century, being used to jettison any and all realism from the new definitions.

I was personally excluded from the upper echelons of contemporary art based on that manufactured division.

I was told my art was “aristocratic” and therefore outmoded, based only on its use of old forms and conventions—like figuration, representation, and attention to technique.

But if both the old art and the new art

“belong to the upper class,”

then this slur against realism collapses.

The old art is then not frowned upon because it is “aristocratic.”

It is frowned upon because the new aristocrats like Rockefeller choose to frown on it.

An art that “belongs” to the elite is then at the mercy of the elite.

Global Elite: The Transnational Capitalist Class – Library of Rickandria

If they decide to redefine art to suit their portfolios, artists and critics can only go along.

This is what Greenberg is really saying, in his nearly illegible way.

But back to Saunders’ book.

The more I reread chapter 16, the more it looks like a palimpsest, written over and written over again.

It undercuts itself and then the undercut is re-undercut.

We see this most clearly in the way Pollock is dealt with.

Although the main line of the book would lead most people to dismiss Pollock as a CIA creation, someone underneath the top layer of this book is trying to save him with all the rest.

We hear the tired superlatives once again: that Pollock was the great American painter [so says Budd Hopkins], the Hemingway of painting, the real American, the cowboy, the hard-talking heavy drinker with,

“the grittiness of Marlon Brando and the brooding rebelliousness of James Dean.”

Elliot Budd Hopkins (June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011) was an American artist, author, and ufologist. He was a prominent figure in alien abduction phenomena and related UFO research.

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But then that sales pitch is destroyed in one sentence, where we are reminded that all of this is bunk:

Pollock couldn’t ride a horse and left Wyoming as a child.

And this reminds us he was also terrorized by self-doubt (hence the drinking), couldn’t hold his booze, and—like Greenberg—was short, bald and unattractive.

Pollock had nothing in common—even on the surface—with Marlon Brando or James Dean, much less John Wayne.

He was neither a rebel nor a tough guy, spending his afternoons—like Woody Allen—in therapy.

Miles Williams Mathis: WOODY ALLEN & the Teutonic Knights – Library of Rickandria

He saw his drip period as a lark and a marketing ploy, and felt guilty for the undeserved fame.

He preferred his earlier work, and wished he were allowed to pursue figuration.

This is the reason he went off the wagon after the Hans Namuth photoshoot in 1950 and quit doing the drip paintings.

The photoshoot made him feel like a big phony.

Which brings us to a curious outcome of my research on Pollock.

Turns out Pollock spent some time pursuing Theosophy, attending retreats in California with Krishnamurti.

That of course brings us back to the paper that started all this, where I show that Theosophy was founded as a joint project of US/Russian Intelligence.

Miles Williams Mathis: From Theosophy to the Beat Generation or How even the Occult was Disguised – Library of Rickandria

So even before Modernism was infiltrated by the CIA, it had long been infiltrated by Intelligence through Theosophy and its offshoots.

Other artists who were influenced by Theosophy include: **

Rothko

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (Dutch: [ˈpitər kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈmɔndrijaːn]; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (/piːt ˈmɒndriɑːn/, US also /- ˈmɔːn-/, Dutch: [pit ˈmɔndrijɑn]), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He was one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated from Odessa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession, he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia). Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

Constantin Brâncuși (Romanian: [konstanˈtin brɨŋˈkuʃʲ] ⓘ; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian sculptor, painter, and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought inspiration in non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and others. However, other influences emerge from Romanian folk art traceable through Byzantine and Dionysian traditions.

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (/ɡoʊˈɡæn/; French: [øʒɛn ɑ̃ʁi pɔl ɡoɡɛ̃]; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He was also an influential practitioner of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. While only moderately successful during his life, Gauguin has since been recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism.

Johannes Itten (11 November 1888 – 25 March 1967) was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus (Staatliches Bauhaus) school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.

Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc (8 February 1880 – 4 March 1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it. His mature works mostly are animals, and are known for bright colors. He was drafted to serve in the German Army at the beginning of World War I, and died two years later at the Battle of Verdun. In the 1930s, the Nazis named him a degenerate artist as part of their suppression of modern art. However, most of his work survived World War II, securing his legacy. His work is now exhibited in many eminent galleries and museums. His major paintings have attracted large sums, with a record of £42,654,500 for Die Füchse (The Foxes) in 2022.

Pasternak

Blok

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer and critic who was an important figure in the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world and have been published in 25 languages. Born and raised in a house on Tinakori Road in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon, Mansfield was the third child in the Beauchamp family. She began school in Karori with her sisters, before attending Wellington Girls’ College. The Beauchamp girls later switched to the elite Fitzherbert Terrace School, where Mansfield became friends with Maata Mahupuku, who became a muse for early work and with whom she is believed to have had a passionate relationship. Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her own name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety, sexuality, Christianity, and existentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, and she died in France aged 34.

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright. He was a leading figure in English-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated the art through his use of language, writing style, and verse structure. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.

Paul Klee (German: [paʊ̯l ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci‘s A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (German pronunciation: [ˈvaltɐ ˈadɔlf ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈɡʁoːpiʊs]; 18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-born American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar and taught there for several years, becoming known as a leading proponent of the International Style. Gropius emigrated from Germany to England in 1934 and from England to the United States in 1937, where he spent much of the rest of his life teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the United States he worked on several projects with Marcel Breuer and with the firm The Architects Collaborative, of which he was a founding partner. In 1959, he won the AIA Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in architecture.

Robert Delaunay (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ dəlonɛ]; 12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French artist of the School of Paris movement; who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract. His key influence related to the bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (6 January 1872 [O.S. 25 December 1871] – 27 April [O.S. 14 April] 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy. He is often considered the main Russian symbolist composer and a major representative of the Russian Silver Age.

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, and a central element of his music was its use of motives as a means of coherence. He propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the “unity of musical space“.

Since Theosophy was founded in 1875, it would seem difficult to connect it to the Rockefellers.

The Rockefeller fortune was just being made at that time, and most assume the first Rockefeller was too busy creating his monopoly to bother with spiritualism.

But those who assume this would be wrong.

Rockefeller not only followed Vivekananda in the 1890’s, but he is also one of the ones who brought him here.

Swami Vivekananda (/ˈswɑːmi ˌvɪveɪˈkɑːnəndə/) (12 January 1863 – 4 July 1902), born Narendranath Datta, was an Indian Hindu monk, philosopher, author, religious teacher, and the chief disciple of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. Vivekananda was a major figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world, and is credited with raising interfaith awareness and elevating Hinduism to the status of a major world religion.

What Did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, Nikola Tesla and Sarah Bernhardt Have in Common? – WSJ

Vivekananda, like Krishnamurti, was one of the early importations of the Theosophists.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (/ˈdʒɪduː ˌkrɪʃnəˈmʊərti/ JID-oo KRISH-nə-MOOR-tee; 11 May 1895 – 17 February 1986) was an Indian spiritual speaker and writer. Adopted by members of the Theosophical tradition as a child because of his aura as perceived by Theosophic leader Charles Leadbetter, “without a particle of selfishness in it,” he was raised to fill the advanced role of World Teacher, but in adulthood he rejected this mantle and distanced himself from the related religious movement. He nevertheless spent the rest of his life speaking to groups and individuals around the world to set mankind free, gaining a wider recognition in the 1950s, after Aldous Huxley had introduced him to his mainstream publisher and the publication of The First and Last Freedom (1954). Many of his talks have been published since, and he also wrote a few books himself, among them Commentaries on Living (1956–60) and Krishnamurti’s Notebook (written 1961-62). His last public talk was in January 1986, a month before his death at his home in Ojai, California. According to Krishnamurti an “immense energy and intelligence went through this body,” a consciousness he called “the otherness” and which had always been there, but became more clear over time, as did his intellectual capability to express it in words. During his life he tried to express this in ‘the teachings’, but a few days before his death he stated that nobody had understood what his body went through, and after his death, this consciousness would be gone, and no other body would support it “for many hundred years.” Krishnamurti asserted that “truth is a pathless land” and advised against following any doctrine, discipline, teacher, guru, or authority, including himself. He dismissed the need for contrived meditation techniques, instead emphasizing the practice of choiceless awareness as the essence of “true meditation”. He also emphasized psychological inquiry and liberation from cultural conditioning. His supporters — working through non-profit foundations in India, Britain, and the United States — oversee several independent schools based on his views on education, and continue to distribute his thousands of talks, group and individual discussions, and writings in a variety of media formats and languages.

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What most people don’t know is that Vivekananda was a freemason.

FREEMASONRY: Brotherhood of the Obligated Names – Library of Rickandria

It is not widely publicized, but it is admitted even at Wikipedia.

Swami Vivekananda – Wikipedia

He was educated at the General Assembly’s Institution, now known as the Scottish Church College.

This is curious, since this college taught a “liberal Western” education.

Vivekananda’s favorite professor was from Trinity College.

Also of interest is the fact that when Vivekananda came to the US for the first time in 1893, he went straight to Harvard and the waiting arms of William James.

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers and is often dubbed the “father of American psychology.”

See my previous papers for the importance of that fact.

Miles Williams Mathis: The Stolen Century – Library of Rickandria

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.

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To get you started, remember that James was a Theosophist and a mentor of Gertrude Stein.

But back to Saunders’ book.

Here’s another strange contradiction in chapter 16.

On page 256, we learn of an exhibition in 1947 called “Advancing American Art.”

We are told that speeches in Congress killed it after it got to Europe.

This is supposed to be evidence of the power of the reactionaries in the House, including Rep. Dondero.

But Saunders, in the previous paragraph, had just admitted that the show—which included works by:

• O’Keefe
• Gottlieb
• Gorky

—had already been to Paris and Prague, where it was “a major success.”

It was such a success, we are told, that the Russians had to immediately organize a competing exhibition.

So, we see the contradiction already.

We are told that Congressmen killed the show, but if they had killed it, it would never have left New York.

It opened first at MoMA before moving to Europe, and a proper “killing” would have prevented it from ever being shown at all, here or abroad.

What we learn if we delve deeper is that Congress voted funds for the show in the amount of $50,000.

With that money, 79 paintings were bought, and the funds also had to include travel expenses to Europe and Latin America.

Which means the average price paid for an oil painting was about $500.

Since most were bought through galleries, each artist got about $250.

We are told the itinerary after Prague included Budapest and an

“undetermined venue in Poland.”

That sounds fishy to me, since what major art exhibition goes to Europe without a firm itinerary?

The “great success” in Prague also turns out to be pushed, since it is admitted that the opening attracted 1,000 visitors.

That sounds pretty paltry to me, considering the show was supposed to have received advanced promotion from critics and accolades from Czech President Benes.

If the President was in favor of the exhibition, why wasn’t it shown at one of the National Gallery venues in Prague?

Why was it relegated to an art cooperative?

The story completely unwinds when Saunders admits that after the show was “canceled,” the paintings were sold off at a 95% discount as surplus government property.

What?

That means each painting fetched about $25 on the open market!

Two questions are begged by that:

1) if the exhibitions were such a success, why was no one interested in buying this “exciting new work”?

We know most of the lots went to small museums in:

• Oklahoma
• Georgia
• Alabama

If the works were so good, why didn’t any of the major museums bid on them?

Apparently it wasn’t only Truman who didn’t care for this work.

The directors of 99% of the museums in the country also passed, even at a bid of $25.

2) If the government and the CIA believed so strongly in Modernism, why did they sell off these works for almost nothing?

The CIA agents themselves should have been bidding these works up into the thousands, right?

No.

The CIA believed in Modernism to the tune of less than $25, and the rest is bluff.

But of course, this means the whole story was manufactured.

It wasn’t the “philistinism” of Truman or Dondero or Busbey that killed this show.

That story was created after the fact as spin.

The show went to Europe and Latin America as planned and bombed on its own lack of merits. 

If the show really had so much critical and academic support back in the US, the paintings would have sold to critics and academics.

Anyone can afford $25 for a painting, even a lowly art critic.

The reason these early shows failed while later shows didn’t is that the CIA hadn’t yet assumed total control of the press in 1946.

Some magazines and newspapers were still printing honest opinion at that time, which obviously got in the way of the propaganda machine.

But within a couple of years, that changed completely.

Whereas Hearst’s New York Journal-American and LOOK magazine had panned the show in 1946, the CIA soon brought them onboard.

And once the media was speaking with one voice, it didn’t matter what Truman or any Congressman thought.

The newspapers could be instructed not to report it, or to report it with a strong spin.

If the newspapers got a hundred letters from readers panning the show and one extolling it, they would print the one and throw the other hundred in the trash.

That is how things work to this day.

We see another bold contradiction on page 258, which starts off,

“Supporting left-wing artists was familiar territory for the Rockefellers.”

Diego Rivera (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈdjeɣo riˈβeɾa]; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican and international art.

Saunders then repeats the story we all know about Diego Rivera being hired to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center.

Rivera paints Lenin into the mural, Nelson Rockefeller asks him to remove it, Rivera refuses, and Rockefeller pays him off and destroys the mural with jackhammers.

Nelson Aldrich “Rocky” Rockefeller (July 8, 1908 – January 26, 1979) was the 41st vice president of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford. He was also the 49th governor of New York, serving from 1959 to 1973. Rockefeller was a member of the Republican Party and of the wealthy Rockefeller family.

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Saunders gives us the CIA spin here, which is that despite that, the Rockefellers continued to support left-wing artists.

Of course, she doesn’t pursue the obvious conclusion here, which is that the Rockefellers promote left-wing artists only as long as “left-wing” means “Modern.”

If left wing has any real political meaning—as in supporting either Socialism or Republicanism—the Rockefellers run like the wind.

They only support lefties that aren’t really lefties. All the Rockefeller artists who are sold as lefties turn out on closer inspection to be righties sold as lefties.

They are fascists posing as Marxists.

Miles Williams Mathis: Reading the Signs – Today’s Lesson: Karl Marx – Library of Rickandria

In my previous papers we saw the same thing with Ezra Pound and many others.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos (c. 1915–1962).

Sometimes, as with Pound, the fascists posing as Marxists then pose as fascists, just to be sure you are well and permanently confused.

On page 261, the tug of war between Saunders and her invisible re-writers continues, as she re-leaks the information that most of MoMA’s trustees/directors/executives are from Intelligence, the invisible writers come on the page and spin that, and then she comes back and despins it.

For the reader, the entire chapter is like riding a yo-yo.

We are told that in addition to Nelson Rockefeller, the Intelligence/trustees included:

• John Whitney
• William Burden
• Rene d’Harnoncourt
• William Paley
• Joseph Verner Reed
• Porter McCray
• Gardner Cowles
• Junkie Fleischmann
• Cass Canfield
• Oveta Hobby

and Tom Braden.

And although she lists the actual links to Intelligence, the invisible writer then pops in and says,

Of course, it could be argued that this congruity revealed nothing more than the nature of American power at the time.

Just because these people knew each other, and just because they were socially (and even formally) enjoined to the CIA, doesn’t mean that they were co-conspirators in the promotion of the new American art.

What?

Yes, that is exactly what it means, Buddy.

You have to be kidding me with sentences like that.

Saunders is too good a writer to be caught writing that.

“Congruity”?

“Socially enjoined to the CIA”?

What the fuck does that mean?

Is the CIA now a cotillion?

Saying that just because these people were in the CIA and running MoMA doesn’t mean the CIA was running MoMA is like saying that just because these clothes are on my body doesn’t mean I am wearing them.

It is the dastardly attempt to dodge the definition of words.

Only an organization as untouchable as the CIA would even think to put such an argument in print.

The invisible writer is so confident, he next sends you to Eva Cockcroft’s 1974 article in Artforum— which is of course one of Saunders’ primary sources for this 1999 book—but does nothing to spin it except to preface it as a “rumor.”

But since the CIA’s Tom Braden has since confirmed large parts of that article, and since documents are referenced showing these people’s official links to Intelligence and the government, none of this is a rumor, and hasn’t been for decades.

In fact, that is why Saunders’ book was allowed to go to press, and why it was allowed to be reviewed by major media outlets in Great Britain:

the CIA needed to spin it, because it was now common knowledge.

You don’t need to spin rumor, since you can dismiss it as rumor.

You only need to spin things that are documented and making the rounds.

The confidence of the invisible writer is again apparent when he allows Saunders back on the page immediately to undercut him.

As proof that MoMA’s support for Abstract Expressionism was not linked to the CIA or the Cold War, Michael Kimmelman is quoted from 1994 telling us that MoMA didn’t get involved in collecting or showing Abstract Expressionism until the late 1950’s.

But Saunders comes back in the next sentence to show that is an outright lie.

She proves that not only was Kimmelman paid to say that by MoMA, but that it is easily refuted by the record.

Saunders quotes from the Museum’s own catalogs to show that it had been collecting all the big names since 1941.

She finds a particularly damning entry in 1944, in which the Museum sold off

“certain of its 19th century works”

to buy more:

• Pollocks
• Motherwells
• Mattas

In probably the last attack of name artists upon an American museum, we see in 1952 a group of fifty including realists:

• Edward Hopper
• Charles Burchfield
• Jack Levine

publishing a “Reality Manifesto” against MoMA, accusing it of propping up unpopular art for “dogmatic” reasons.

Reading the manifesto, it is clear these artists had no idea of the real reason this art was being promoted.

Since my realist friends and I still had no idea until recently, this is not surprising.

The Rockefellers and CIA were not unmasked until the mid 1970’s, and then only partially.

Since that unmasking was in Artforum, no realist would have been expected to see it.

They were unmasked again in 1995 by Saunders, but that was in London, and you could count the number of outspoken realists there on one hand.

I would have expected to hear something from the Stuckists on this but haven’t.

The article at the Independent seems to have only hit the web recently, and that is where I discovered it.

Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American painter, muralist, and printmaker. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. The fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States. His work is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, the region in which he was born and which he called home for most of his life. He also studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there, summered for 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard off the New England coast, and also painted scenes of the American South and West.

I don’t know of any realist since Thomas Hart Benton who is as outspoken as I am, so I suppose it is up to me to lead the first serious charge since 1952.

As part of that charge, we can borrow some firepower from Ad Reinhardt, a painter of little talent from the time in question, who we would have liked to have sicced on Clement Greenberg.

Reinhardt would have pounded him into a meaty pulp.

Reinhardt was a sort of anti-Agnes Martin, being famous for his all black canvases.

He was also the anti-Agnes in that while she was semi-catatonic, he was a volcano.

He claimed to be painting the

“last paintings that anyone can paint,”

so he was as full of air as the next Abstract Expressionist; but he is useful at least as a provider of interesting quotes against his fellow airmen.

Reinhardt called Rothko a “Vogue magazine cold-water-flat-fauve,” and Pollock a “Harper’s Bazaar bum.”

Barnett Newman was,

“the avant-garde huckster-handicraftsman and educational shopkeeper.”

Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American painter. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate the simplest forms to emphasize this feeling.

He called art criticism “pigeon droolings” and ridiculed Clement Greenberg as a phony.

He said the museum should not be a

“counting house or amusement center,”

which means he would not be comfortable in the:

• Whitney
• Guggenheim
• MoMA
• Pompidou
• Tate

or Saatchi Gallery.

You almost have to like the guy, no matter what you think of his art.

Although not much of a painter, he was at least not a bootlicker of the elite, and he was the only Modern artist to participate in the March on Washington for black rights in 1963.

We may suppose the others were polishing their medals.

Of course, this is the reason you haven’t heard of Reinhardt before now, despite the fact he was producing pretty much the same thing as everyone else.

The others kept quiet and just pissed in the fireplace or something.

He was foolish enough to think he was actually a real person, and therefore the owner of his own life.

To wrap this up, let us return to the book.

Russell Lynes gives us a good quote to end with:

The Museum now had, and was delighted to have, the whole world (or at least the whole world outside the Iron Curtain) in which to proselytize—though this time the exportable religion was home-grown rather than what been in the past its primary message, the importable faith from Europe. 

That is from his history of MoMA, and he is talking about the year 1950.

It was upon reading this unparsable sentence that I finally figured out what the European exhibitions were all about.

It wasn’t about fighting Communism or showcasing democracy.

It was about expanding the market.

In order to drive the prices of their investments up, the Rockefellers needed to manipulate not just the US market, but the European market as well.

Since the population of Europe was at that time about 3 times that of the US, the Rockefellers could quadruple their market for new art by expanding operations into Europe.

Until the end of the war, Europe was too unstable for anyone to think of pursuing art markets there, but as soon as hostilities ended, the Rockefellers saw their opening.

Hiding this move under the flag was the perfect cover.

Samuel Johnson (18 September [O.S. 7 September] 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”.

Samuel Johnson’s

“patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”

fits this ploy like a hand in a glove.

Since the recent NSA scandals have proven that we are being watched at all times, I will turn straight into the camera for this final paragraph, talking to the agents directly.

It occurs to me you may be as surprised as all my other readers to discover the true story behind Modern art.

Perhaps you have never cared enough about art to look closely; or perhaps you cared but—like me—just couldn’t see through the many layers of veils. I beg you to ask yourself if this is really what you signed on for.

Maybe you feel just as used as the rest of us.

Since I have shown that patriotism was just a cloak here, your patriotism doesn’t matter.

Art history wasn’t killed on the altar of patriotism or US political interests; it was killed only to enrich people that were already billionaires.

You may say,

“You are right, I don’t care about art.

Its loss means nothing to me.”

So, substitute what you do care for instead of art.

For the truth is, everything is being destroyed to enrich those who are already billionaires, and the destruction is always justified under the cloak of patriotism.

• Our health is being destroyed
• the oceans are being destroyed
• the fertility of the land is being destroyed
• our water quality is being destroyed
• our privacy is being destroyed
• our very self-determination is being destroyed

and in each case those doing the destroying are hiding behind the flag.

So I ask again, is this what you signed on for?

It isn’t what I signed on for when I squeezed through the birth canal.

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*

Like theater critic Lionel Abel, who was about 5’5”.

It takes a real macho man to attack a theater critic.

After that, Greenberg went out and stole cookies from a girl scout.

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**

This link tying the Moderns to Theosophy is to a reprint of another article by Frances Stonor Saunders, although I wasn’t aware of it until later.

Miles Williams Mathis: From Theosophy to the Beat Generation or How even the Occult was Disguised – Library of Rickandria

The website does not attribute the article, but it is from a BBC4 program book called Hidden Hands.

According to the linked website, the article was on the web for a while but was later wiped.

Curious, since we saw that Saunders’ 1995 Independent article was also wiped from the web for about 15 years.

RELATED

Miles Williams Mathis: The CIA & Art – Library of Rickandria

Miles Williams Mathis: I Would Like to File a Suspicious Transactions Report on the entire 20th century – Library of Rickandria

SAUCE

stoner.pdf

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Miles Williams Mathis: The Cultural Cold War

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Miles Williams Mathis: The Cultural Cold War – Library of Rickandria