A New Series – FREE4ALL

Part One: Express Yourself

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How did the US and other United Nations foster a culture of freedom in the decades following World War II? 

That’s the broad topic of my new series.

The entries here will be posted on more of an ad hoc basis than the Dude series.

The Series Finale:Dude, Where’s My Van? Part 21: Heart and Soul

It will also be more inclusive topically, ranging from art to education to politics, really anything that tickles my fancy. My primary focus will be on the United States, but I will also cover other nations from time to time. Enjoy!

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When Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted his New Deal policies in the 1930s, he made sure to use art to communicate his vision to the American public. 

From 1933 to 1943, FDR would pour more than 37 million dollars into funding for public art. Most of the commissioned works were murals and sculptures for buildings such as post offices and court houses. 

And most of those works were simple, idealized depictions of American communities at work, done in a Social Realist style. In other words, their role as national propaganda was readily apparent.

And then of course came the second war to end all wars. The end of that conflict was to be the dawn of a new day for Western democratic nations. Yet there was a new enemy to contend with: the Soviet Union. Stalin’s regime was viciously authoritarian, but the Soviets were skilled and quite aggressive in their own efforts in propaganda.

Given this new opponent on the world stage, it made sense for the US to try to stand out as a cultural epicenter for artistic innovation, individual expression, and the value of freedom.

And yet, it was undeniable that the art of FDR’s New Deal era happened to strongly resemble the Social Realist art that the Soviets used for their own national propaganda. 

So, in the late 40s and early 50s, the US would turn to a different type of art for national branding: the avant garde. 

Starting in 1944, the US federal government would make it a priority to fund modern art centers, exhibitions, and art criticism publications, to spread ideas of liberal individualism all over the globe. 

The Museum of Modern Art in New York was a crucial asset for this effort.

Unfortunately, Congress did not agree with the use of federal funds to promote left-wing weirdos. And so, the effort had to go underground. The Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947, and one of its first activities was the covert funding of modern art initiatives.

Naturally, this was a great time to be in the arts world. American art curators suddenly had the means to support and elevate whoever they deemed to be the visionaries of this new era. 

So what was to be the look of this Bold and Free America? Based on who first gained attention and influence in the years after the war, this was our new national iconography:

Yes, America’s first major painter laureate was none other than Jack the Dripper himself, aka Jackson Pollock.

Pollock had been living and working in New York City since 1930.

As he continued to develop his approach, he began to incorporate influences from the two most prominent European styles of the modern era: Surrealism and Abstract painting.

As covered in my Dude, Where’s My Van series, the Surrealist painters relied on automatic approaches to generate their bizarre images.

In the early 40s, while exiled in America, Max Ernst tried punching holes into cans of paint, then swinging them around on strings to unleash jets of color onto his canvas. This was perhaps the closest precursor to what Pollock would soon bring to the art world.

In 1936, Pollock attended a workshop by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and it was there that he learned various automatic techniques of the Surrealists.

While the Surrealists tended to use automatism as the starting point for a pictographic design, Pollock began to adopt a process of capturing movement and fluidity in his strokes without thinking about any representational image.

His first real breakthrough in this vein was his 1943 piece Mural, commissioned for Peggy Guggenheim, who was married to Max Ernst at the time. This was a gargantuan painting: 8 x 20 feet! Pollock had to knock out a wall in his small apartment just to paint the thing. At this point, he was still using strokes on the canvas rather than drips, but it’s otherwise the perfect herald for his signature style.

Like the abstract artists, Jackson’s mature work did not traffic in conventional images or scenes. Yet even Kandinsky and Mondrian paintings could be said to have figures and backgrounds. Pollock ushered in an era where even those conventions were obscured beyond recognition.

Instead, what we witness is a vibrant record of the paint’s movement as it danced upon the canvas.

Pollock and his peers at the time are sometimes called Abstract Expressionists, because they expressed their inner worlds through non-pictoral, non-symbolic paintings.

They were also called Action Painters, because their work captured and centered the process of painting as a focus in its own right.

If Pollock’s paintings could be said to represent anything, that type of open-ended, action-centered philosophy of free will is perhaps the best candidate available.

Not everyone lumped into the movement fit the descriptions quite so well as Pollock did. 

For instance, William De Kooning sometimes had recognizable images in his works.

Franz Kline evoked recognizable emotions like despair and anxiety: 

Mark Rothko was more of a proper abstract artist, perfecting the capture of universal human experiences through the most minimal of visual cues:

But importantly, Pollock was the first in this circle to find fame, and so in many ways his vision was the one to which everyone else was compared. It was a movement very much defined by the long shadow of his gigantic murals.

But let’s not veer into hero worship. Most of the great Abstract Expressionist painters were anything but saintly.

De Kooning and Rothko were also alcoholics, and Rothko took his own life. Collectively, the lives of these tormented souls can serve as a warning about the perils of dogged individualism without the tethers or supports of a larger community. 

That’s the ideal that the US government wanted to fashion as their national propaganda. The goal wasn’t to convey any particular message through a particular painting, but instead to invite citizens to investigate, to interpret, to converse, and even to disagree. 

President Eisenhower put it nicely, in a speech he gave for MOMA’s 25th anniversary:

As long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be healthy controversy and progress in art. Only thus can there be opportunity for a genius to conceive and to produce a masterpiece for all mankind. 

But, my friends, how different it is in tyranny. 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. 

Let us therefore on this meaningful anniversary of a great museum of art in America make a new resolve. Let us resolve that this precious freedom of the arts, these precious freedoms of America, will, day by day, year by year, become ever stronger, ever brighter in our land.”

Here’s a solemn nod of respect to those scribbles and drips.