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American art, the CIA's “soft power”

2020-04-29T10:02:25.044Z


In this fascinating documentary, visible at 11:25 pm on France 3 and replayed on France.tv, the history of 20th century art and the secret agents share the picture.


Few good history lessons. Specific. Synthetics. Mixing details like the art of the whole here. Holding their tale as one holds the reins of a thriller. Drawing appropriately in the archive footage: the dance of Jackson Pollock, dry as a smoker, in full "dripping" in the open air in front of his barn; Robert Rauschenberg who received the grand prize for painting in 1964 at the Venice Biennale and Dame le pion at the École de Paris, depited. Giving voice to the disappeared, painters Robert Motherwell or Lee Krasner, partner of Pollock, or the great critic Clément Greenberg, who coined the term action painting. The documentary is visible on France 3 at 11:25 p.m. and replay on the France.tv site.

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In "The Hidden Face of American Art", by François Lévy-Kuentz, the heroes are these penniless artists, debaters, from nothing, reinventing art in lofts that were not yet design. The villain of the story? The CIA, which pulls the strings of this "soft power". It all starts on a field of ruins, that of Europe devastated by the Second World War. Paris was the capital of the arts and the cradle of modern art. The Nazis take his vanguards for "degenerate art" and promise them bonfires and fireworks. Its artists often managed to flee, among the two thousand intellectuals that the Varian Fry network managed to exfiltrate from defeated France after 1940. Zadkine, Mondrian, Lipchitz, Chagall, Tanguy, Masson, Dali joined New York Marcel Duchamp and Calder. "They form a colony of underground French-speaking artists , " says Motherwell. Often young, frightened, not very established, speaking little or no English, they take modern art in their luggage across the Atlantic. It is there that it will be reborn in the form of an American “postwar” art and escape from Old Europe, suddenly gray and poor like its cities without buildings.

New world

In just ten minutes, François Lévy-Kuentz gives a breathtaking summary of this New World which takes advantage of its virgin spaces, even in the large revolutionary formats of abstract expressionists. Thanks to his patrons like Nelson Rockefeller and Peggy Guggenheim, the honorable heroes of this golden legend. Then, through the political mysteries of the Cold War, via the CIA founded in 1947 by the National Security Act, the other side of the coin.

How fierce Republicans, little inclined to change, hermetic to abstraction, changed their rifle and bet on leftist intellectuals, despite the McCarthyism so virulent until 1956… to thwart the Soviet bloc and its painting of state, socialist realism! This is a good thriller worthy of La Taupe , by John le Carré (1974), with the cow humor of Un, deux, trois , the Berlin comedy by Billy Wilder on the conquest of Coca-Cola in Europe (1961). The press does not have a good role.

This pragmatism so American is explained with clarity, and a bit of mischief, by the American Robert Storr, the French Éric de Chassey and the British Frances Stonor Saunders, three sizes in art history. The beautiful voice of François Marthouret reads the text which refers to the parade of images. Those of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Rothko, Clyfford Still or Jackson Pollock, which are today the treasures of museums and the kings of the market.

Source: lefigaro

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