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The influence of Mexican folk art on Kahlo’s work and life
Like many artists in Mexico City’s vibrant intellectual circles, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—arte popular—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now iconic paintings.
Following the recent acquisition of Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), this is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It tightly focuses on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular, exploring how her passion for objects such as decorated ceramics, embroidered textiles, children’s toys, and devotional retablo paintings shaped her own artistic practice. A selection of Kahlo’s paintings—including important loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—is brought together with representative examples of arte popular. Bringing fresh attention to Kahlo as an ambitious, ever-evolving painter, this exhibition also opens broader discussions about the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.
The MFA’s mission is to be a meeting place of world cultures. Acknowledging the cultural heritage of the artist, gallery labels for this exhibition are provided in both English and Spanish.
La misión del Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) es ser un lugar de encuentro de las culturas del mundo. En reconocimiento a la herencia cultural del artista, los textos de la galería para esta exposición se ofrecen en inglés y español.
By Laura Perkins
Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country. Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).
My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.
Click on the headline to link to the Hub Pages website for more information on I PAINT WHAT I SEE- A Ballad of Artistic Integrity by E. B. White and the controversy over Mexican artist Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural.
I Paint What I See E.B.White
"What do you paint when you paint a wall?"
Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.
"Do you paint just anything there at all?
"Will there be any doves or a tree in fall?
"Or a hunting scene like an English hall?"
"I paint what I see," said Rivera.
"What are the colors you use when you paint?"
Said John D.'s grandson, Nelson.
"Do you use any red in the beard of a saint?
"If you do is it terribly red, or faint?
"Do you use any blue? Is it Prussian?"
"I paint what I paint," said Rivera.
"Whose is that head I see on my wall?"
Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.
"Is it anyone's head whom we know, at all?
"A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall?
"Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall?
"Or is it the head of a Russian?"
"I paint what I think," said Rivera.
"I paint what I paint, I paint what I see,
"I paint what I think," said Rivera,
"And the thing that is dearest in life to me
"In a bourgeois hall is Ingegrity;
"However,...
"I'll take out a couple of people drinkin'
"And put in a picture of Abraham Lincoln,
"I could even give you McCormick's reaper
"And still not make my art much cheaper.
"But the head of Lenin has got to stay
"Or my friends will give me the bird today
"The bird, the bird, forever."
"It's not good taste in a man like me,"
Said John D.'s grandson Nelson,
"To question an artist's integrity
"Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
"But I know what I like to a large degree
"Though art I hate to hamper;
"For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks
"You painted a radical. I say shucks,
"I never could rent the offices.
"For this, as you know, is a public hall
"And people want doves or a tree in fall,
"And though your art I dislike to hamper,
"I owe a little to God and Gramper,
"And after all,
"It's my wall...."
"We'll see if it is," said Rivera.
[First published in The New Yorker, May 20, 1933 during the controversy over Diego Rivera's mural in Rockefeller Center which was destroyed the following year on February 9, 1934.]
The influence of Mexican folk art on Kahlo’s work and life
Like many artists in Mexico City’s vibrant intellectual circles, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—arte popular—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now iconic paintings.
Following the recent acquisition of Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), this is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It tightly focuses on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular, exploring how her passion for objects such as decorated ceramics, embroidered textiles, children’s toys, and devotional retablo paintings shaped her own artistic practice. A selection of Kahlo’s paintings—including important loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—is brought together with representative examples of arte popular. Bringing fresh attention to Kahlo as an ambitious, ever-evolving painter, this exhibition also opens broader discussions about the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.
The MFA’s mission is to be a meeting place of world cultures. Acknowledging the cultural heritage of the artist, gallery labels for this exhibition are provided in both English and Spanish.
La misión del Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) es ser un lugar de encuentro de las culturas del mundo. En reconocimiento a la herencia cultural del artista, los textos de la galería para esta exposición se ofrecen en inglés y español.
By Laura Perkins
Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country. Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).
My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1990-91, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
***************
Culture, Class and Censorship-Forbidden Art
By Helen Cantor
"Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies." —Rep. George A. Dondero
Back in the McCarthy witch hunt days, abstract art was supposed to be a Commie plot, subverting and/or making fools of the American people, as the above 1949 quote from Michigan Representative George A. Dondero indicates. Today, when you can tell exactly, precisely, down to the last hair follicle, what's happening in certain works of art, the same generic yahoo Congressmen still don't like the stuff. Today it's North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms ranting against the late Robert Mapplethorpe's classic, precise photographs because they have sexual themes he doesn't happen to like. Back then it was Dondero and his ilk howling against works they charged were deliberate gibberish done by "germ-carrying vermin," "international art thugs" and "human termites" they darkly claimed were Communist agents boring from within.
Then and now, such hysterical assaults serve the same purpose, which isn't art appreciation but an attempt to ensure the government's social control over the population through intimidation and witch-hunting. In the first Cold War, the focus was on "the Commie menace" and fluoridation; in the past decade it's been sex (it was a/so sex then, of course, and some anti-homosexual campaigns rivaled the anti-Communist hunts in their hysteria). Having pretty successfully expunged the "Reds under the beds," during the Reagan/Bush years the government has turned directly to the beds, unleashing an army of sex police to try to overturn the '60s "sexual revolution" and return Americans "to their places," passive and socially obedient. They even tried to shut down the art museums this past summer. But the American public is pretty fed up with this reactionary assault, as the recent stunning jury decisions in favor of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center's Robert Mapplethorpe show and for the black rap group 2 Live Crew demonstrate.
Artists need support, and should try to get all they can ' out of this government, which is supposedly a democracy. The government has no business telling us what we can look at—or telling artists what they should paint. As New York artists rudely and aptly put it in protests at the Metropolitan Museum last year, "Jesse Helms, You Old Fart! Keep Your Hands Off Our Art!"
Congress' current deal is that the National Endowment for the Arts will give you grant money, and you don't have to sign the "no dirty sex" Jesse Helms pledge. But if a local sheriff finds your work "obscene," you have to pay it all back (not to mention possibly going to jail). Joseph Papp, impresario of New York's renowned Public Theater complex, turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars in NEA grants as a protest against this policy, which continues government censorship in only slightly disguised fashion. This is a courageous act, even if he can afford it. For poorer struggling souls, however, it may come down to a Woody Allen "Take the Money and Run" guerrilla approach. But don't kid yourself—they are not nice guys handing out free money up there. As Lenin used to say, "If you're going to sup with the Devil, you'd better bring a long spoon."
Of course performance artists like Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, with their feminist and lesbian themes, have just as much right to NEA grants as anybody else. But it is hard to imagine government policy, wedded to the concept of the monogamous family as the cornerstone of society, really going for "gay and lesbian art." It's unlikely there will be enthusiasm in Congress for some of the works, for example, in a recent Soho exhibition titled "Queers"—for good or ill, the gigantic lavender plastic male with the big purple penis is never going to grace the Senate lobby. Judy Chicago's equally massive Dinner Party, with its plates representing the vaginas of historical women, lost its home at the University of the District of Columbia. Congress, which still rules over D.C. like a feudal plantation, vindictively cut $1.6 million from the University's appropriation as punishment for accepting what one Congressman called "ceramic 3-D pornography" (meanwhile, students' protest over their rotten education and lack of funding led the artist to withdraw her work in sympathy with their demands).
As the sordid history of official support to the arts shows, the' politicians, even when they appear to be totally disinterested and liberal, dole out their crumbs with careful control. From the Depression era WPA (Works Progress Administration) up through the Rockefellers' sponsorship of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s, official interest in art has been reluctant or self-interested. This history hasn't been raised much in the current fights over the NEA, but then, neither the "progressive" artists nor the government bureaucrats come off too well in what's been a tentative, awkward relationship rich with embarrassment, farce and sheer McCarthyite terror.
The WPA: "A sound, fresh ear of corn"
What I want, said Edward Bruce, one of the early advocates of massive public arts projects during the Roosevelt administration, is work that has "the same feeling I get when I smell a sound, fresh ear of corn," things that "make me feel comfortable about America." Well, he got the corn anyhow. If American "progressive art" of the 1930s tended toward self-righteous preaching, and state-sponsored "official art" tended toward the horribly dull and morally uplifting, the combination was practically fatal, at least aesthetically. The American Stalinists of the Communist Party, solemnly proclaiming "Communism is 20th Century Americanism" during the heyday of the "Popular Front," contributed their share of turgid murals, all of which seem to be variations on Davy Crockett and Babe the Blue Ox leading oppressed Indians, Negroes picking cotton and starving coal miners reading volumes of Marx by flickering coal lamps as huge tornadoes rage in the dust bowl and floods carry scrawny chickens downstream. As we noted in "Women, Culture and Class Society," an earlier article on feminist art, "The caricatures of 'womanhood' (either the eternally strong or eternally suffering woman) are necessary to their art in the same way that caricatures of the proletariat and bourgeoisie are necessary for Stalinist propaganda" (W&R No. 6, Summer 1974).
Some people claim there's such a thing as "totalitarian art," massive, relentlessly upward stuff churned out in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. But examination of the work of Roosevelt's WPA reveals the same styles and themes—the aluminum horses, monster eagles, heroic workers rebuilding society, simple-minded peasant families. Bruce's "fresh ear of corn" line isn't so different from the Nazi historian who said, "Pictures have to have a certain smell of the soil." The heated rhetoric of the self-styled "American regionalists" like Thomas Hart Ben-ton and Grant Wood versus Communist Party sympathizers is hard to grasp 50 years later, as they all dug into that same soil stylistically.
"Any artist who paints a nude for the Public Works of Art Project should have his head examined," another Roosevelt honcho proclaimed. One of the few artists whose works were openly, even grotesquely, sensual was one of the first to be censored and, ironically, at the very same Corcoran Gallery in D.C. that canned the Mapplethorpe show. Paul Cadmus today enjoys a renewed reputation as a kind of pioneer of "lesbian and gay art." His work, The Fleet's In, was initially chosen as one of the 500 paintings for a 1934 show of state-sponsored art. While the bulging, randy sailors, arms around one another, and the equally bulging females, were enjoyed in the Navy Department's salons without incident, one high-ranking narrow-minded admiral spotted the picture and had a fit. After much protest, the offending picture was removed, and Eleanor Roosevelt opened the affair to music by the Navy Band Orchestra. The president praised show as "robust and American."
It was hardly "the greatest art event in this country since the Armory," as one of the organizers had hoped. The faithful members of Roosevelt's court had comfortably forgotten that the 1913 art show in New York's Armory, which introduced the American public to modern European art, had horrified another Roosevelt. The show, including Marcel Duchamp's infamous Nude Descending a Staircase, set off the former president, according to exhibitor William Zorach, who recalled Teddy "waved his arms and stomped through the Galleries pointing at pictures and saying 'That's not art!'"
Other artists had better luck at subverting the nitpicking rules and pompous censors of the WPA agencies. Among the first big projects of Edward Bruce's Treasury "Section of Fine Arts" were murals for the Justice and Post Office buildings. The jury looked at 91 designs —mainly of chain gangs, evictions, third degrees, electrocutions, battling juvenile delinquents and gangsters—and promptly rejected them all. Rockwell Kent, however, got a commission for a Post Office mural. He painted a mailman delivering a letter to delighted Puerto Ricans with the words (in Eskimo language): "To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends! Go ahead. Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free." When no one noticed he finally called up a newspaper columnist and broke the story. Delighted by the resulting tempest, he cheerfully told reporters, "I think it's a swell thing when people want independence and I think it's the most American thing one can do to wish them luck." The seething bureaucrats demanded he change it, but rejected his suggestion for a quotation from Lincoln's first inaugural address on the right of oppressed minorities to revolution. The unamused Treasury officials insisted the only motto he could paint was "To commemorate the far-flung front of the United States Postal Service." Kent properly refused to paint this bombast, and so the letter is blank to this day (see The New Deal for Artists, by Richard D. McKinzie, Princeton University Press, 1973).
The Communist Party "Popular Front" and Artists
The WPA did give work to thousands of artists on relief. In its first year alone (1935), over 5,300 artists joined the WPA's Federal Art Project (FAR). About half the artists in the FAR were in New York City, home of the large and influential Communist Party-inspired American Artists' Congress, also formed in 1935. Earlier New York State and federal art relief efforts had sought to exclude known Communists, by not inviting the "Unemployed Artists Group," connected to the CP's John Reed Clubs, to participate.
The noblesse oblige of Roosevelt's cultural overseers was often severely strained, especially in New York, where militant artists' actions sought to extend the benefits of the WPA. In December 1936 (after the national elections), Roosevelt tried to cut the relief programs, but artists packed the Art Project offices in a sit-down strike. Police waded in and arrested 219 of them. In May of 1937, another protest and sit-in was called. Though it didn't win its demands, this protest finally pushed FAR director Holger Cahill, a former bohemian fellow traveler, over the edge: "These people are psychopaths, they are basically unemployable, and you can't do anything with them," he fumed, stating later that "these people were pretty wild...they were left-wingers who thought that if they could get a portrait of Marx or Lenin into a meeting, this somehow would bring about the revolution."
In fact, the American Artists' Congress was not for "red revolution," but was formed precisely because the Communist Party's previous artistic groups, the John Reed Clubs, were too radical for the "Popular Front," proclaimed in August 1935 at the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. This "front" was supposed to enlist the "Western democracies" (formerly known as capitalist swine) in the fight to defend the Soviet Union against fascism—which for the CP meant in practice calling off the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. The John Reed Clubs were summarily disbanded during the winter of 1935-36, while their emphasis on class struggle and "proletcult" (proletarian culture) was abandoned.
"By building an alliance among Communists, Socialists, independent leftists, and Democrats, artists could feel as if they were part of American society," noted the editors of Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress (Rutgers University Press, 1986). This novel feeling^—both for artists and Communists—was not to survive the war. The organization reached over 900 members by 1939, with exhibits like "To Aid Democracy in Spain." Though the group took no official position on what style of art it preferred, a paper by Max Weber on "The Artist, His Audience and Outlook" outlined a view close to the party line:
"We must cast away therefore chameleon cleverness, and discard mental and optical illusions born of bourgeois decadence and ennui of a fast expiring civilization.... Let us, instead, turn to the gladiatorial heroism, ambition, and tempo of modern beneficent and yielding industry, science and technology, to scenes of joy and verve of happy toilers in their own made environments, to the new home-life, nursery and school, to the new comradeship and brotherhood hitherto unknown."
Yech. Following the twists and turns of Stalinist politics, artists in the group put out a letter defending the Moscow Trials, signed by president Stuart Davis as well as Raphael Soyer, William Cropper, Max Weber, Harry Gottlieb and other well-known artists of the period. But the increasing strain of following the Moscow line, especially when in 1938 "modernist" influences in art were officially banned in the Soviet Union, took its toll, as did the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact in August 1939. As well, artists and writers around Partisan Review and others were coming to the defense of Leon Trotsky, Stalin's Bolshevik opponent; the 1937-38 John Dewey Commission exonerating Trotsky of Stalin's slanders had an important impact.
The bureaucratic perversion of "socialist realism" imposed by Stalin in the USSR was an especially bitter blow to artists, because the triumphant Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 had been associated with the great cultural upheavals that gave birth to modernism and abstract art. Recalling the heady atmosphere of those days of artistic experimentation and enthusiasm in the midst of poverty and civil war, Trotsky sought to re-establish what had been the Marxist norm when he and Lenin were leading the young workers state. As he wrote in a 1938 letter to Partisan Review:
"...a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power. Such a pretension could only enter the head of a bureaucracy—ignorant and impudent, intoxicated with its totalitarian power—which has become the antithesis of the proletarian revolution. Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its laws—even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity."
Essentially it was World War II that swept away the CP's art groups and the WPA. The war finally got American capitalism out of the Depression, ending all the Rooseveltian experiments in subsidizing artists. Its conclusion, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushered in a new era of American world imperialism.
"Advancing American Art": Censorship and McCarthyism
In 1947 the State Department organized a big art show, "Advancing American Art," to prove to the not yet totally grateful Europeans and South Americans that the American conquerors were not really the new barbarians. Instead the State Department ended up with egg on its face when it was forced to cancel the successful show in mid-tour by an outbreak of nativist yahooism and anti-Communism in Congress and the Hearst press.
The paintings themselves, bought in 1946 for the show by the State Department, represented a fairly broad range of American painting at that time (a 1989 paperback, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, published by the University of Alabama Press, includes 36 of the paintings). This was before the smashing success of Abstract Expressionism, so most works had recognizable subject matter, some mildly surrealistic, some still carrying on the '30s and early '40s themes of social injustice, like Ben Shahn's painting of a gaunt boy titled Hunger. There was a Georgia O'Keeffe landscape, a seascape by John Marin, a Marsden Hartley, a painting by the black artist Romare Beardon—all artists accepted today as standard figures of American modern painting.
William Randolph Hearst's papers went wild during a preview of the show in New York City. His New York journal American carried a series on the "Red Art Show," attacking "left-wing painters" like Stuart Davis, William Cropper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others as "a lunatic fringe." With slashing sarcasm, the Hearst writers denounced works like Karl Zerbe's Around the Lighthouse: "SHEER LOVELINESS...Is there anything more beautiful than a dead fish? Of course there is: Two dead fish, for example, or three or five. That's what makes this painting...so wonderful. You get five dead fish. And so did the State Department!"
Look magazine ran seven of the paintings under the provocative title "Your Money Bought These Pictures," while Newsweek ran a spread originally widely distributed by the Republican National Committee, which claimed that five of the seven works were by artists with Communist connections. The Republican majority in Congress, along with some nativist Democrats, seized on the show to settle scores with old New Deal enemies. Congressmen passed reproductions around the floor to raucous laughter, amidst charges it was a Communist plot because the faces of people in the paintings "are always depressed and melancholy. That is what the communists and other extremists want to portray. They want to tell the foreigners that the American people are despondent, broken down or of hideous shape—thoroughly dissatisfied with their lot and eager for a change of government. The Communists and their New Deal fellow travelers have selected art as one of their avenues of propaganda."
Finally President Truman was moved to denounce the show as "so-called modern art" and "merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people." He said of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Circus Girl Resting, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." On 4 April 1947 the Hearst papers triumphantly screamed "Marshall Halts World Tour of Red-Linked U.S. Art." Secretary of State George C. Marshall had the 79 art works brought back and sold as government "surplus property" at a gigantic loss—a Romare Beardon painting went for as little as $5.00!
Enter the evil age of Richard Milhouse Nixon, of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, "the Great Fear" era dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department," he charged in his famous scare speech of 1950. He never had such a list, but the "Red Scare" rolled on to full, raging hysteria, as loyalty oaths, flag salutes, enforced finking, "confessions" and witch hunts sought to drive CPers and other leftists out of the trade unions, the schools and every other field of American life, while crushing any sympathy for them. A 1949 Life magazine photo spread of "Dupes and Fellow Travelers" of the "Red Peril" was practically a who's who of famous people, including Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller.
This was the heyday of Republican Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan, who served an incredible 25 years in Congress. He was honored by Vice President Nixon at a 1957 dinner saluting Dondero's many contributions to alerting the public to "the Communists' evil designs for pollution of American art." This McCarthy of the art world had a genuine obsession with modern art: "Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth.... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.... Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason," he explained.
The CIA, the Rockefellers and Abstract Expressionism
This uncontrolled ranting was viewed with dismay by more rational bourgeois ideologues, who knew perfectly well it was making American society look like the revolting combination of terror and idiotic cultural boorishness it in fact was, a dippy "hula hoops from hell" suburban nightmare where a Picasso print on the wall was proof you'd made a pact with the Commie devil. (The FBI, in fact, kept a huge file on Picasso, extending on for years even after his death!) The United States Information Agency, perhaps hoping the worst storms had subsided, tried later in the '50s to present some international shows of American artists, but with similar disastrous results, as William Hauptman detailed in "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade" (Artforum, October 1973).
The USIA supported a show on "Sport in Art" (partially funded by Sports Illustrated), scheduled for the 1956 Olympic Games. A preview in Dallas, Texas was vehemently protested by Colonel Owsley, the Dallas County Patriotic Council and other art-loving ladies of Dallas, because it contained paintings by supposed Communist or Commie dupe painters like Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Max Weber, Diego Rivera and the seemingly ubiquitous Ben Shahn. The USIA canceled that one. They tried again with "100 American Artists of the Twentieth Century." Again, it was claimed that ten of the artists were politically "unacceptable" and "pro-Communist." The USIA had to cancel that one too. Shortly afterward, the USIA announced in exasperation that it would ban from any of its traveling exhibitions any "American oil paintings dated after 191 7"—that is, after the Russian Revolution—to avoid any possible Communist taint!
Somebody had to rescue America's international reputation on the cultural scene, to win over European intellectuals in the Cold War—and it turned out to be the Rockefellers, the Museum of Modern Art and the CIA. A fascinating article by Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," in Artforum (June 1974) lays out the connections. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was founded in 1929 by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. In 1939 Nelson Rockefeller became its president, going on to become Roosevelt's coordinator for South and Latin American affairs, and returning to MOMA in 1946. A 1941 wire story called the museum the "latest and strangest recruit in Uncle Sam's defense line-up," quoting the museum's chairman John Hay Whitney on MOMA's mission to "strengthen the hearts and wills of free men in defense of their own freedom." Whitney (a veteran of the OSS, predecessor of the CIA) himself set up a trust exposed as a CIA conduit in 1967. Cockcroft details:
"Primarily, MOMA became a minor war contractor, fulfilling 38 contracts for cultural materials totalling $1,590,234 for the Library of Congress, the Office of War Information, and especially Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. For Nelson's Inter-American Affairs Office, 'mother's museum' put together 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting which were shipped around Latin America, an area in which Nelson Rockefeller had developed his most lucrative investments—e.g., Creole Petroleum, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the single most important economic interest in oil-rich Venezuela."
Rockefeller's Latin American experts were bodily transferred over to MOMA after the war, including Rene d'Harnoncourt, who had helped cultivate the Mexican muralists at the time Mexico's oil nationalism threatened Rockefeller oil interests. Head of the art section of Nelson’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in 1943, he was brought to MOMA as vice president in charge of foreign activities, and in 1949 d'Harnoncourt became MOMA's director. In 1952 MOMA launched its international program with a $625,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Under the direction of Porter A. McCray, another Office of Inter-American Affairs veteran, MOMA added its International Council. Reassuringly "modern" exhibitions of contemporary American art were sent to Europe, South America and Japan, as MOMA "assumed a quasi-official character, providing the 'U.S. representation' in shows where most nations were represented by government-sponsored exhibits," Cockcroft points out. At the Venice Biennale, the most important European international art show, MOMA took over the U.S. pavilion, the only privately owned booth, from 1954 to 1962.
Abstract Expressionism, the slashing, dripping, floating huge canvases whose primary subject is the world of paint and canvas itself, became MOMA's favorite art. Not only was it new and artistically avant-garde, in refreshing contrast to the stale old "smell of the soil" Thomas Hart Benton "regionalism" pushed by more primitive anti-Communists, but it was really "American." Many of the leaders of the movement had past left-wing connections: Jackson Pollock was influenced by left-wing Mexican mural painting, Mark Rothko had done paintings of the city poor, Willem de Kooning did work for Artist Union protests, while Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell had "dabbled in Marxism," according to art critic and "Action Painting" advocate Harold Rosenberg. While this may have kept them from getting Congressional approval, it wasn't entirely bad from the more sophisticated Cold Warriors' viewpoint. It heightened the propaganda value of these artists in demonstrating the supposed "freedom of expression" of America, since they ostentatiously avoided "politics" in their new work. Though as Rosenberg noted in The Anxious Object, the old impulse wasn't entirely gone: "It is hard to imagine a Johnson campaign billboard in the manner of the late Franz Kline, though in 1952 the Action Painters of the Artists Club in Greenwich Village turned out placards for [Adlai] Stevenson (how much these contributed to his defeat is not known)."
Of course, totally abstract art was safer for the Rockefellers too. Those earlier attempts to woo the Mexican muralists were not a total triumph. In 1933 the Rockefeller family ordered Diego Rivera off the scaffolding at Rockefeller Center, because the artist refused to remove a head of Lenin from his mural Mankind at the Crossroads. Later the entire mural was pulverized. At least with a Pollock drip painting or an Ad Reinhardt black-on-black, there was no obviously subversive, rude content. In any case, MOMA began showing the Abstract Expressionists early and often, in 1956 touring a "Modern Art in the U.S." show with works by de Kooning, Franz Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, Rothko and others through eight European cities, including Vienna and Belgrade.
MOMA also sought to influence intellectuals behind the so-called "Iron Curtain." In 1961the museum gave the Polish painter Tadeusz Kantor and other "nonobjective" Polish painters an exhibition at MOMA. The CIA funded cultural institutions like the National Student Association, Encounter magazine and even a 1952 Paris tour by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Gloria Steinem, one of the founders of the bourgeois feminist Ms. magazine, knowingly took CIA money as director of the "Independent Research Service," which sponsored young Americans going to youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1962. "I found them liberal and farsighted and open," she said of the CIA agents with whom she collaborated, according to the Washington Post (18 February 1967).
MOMA's executive secretary from April 1948 to November 1949, Thomas W. Braden, joined the CIA in 1950, supervising its cultural activities from 1951 to 1954. In "I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral'," in the 20 May 1967 Saturday Evening Post, Braden said that "dissenting opinions within the framework of agreement on cold-war fundamentals" made effective propaganda abroad, and in any case "the idea that Congress would have approved of many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch society's approving medicare." This initial suave CIA impression was later buried in the swamps of Vietnam, as they were revealed as the bloody killers they were and are. And Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York in 1971, will go down in history as the "Butcher of Attica."
One of the few bright lights in this sick period between McCarthyism and the explosion of the New Left was the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. "The most beautiful body I've ever seen was at a party in 1954," Lenny would occasionally muse on stage, "I was in the bedroom getting the coats...and I viewed the most perfect bosom peeking out from the man-tailored blouse above a tweed pegged skirt. 'You like what you see? They are nice, aren't they?' she said, caressing the area near her medallion. 'Yes, they are very nice.' 'Would you like to touch them?' 'I'm—I'm—' 'You're shocked,' she said, 'aren't you?' Indeed I was. Eleanor Roosevelt had the prettiest tits I had ever seen or dreamed that I had seen." For this gentle satire, Lenny was arrested at Greenwich Village's Cafe Au Co Co for giving an "indecent performance." The legal complaint was headed "Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits"! Lenny Bruce died on 3 August 1966, after having been unable to get work for months, harassed and hounded by the state's vicious censors.
No to Censorship!
The current debate over whether the National Endowment for the Arts, itself a creation of the Kennedy-Johnson "Great Society" days, should place conditions on its grants seems like a somewhat paler repeat of this turbulent past. The total amount of money being debated isn't much—military bands get more money than the entire arts budget—but the point, as we've said, is attempted political repression. Jesse Helms is every bit as reactionary a piece of work as the Donderos and McCarthys of the 1950s, and the spectacle last summer of Senator Alfonse D'Amato ripping up an Andres Serrano art catalogue on the Senate floor was a chilling replay of earlier witch hunts.
There are encouraging signs that the "heartland of America" is finally getting fed up with the lying cant and censorship shoveled down its throat for the past decade. The six-year-long ghastly expensive trial against teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Southern California finally ended early this year as a jury acquitted the defendants of some 52 counts of child abuse, renouncing the prosecutors' witches brew of hysteria over the devil, drugs and day care. The jury in the Washington, D.C. Marion Barry trial refused to be suckers for the feds' attempted frame-up of the black mayor in a drug/sex sting.
And in early October an eight-person jury in Cincinnati, Ohio, acquitted the city's Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie of obscenity charges for its retrospective exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photos. "High art" devotees had plenty to cheer about, since this was the first-ever obscenity case against an art museum. The prosecution strategy of picking people they thought were hicks from the sticks backfired, as one juror said afterward: "We thought the pictures were lewd, grotesque, disgusting. But like the defense said, art doesn't have to be beautiful or pretty."
Then "low art" got its licks in, as a jury in Broward completed the one-two punch, acquitting the rap group 2 Live Crew of obscenity charges on October 20. "You take away one freedom, and pretty soon they're all gone," said one juror in that case, while others noted they thought the black group's raunchy lyrics were really a gas. This tendency toward common sense, decency and tolerance on the part of ordinary citizens is deeply disturbing to our rulers.
Government censorship is going to continue as long as this capitalist government goes on. The heart of it is that this system of government is not neutral. It was created to uphold capitalism, the system of private ownership of the means of production. Pared down to its essentials, the state is an executive committee of the capitalists as a whole, for keeping the ruling class on top through state coercion of those at the bottom, mainly through the selective use of cops and prisons and murder. State subsidies for health care, education and the like are given reluctantly, as part of the necessary overhead to keep the population minimally content and at least a section of it competent to work. Subsidies for artists are extra frills, given or taken away depending on how the political winds are blowing. It's especially so in this country, where the Puritan legacy still hangs heavy with its dour suspicion of the arts, especially live theater, as agencies of sin and the devil.
Meanwhile, as the hogs at the public trough complain they don't want to spend our "taxpayers' money" on sexy art, but would really rather use it for strange new weapons and to bail out their buddies in the savings and loan scandals, there is some poetic justice around to relish. While the Mapplethorpe show's director was acquitted, the man who gave "Censornati" its nickname, the founder of various Cincinnati Legions of Decency, is himself under indictment today, the Lincoln Savings & Loan's own Charles H. Keating Jr. And another figure in this latest farcical episode in American cultural life has met her appropriate end as well: Christina Orr-Cahall was the curator who canceled the Mapplethorpe show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., ostensibly to avoid Congressional ire, in the Vietnam-era spirit of "bombing the village in order to save it." She was last heard from in a New York Times Travel Section, down in the Nancy Reaganland of West Palm Beach, curating the no doubt culturally deep show "Pools," a survey of swimming pools in recent American art.
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I Paint What I See
It's no good taste in a man like me,
Said John D's grandson, Nelson.
To question an artist's integrity Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
But I know what I like to a large degree,
Tho art I hate to hamper.
For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks You painted a radical.
I say, shucks,
I never could rent the offices—
The capitalistic offices.
For this, as you know, is a public hall And people want doves, or a tree in fall,
And tho your art I dislike to hamper,
I owe a little to Cod and Cramper,
And after all,
It's my wall ....
We'll see if it is, said Rivera.
— E.B.W.
Excerpt of poem printed in The New Yorker, 20 May 1933
The influence of Mexican folk art on Kahlo’s work and life
Like many artists in Mexico City’s vibrant intellectual circles, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—arte popular—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now iconic paintings.
Following the recent acquisition of Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), this is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It tightly focuses on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular, exploring how her passion for objects such as decorated ceramics, embroidered textiles, children’s toys, and devotional retablo paintings shaped her own artistic practice. A selection of Kahlo’s paintings—including important loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—is brought together with representative examples of arte popular. Bringing fresh attention to Kahlo as an ambitious, ever-evolving painter, this exhibition also opens broader discussions about the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.
The MFA’s mission is to be a meeting place of world cultures. Acknowledging the cultural heritage of the artist, gallery labels for this exhibition are provided in both English and Spanish.
La misión del Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) es ser un lugar de encuentro de las culturas del mundo. En reconocimiento a la herencia cultural del artista, los textos de la galería para esta exposición se ofrecen en inglés y español.
By Laura Perkins
Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country. Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).
My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip On Frida Kahlo (with music in Spanish). No wonder Leon Trotsky (as well as her husband, Diego Rivera)was smitten by her charms.
DVD REVIEW
The Life And Times Of Frida Kahlo, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and others, PBS Productions, 2006
The last time that the name of the Mexican artist extraordinaire, Frida Kahlo, was mentioned in this space was in a review/ commentary of a commercial movie done about her life, “Frida” and an article in the New York Review of Books (May 15, 2008) analyzing her work The article had reminded how much I liked that film, especially the performance by Ms. Hayek (who received an Oscar nomination for her efforts and who bore a striking resemblance to Frida in the film). I have remained fascinated by Kahlo’s art (and by her life, intertwined as it was with the fates of the revolutionary artist Diego Rivera, and for a short time, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky). In the search for more information I ran across this PBS production that goes into much greater detail about her trials and tribulations as a person, an artist, a lover and cultural icon.
The substance of the documentary includes much biographical detail missing in the commercial film that as is almost always true with such commercial efforts spent much more time on her troubled relationship with Diego Rivera and her physical and mental problems that resulted from a severe, life-threatening accident when she was a teenager. This film moreover placed Frida’s life in the context of the exceptional cultural milieu that developed as a result of the bloody Mexican revolutionary period from 1910-20, the breaking up the old colonial mentality with its emphasis on European culture and the dominant role of Catholic Church. Additionally, it addressed Frida’s various romantic exploits (both male and female including with the above-mentioned Trotsky), the relationship between her art and her inner physical and mental turmoil and her struggle, under the weight of Rivera’s fame, to gain recognition as an artist in her own right.
I mentioned in that previous review that the “New York Review” article placed much of Kahlo's artistic work, as reflected in her strong physical and psychic attachment to Mexico, squarely in the camp of naturalist painters. I noted there that I was not enough of an art devotee to make comment on that critique, however, from the several paintings of Kahlo’s that I have seen up close that I would argue a little more toward the surrealist school that virtually every Mexican artist in the 1920’s and 1930’s drew from as they created their work. The various commentaries presented here only make me feel more certain that she was closer to that school than the naturalist school. Frida was, in the words of the French ‘high priest’ of surrealism, Andre Breton a natural self-trained surrealist. That comment hits the mark.
But enough of that argument for now. This film, in its own way, especially through the comments of the “talking heads” that almost by definition are a part of a PBS production, by presenting Frida’s various psychic pains (failure to have the children she desperately wanted, her topsy- turvy relationship with Rivera as she tries to make her own space in the art world and the underlying tensions of combining politics and artistic endeavor) gives a very fine gloss on the trials and tribulations of being a Mexican woman artist in the early part of the 20th century.
Note: Another impetus for my interest in Frida is that for this political junkie and admirer of Leon Trotsky the names Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera conjure up political connections as much as art. One of the strands that briefly is given notice here is this couple’s relationship with the exiled Trotsky when Mexican President Cardenas granted him a visa in 1937. All sources that I have read and photographs that I have seen have mentioned that Trotsky was smitten with Frida’s exotic beauty (to the furor of his long time companion ‘wife’, Natalia). I have noted elsewhere that the old time revolutionaries, especially the Russians, were extremely reticent about discussing personal sexual matters in their memoirs and autobiographies. Trotsky was no exception. Apparently, according to this film, Trotsky and Frida had a brief affair. That clears up a question that I had about a scene in the commercial film. In any case I can now, as always, concentrate on Trotsky’s political wisdom. And Frida’s strangely exotic paintings.
