[lbo-talk] CIA and abstract expressionism

[James Heartfield]

When I was growing up my dad, who taught at the Leeds School of Art at the time, regaled us with a relentless critique of abstract expressionism (he was a follower of Fluxus, and surrealism) for its moronic worship of spontaneity, 'like cavemen, still amazed that the paint drips off the ends of their fingers'.

Later, when the CIA story was reported in the late 1990s (I remember first in a TV programme by Philip Dodd, I think I still have it somewhere), I told my dad, 'see, it was all a CIA plot, anyway'.

'Oh yes,' he said, 'we knew that at the time - it was obvious from Clement Greenberg's involvement, and there was always the US embassy promoting shows by Pollock and the rest. And you could see where it was heading with Jasper Johns and his Flag.'

Given he had fought the good fight against abstract expressionism for more than a decade, I asked him, why did he never make an issue out of the CIA connection. 'That never seemed to be what was wrong with it' he explained to me. (And anyway, the Soviet stuff was pretty rubbish too.) It was the retreat from thought that offended him in abstract expressionism, not its paymasters.