52 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL “is able to contribute to the spiritual riches of man in general in the same way in which its machinery, its railroads, its refrigerators, and its radios have contributed to enrich and to make more comfortable the life of the common man.” Back home, however, the political attacks against it were growing fiercer. Republicans were threatening to withhold the $31 million the Truman administration had requested for State Department information programs, including Voice of America, as punishment for sending American modern art abroad. On April 2, 1947, Truman, clearly tiring of the controversy, fired off a letter to Davidson’s boss, Assistant Secretary of State William Benton. “I don’t pretend to be an artist or a judge of art, but I am of the opinion that so-called modern art is merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people,” Truman wrote. “An artistic production is one which shows infinite ability for taking pains, and if any of these so-called modern paintings show any such infinite ability, I am very much mistaken.” Secretary Marshall could take a hint, and in early May, he pulled the plug on “Advancing American Art.” Appearing before a House committee, he told lawmakers the pictures would be recalled to Washington and auctioned off. The State Department was getting out of the modern art business. Davidson would be dismissed, his position abolished. There would be no more government-funded exhibitions of modern art. The Republican Congress still ended up slashing the State Department’s budget for information programs to $10.8 million, less than half the amount the administration requested. Soon after he was fired, LeRoy Davidson and his wife, Martha, left Washington. Davidson went back to college, earned a Ph.D. in art history from Yale in 1951, and later became head of the art department at UCLA. He specialized in Chinese and Indian art. His 1954 book, The Lotus Sutra in Chinese Art: A Study in Buddhist Art to the Year 1000, is still considered an important work in the field. Martha continued to work as an art critic and co-edited Arts of the United States, a pictorial history of American art published in 1960. He died in 1980, she in 1993. The works in the “Advancing American Art” exhibition were auctioned off in 1948. Considered government surplus, the pictures were sold at a steep discount. The collection was appraised at $80,000, but due to the bidding rules, the government took in just $5,544 for the works. A Georgia O’Keeffe piece fetched just $50. Republicans, of course, made much of this fact, saying it proved the pictures were worthless, while ignoring the fact that their appraised value had increased 60 percent since the State Department purchased them. The bulk of the pictures went to Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) and the University of Oklahoma. “Circus Girl Resting” went to Auburn for $100, and there she resides today. n The failure of State’s 1947 “Advancing American Art” program to win support in the U.S. Congress was, of course, not the end of the story. Ironically, the existence of a “culture war” over modernism in the United States would prove to be an excellent advertisement for America’s democratic freedoms. While Secretary of State George Marshall was telling the Congress there would be no more government funding of exhibitions of modern art, the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had already embraced the idea. American avant-garde art demonstrated America’s creativity, cultural sophistication, and, especially, intellectual freedom, the CIA believed. And it would be hard for Soviet modernism, called socialist realism, to compete, given the rigidity of communist ideology. The CIA began covertly funding an initiative centered on a nongovernmental organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom to promote the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and others. The CIA operation grew, establishing offices in 35 countries and subsidizing international tours by American jazz artists, symphony orchestras, and more until its exposure in 1967. Meanwhile, in 1953 the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) was created to “tell America’s story to the world.” By engaging with the world through international information, broadcasting, culture, and exchange programs, USIA made cultural diplomacy an essential element of American foreign policy. Until its 1999 absorption into the State Department, USIA’s “Arts America” program was instrumental in bringing unique American achievements in music, painting, literature, and architecture, as well as industrial arts, to the rest of the world. And its successor, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, has continued the tradition. —M.A. POSTSCRIPT
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