When the Nazis invaded France Rockefeller and friends decided this was their chance to capture the art market. Until then no serious art collector would buy a painting anywhere except Paris. When European modern art had its U.S. coming out party in 1913 at the Armory Show, Americans didn’t understand it. So they did what people do in this situation: they made fun of what they didn’t understand. Europe in turn made fun of Americans for not understanding. Lots of articles appeared in European journals depicting Americans as uncultured boobs. This made John D., who surely considered himself a cultured guy, very mad.

Another thing that made him mad was social realism, paintings about organizing labor, workers rights, and strikes, along with paintings of cafes, bars, the artists girlfriends and wives, and bowery bums, now referred to as the homeless. This kind of art, the political part, made him so mad that he had Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center smashed to smithereens. He and his friends decided that America needed not only to become the capital of the art world, but also needed a distinctly American art movement, free of any European influence. This American art would have no message, especially no political message.

Then Rockefeller went to the Museum of Modern Art where he got together a group of New York artists and told them what American art now was. This art, he said, was about color, form, composition, the language of the brush, all of the basic elements of representational painting. It would be completely non-objective. Any thing but a recognizable visual image or message.

Peter Leventhal, a New York figurative painter now living in San Miguel de Allende, says he was at that meeting. He told me Willem de Kooning stood up and said he was an artist and no one was going to tell him how to paint. Rockefeller returned that he was telling him how to paint and he could sit down and listen or he could leave. He sat down. Too bad, artists have been sitting down ever since, towing the line. I always liked de Kooning’s work, and his best-known works are his figurative paintings. He hung true to the figure and in the end ignored Rockefeller’s edict. Once abstract expressionism swept into Europe as the favored art form, even Picasso was under great pressure to conform. He never gave in either. I don’t believe he ever did a non-objective piece of work.

Byron Browne, a successful New York artist at time, highly influenced by Picasso, was about to have an important retrospective. Stopping by his gallery one day he was informed that the show was cancelled and his work was now considered to be too derivative of Picasso, and too European. Virtually overnight he went from being one of New York’s most recognized artists to a non-entity. He had lost his support system. Browne died shortly there after, depressed, bitter and unrecognized by his peers.

The Ashcan school painters like Reginald Marsh and John Sloan ignored the whole scene and just kept doing their own thing despite an enormous publicity campaign to convince people that painting things as they were was a useless, old-fashioned exercise in the 20th century.

One of more infamous results of this campaign was when some committee from the National Museum in Washington D.C. cited John Nagy for destroying the imagination of children. Nagy had a Saturday morning TV show and taught kids how to draw puppies, covered bridges and trees. He would start his show with a drawing of a cone, a box and a ball and say “If you can draw these three simple forms, you can draw anything.” Shame on him, what an old fashioned guy.

Rockefeller and friends’ campaign worked. They managed to capture the art market from Europe and before you knew it New York was indeed the capital of the art world. Representational painting had been eclipsed by abstract expressionism.
A big Jackson Pollack was put on display in the window of Saks 5th Avenue and Thomas Hart Benton, one of Jackson’s teachers, left town. Later Pollack sent Benton photos of his latest work. Benton wrote back one sentence: “Jackson, you do what you do and I’ll do what I do.” Not a bad attitude.

So what’s the answer? Are artists who make modern art part of a capitalist conspiracy? Of course. Sincere in your love of contemporary art, or calculating in your desire for fame and fortune, or a product of a modern art education, are all part of a capitalist conspiracy. As long as art, any kind of art, is for sale, it will be reduced to a commercial commodity and the same methods will be used to sell it as any other commodity. Convince a bored and boring banker that by spending $800,000 USD on a large red canvas that this will make him a cool guy and get him laid, and you will have a sale. Convince a kid that slicing up a dead shark is great art, and you have a conspirator.

For much of the above, we must give credit to Serge Guilbaut’s “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art”
“I found the experiments of Mondrian very interesting in 1913. It’s 1947 now and I think we should get back to painting.” -Magritte
“Every guy I know running a gallery, if he wasn’t selling art, would be selling wigs and sneakers on 14th street.” –Rita Torlen