Infiltrating the CIA's Secret Art Collection

Infiltrating the CIA's Secret Art Collection

Few outsiders have seen (or even know about) the controversial works that hang inside the agency’s heavily fortified Virginia headquarters—until now

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MENAGHEM WEGKER

We realize we’re at the wrong entrance when a police cruiser pulls up behind our car. An officer steps out with one hand on his sidearm, eyes locked on me, as I approach a guard posted in front of the Central Intelligence Agency’s hyper-secure headquarters in Langley, Virginia. My photographer, Ferdous “Danny” Al-Faruque, stays in the car, hands in plain view to avoid spooking the spooks. Thus begins our bizarre descent into the CIA rabbit hole, not to unearth classified documents on torture at Guantanamo

Bay or UFO warehousing at Area 51 but to sneak a peek, at the controver-

sial million-dollar-plus art collection hanging ‘ inside—a collection that has grabbed headlines of late not only because few outsiders have laid eyes on it but also because for years the CIA seemingly didn’t want anyone to know its contents. Unbeknownst to many, the CIA established its own arts commission in 1963 for purposes that vary from “the selection of the colors of paint for the walls” to “the development, location and display of exhibits.” The agency website briefly mentions a collection of abstract paintings that “representan elemental approach to art, aswash1 ¦ buckling donor and a connection to the architec„ture of the [original headquarters building].” This collection is separate from the CIA’s highly publicized museum of intelligence-themed art• work and historical artifacts such as clothing, weapons and radio equipment. According to the site, the paintings arrived byway of an eccentric collector named Vincent Melzac, who by the • time he died in 1989 had become notorious in D.C. for his hotheadedness. It wasn’t until around 2015 that public interest in the Melzac collection caught fire, after • the CIA denied several Freedom of Information Act requests about it from a Portland, Oregonbased artist named Johanna “Joby” Barron. In a 2015 appeal, Barron threatened the agency with ’^.lawsuit, stating, “Should you continue to deny

my request in whole or in part, and if you do not provide a satisfactory explanation of any withheld or excerpted materials, I may take legal action to compel disclosure under the FOIA.” Details about the collection—specifically the artists and works on display—have since vaporized into myth, both controversial and misrepresented. In December 2015, art website Hyperallergic noted, “Unless you’re one of the CIA’s undisclosed number of employees, your chances of ever seeing these paintings, or even digital images of them, are pretty slim.” In February 2016 CNN reported, “The identities of many of the artworks remain unknown.”

The CIA’s repeated dismissals of Barron’s FOIA requests underscore the collection’s purported secrecy, though some of the works can be seen in artist Taryn Simon’s 2007 collection An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. Other pieces appear briefly in Argo, the 2013 best picture Oscar winner, some of which was shot on location at Langley. But it wasn’t until producers at Warner Bros, tried to secure image rights that one of the artists, Robert Newmann, learned that a painting of his hangs in CIA headquarters. “I’m not exactly thrilled my painting is there,” says Newmann. “I would never have approved it, nor do I think any of the other artists would have.”

Talking with Newmann on the phone after my visit to Langley, I tell him the CIA had said none of the artists were still alive. When Warner Bros, contacted Newmann in 2012, the studio told him that the CIA said it hadn’t been able to find him. “I’ve been living in New York for 35 years in the same loft,” he says. “It’s a sad comment that Warner Bros, could find me but the CIA couldn’t.”

Unraveling the mysteries surrounding the collection is why Danny and I are at Langley, but first, we have to get inside. Clearance heretofore has been tense, the culmination of dozens of phone calls and e-mails and several security checks over more than a month. After sending a blind e-mail through the CIA website, I received a response from a woman named Molly Hale saying she’d forward my request to the appropriate party. The website notes that Hale has worked at the agency since 2002, is the “public voice of the CIA” and “reads more than 13,000 e-mails, answers 3,000 phone calls, reads 900 faxes and sends out several hundred letters” in a given month. A simple Google search for “Molly Hale,” however, raises questions about her existence.

Lo and behold, I received a call back from CIA spokesperson Glenn Miller. I’d sensed from media reports that it would be impossible to view the artwork in person, but Miller agreed to let

Danny and me in. And so we’re finally here, albeit drawing way too much attention to ourselves.

Walking through the front doors of an agency responsible for the assassination of Osama bin Laden and for “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding in “black sites” is unnerving. We undergo a screening process that’s like the Transportation Security Administration on steroids. Recording devices are off limits, and Danny has to take his camera apart so it can be inspected. Each photo he takes has to be approved to ensure he hasn’t accidentally captured undercover agents in the hallways. He’s also forbidden to photograph signage on walls or doors. We empty our pockets, feed everything through an X-ray machine and walk through a metal detector. On the other side, we meet the seven-person escort team, including curatorial, security and communications staffers, that will accompany us on our three-hour tour.

Gregory Manougian, a bow-tie-clad architect who is chairman of the CIA’s fine arts commission, is our guide. The collection is spread across four floors of hospital-like corridors. CNN, the San Francisco Chronicle and Smithsonian magazine have reported that as many as 29 works may be on display in the 2.5 million-square-foot headquarters, but Manougian says the current

WALKING THROUGH THE FRONT DOORS OF AN AGENCY RESPONSIELE FOR THE ASSASSINATION OF OSAMA

RIN LADEN IS UNNERVING.

collection contains only 11, all identified with the Washington Color School, a postwar abstractart movement that included painters Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring. Works by the latter three hang in the agency today.

The collection’s common denominator is Melzac, a high-profile collector, Republican businessman, Arabian-horse breeder and former chief executive of Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1968, he lent the agency eight paintings by artists associated with the Washington Color School. He would go on to lend it a total of 29 works. William Casey, then director of central intelligence, awarded Melzac the agency’s seal medallion in 1982 for “his generous support to the CIA.”

There was, however, a tale of two Melzacs—a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde. Although renowned critic and collector Clement Greenberg referred to him as “the only other collector I know with guts,” Melzac was also known for his temper and,

according to The Washington Post, his tendency to be “a blunt and tough-minded cost-cutter.” The most notorious episode of Melzac’s Corcoran tenure was his fistfight with then gallery director Gene Baro at a 1972 black-tie opening for a Sam Francis exhibit. The fight was so gory, Baro told the Post, he’d bled “like a stuck pig.” A photograph of Baro with blood streaming from his eye appears on the website of Roy Slade, who became Corcoran director following Melzac’s and Baro’s resignations. According to Slade, who describes the night on his website, Melzac was disgruntled because guests weren’t paying enough attention to his wife, “busty and blonde, in a glittering silver dress.” The men also disagreed over who deserved to appear in a photo with Corcoran artist Sally Drummond; an argument ensued, a drink was thrown, and then it was fisticuffs.

In Melzac’s obituary, the Post called him “one of the earliest and boldest collectors” of the Washington Color School, praising him for having “the confidence to buy where others had

not bought before.” This brings us back to Langley.

In the late 1980s, the agency bought 11 of the paintings Melzac had lent it, for $286,000 —“federally approved dollars,” says Manougian. (Taking inflation into account, $286,000 in 1988 would equal about $584,000 today.) Now the works are valued at more than $1.3 million collectively—a good investment, as Manougian jokes. In November 2015, the National Press Club sold at auction a Norman Rockwell painting it owned for $11.6 million; I ask if the CIA would ever sell the 11 Melzac paintings. Manougian responds with the understatement of the day: “Our budget is a little bit larger than the Press Club’s.” If Edward Snowden’s leaked documents are correct, $1.3 million isn’t even a drop in the agency’s bucket; its budget in 2013 was a reported $14.7 billion.

As we view the first four works—two untitled Howard Mehring paintings from the late 1950s, Thomas Downing’s Planks (1967) and Newmann’s Arrows (1968)—Danny and I spot two men tailing us from 20 yards away. One, a middle-aged guy, carries a laptop, while the other, a much taller bearded man who appears to be in his early 30s, holds a tablet with antennae. Both wear black pants and coats, but they’re so conspicuous they might as well be wearing bells and whistles. Danny gets a glimpse of the tablet, which appears to be running a sniffer program to ensure we aren’t emitting radio signals. A journalist and techie who teaches cybersecurity at the National Press Club to help reporters protect their data, Danny knows about sniffer programs. Soon the man sees Danny sniffing his apparent sniffer program and turns the screen away. A game ensues in which our tails pretend not to be there and Danny pretends not to see them.

We walk along a hallway en route to the next three works, all untitled, by Downing (circa

1959), Norman Bluhm (1966) and Mehring (circa

1960). An obvious question arises: Why does the CIA have artwork of this caliber? Why not fill the walls with mass-produced prints of skylines and fruit bowls, as in most government buildings?

Manougian reiterates something the agency has expressed publicly: The paintings have utility in training analysts to think critically and remove biases. According to some experts, art appreciation can expose viewers to multiple perspectives and different ways of seeing the world. The 1999 book Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, published by the CIA’s Center for the

THE AUDIENCE AT LANGLEY IS FAR FROM WHAT THE ARTISTS WOULD HAVE WANTED

Study of Intelligence, famously uses a drawing that depicts an old woman from one perspective and a young woman from another—like the famous Rubin vase, which doubles as a vase and two faces—to show “the principle that mindsets are quick to form but resistant to change.” Eike Schmidt, director of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and previously a curator at Washington’s National Gallery of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in L.A., backs up this theory. “It’s well-known in the corporate world to use artwork in leadership and similar training,” he says. “Nowadays this is done mostly with digital images or reproductions, but it’s credible that in the 1980s or early 1990s this was a primary reason to purchase the collection.” This baffles Newmann, the only living artist in the GIA collection. “I have to scratch my head on that,” he says. “I don’t understand their motivation: why they want these things or why they ever thought they wanted them.”

Simon, the multidisciplinary artist who photographed some of the works in 2007, writes on her website, “It is speculated that some of the GIA’s involvement in the arts was designed to counter Soviet Communism by helping to popularize what it considered pro-American thought and aesthetic sensibilities.” Since its founding in 1947, the GIA “has participated in both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts throughout the world,” she adds.

Public-information warrior Barron first learned about the works after seeing one of Simon’s images. In 2009, as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, Barron began to request information. She left the project for a few years, her letters unanswered, before submitting her first FOIA requests around 2013. The goal was to get as much information about the works as possible so she could recreate them for an ongoing project inspired by the government’s lack of transparency. “It bothered me that I never received a response,” she says. “That information should be available. As a citizen, I should have access to that.”

The problem arose from complications of writing FOIA requests and asking for information about artwork, which lies in a gray area. “It’s like asking for a picture of a plant,” Barron says. Her research convinced her that the initial loan and subsequent sale of the collection mainly benefited Melzac, the original owner. “Myunderstanding of why he donated it is he was getting big tax write-offs. He was getting the work from the artists really cheap, and then he was donating it to institutions,” she says. “He sort of determined the market value.” Her last request, to which she’s still awaiting an official reply, was over a year ago. I bring up her requests with Manougian, who calls Barron’s charges “almost a conspiracy

theory.” The misconception, he says, stems from “3,000 miles contributing to this misunderstanding.” (“I’m not really sure how much more clear I can be,” Barron says in response.)

The GIA may be using the works for purposes other than they were intended, but in this case the art is important just as art. One of the painters, Gene Davis, is currently the subject of a one-person show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which refers to him as “one of Washington, D.G.’s outstanding visual artists.” At Langley, conservators have examined all 11 paintings within the past five years, but they’re hardly being held in museum conditions. Many have accumulated significant dust on their frames, and several have visible surface damage.

The biggest revelation of our tour may be that the Melzac collection isn’t as invisible as reported. Although the paintings aren’t accessible to the general public, 250,000 people see them every year, based on rough agency estimates of employees, tours, expos and attendance at family days—when relatives of GIA staffers visit. “The floors are as worn out as they are because of all the visitors,” Manougian says. By the time this story went to press, the GIA had granted a tour to a writer from Hyperallergic, the website that originally reported the collection as off-limits.

Regardless of how one looks at it—whether the works are “too private,” as the media tell it, or very public, as the GIA claims—the audience at Langley is far from what the artists presumably would have wanted. “All these people, myself included, were left of center,” says Newmann. “I painted my painting around 1968. It was a turbulent time. There were the Martin

Luther King Jr. riots, the Kennedy assassination. The Vietnam War was raging, and I was of draft age.” He remembers attending peace marches with Downing. Having counted Melzac as a friend who once lent him money to buy a car, Newmann is shocked to learn he sold his piece to the government. Perhaps that’s why it appears Melzac never told any of them. The agency has invited Newmann to see his work in Langley, but he hasn’t accepted.

As Danny and I make our way up the escalators to increasingly restricted areas, we see the final pieces: Downing’s Dapple (circa 1959) and Center Grid (circa i960), Alma Thomas’s Mars Reflection (1972), Gene Davis’s Black Rhythm (1964). When Danny sees the Davis painting, one of the few works the GIA uses to represent the collection online, he notes how its vertical stripes—reds, yellows, blues, pinks, greens, blacks and grays— merge with the lines of the escalator steps. Sometimes the art jibes with its surroundings.

As we pile into the elevator back to the first floor, Manougian turns to one of our handlers. “Did we lose our tail?” he asks. He’s told the two men have taken a separate elevator. Back on the ground floor, we return to the entrance, which displays the gravitas one would expect of a government agency, down to the large circular seal on the floor. A bald eagle’s head rests atop a twisted wreath on a shield bearing a 16-point compass. On our way out, security personnel inspect the 234 photographs Danny has snapped to ensure each is kosher. As he scrolls through the images on his camera, he’s told to delete 13 of them. It wouldn’t be a visit to the GIA without at least some redaction, after all. ¦