My thoughts on the passing of the great Van Cliburn, who died in 2013…
Van Cliburn, the most beloved classical musician from a state that has produced scores of famous musicians from all genres, died last Wednesday in Ft. Worth at the age of 78. In 1958, Cliburn went to Moscow and shocked the world by winning the first ever International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, which was designed to be a showcase for Soviet musical talent. (The judges actually had to clear it with premier Nikita Khrushchev before they dared announce their decision.) Cliburn was immediately famous. Time magazine called him “the Texan who conquered Russia.”
In 1958 this was the perfect parable about how the arts can transcend political differences, even between the bitter foes. President Eisenhower understood this well, perhaps in part because he was an amateur artist himself. Even though he came into office determined to cut federal spending, he endorsed government involvement with the arts in many ways, particularly in diplomacy. He believed the arts could create connections around the world that diplomacy could not. “If we are going to have peace and understanding in the world,” he said at a 1953 press conference, “we have got to know about each other’s culture.”
Eisenhower knew that the arts themselves were something of an international battleground in the 1950s. For their part, the Soviets never missed a chance to draw attention to their world-famous, state-supported Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, while pointing out that no state support for the arts existed in the United States.
Ike knew that official protestations wouldn’t counter Soviet claims that Americans cared nothing for the arts. The only way to do that was to show they were wrong. American art had to be seen and heard throughout the world. To this end, for example, in 1954 he personally wrote to the head of the American National Theater and to the famous composing duo of Rogers and Hammerstein, encouraging them to attend an American cultural festival that year in Paris. He was willing to let the state department tap into reserve funds for the festival because he believed it could help relations.
Later, he refused to censor American paintings being sent to Moscow for an exhibit, knowing that even if he didn’t personally like, say, abstract expressionism, it was a powerful testament to artistic freedom in the face of how the Soviets banned abstract art.
Some influential people outside of government agreed with Eisenhower. William Parker, president of the American Council of Learned Societies said that sending American art abroad would “increase the prestige of the U.S. throughout the free world” and be “a positive answer to communist propaganda about this nation.” A “democracy which from the outside appears to be machined and spiritless will not win converts or friends.”
As former president George W. Bush said at Cliburn’s funeral last Sunday in Ft. Worth, all those people in Russia who came to his performance—people who’d long been conditioned to think that materialistic Americans cared nothing for the arts and culture—got a very different picture as they marveled at his playing.
What Van Cliburn was able to achieve in Moscow that spring was stunning, and because of the Cold War he did far more than just win a piano competition. Although the relationship between the US and the USSR would remain tense, Cliburn demonstrated that the arts could indeed transcend national boundaries, even between rivals, and he certainly quieted the claims that Americans knew nothing about the arts.
Governments will always disagree and there will always be war. But Cliburn’s passing reminds us that, as naive as it may sometimes sound, art really is an international language.
Van Cliburn and Dwight Eisenhower