FBI Files

by Rachel Frankford

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, painter Arnold Mesches got the FBI to give him a big ol' present: 800 pages of files all about him, compiled beween 1945 and 1972. Friends, students, models and even lovers were getting paid every week to send in reports. The FBI — perhaps suspicious of the painter's works inspired by McCarthyism and the Rosenberg executions — dutifully documented Mesches' kids' birthdays and commented on his paint-stained pants. Mesches turned his shock and rage into art, incorporating the files themselves into his dark expressionist paintings. The resulting body of work became a traveling exhibition that opened at North Broad Street synagogue Rodeph Shalom's Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art last week.

"I was just one of hundreds of thousands of people," says Mesches, now in his 80s. "They checked everything I did. Every time I sneezed someone reported it. It was a total waste of time, as far as I can see." Philly is the exhibition's ninth and possibly final stop in its three-year run. It's already visited L.A., New York and Chicago, and gotten press all over the world. "There's a tremendous amount of interest because of the timing," says Mesches. Not that he's necessarily thrilled; "I walk around with a pin on my lapel saying 'Impeach Bush.' I lived through McCarthyism, I lived through the Second World War, I lived through the Depression, and this is the worst it's ever been, and the most dangerous."