structural:reformatting
Abstract expressionism and the Cold War

Since the mid-1970s it has been argued that the style attracted the attention, in the early 1950s, of the CIA, who saw it as representative of the US as a haven of free thought and free markets, as well as a challenge to both the socialist realist styles prevalent in communist nations and the dominance of the European art markets. The book by Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War—The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, (published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War) details how the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Notably Robert Motherwell's series Elegy to the Spanish Republic addressed some of those political issues. Tom Braden, founding chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division (IOD) and ex-executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art said in an interview, "I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."

Against this revisionist tradition, an essay by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, called Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and the Cold War, asserts that much of that information concerning what was happening on the American art scene during the 1940s and 50s, as well as the revisionists' interpretation of it, is false or decontextualized. Other books on the subject include Art in the Cold War, by Christine Lindey, which also describes the art of the Soviet Union at the same time, and Pollock and After, edited by Francis Frascina, which reprinted the Kimmelman article.