{"id":308631,"date":"2025-05-14T07:22:35","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T07:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=308631"},"modified":"2025-05-16T06:59:33","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T06:59:33","slug":"how-the-cia-secretly-used-jackson-pollock-other-abstract-expressionists-to-fight-the-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=308631","title":{"rendered":"How the CIA Secretly Used Jackson Pollock & Other Abstract Expressionists to Fight the Cold War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall \u2013 Open Culture Oct 27, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

What\u2019s the difference between the United States of America and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a culture. So goes one of many jokes long in circulation about the supposed American tendency toward low-minded, expedient philistinism. I grant, as an American myself, that such humor surrounds at least a grain of truth. But there was a time when the federal government of the U.S., an organization not often accused of excessive high-mindedness, took an active role in promoting the country\u2019s home-grown avant-garde \u2014 an appropriate term, notes Lucie Levine at JSTOR Daily<\/a>, since it \u201cbegan as a French military term to describe vanguard troops advancing into battle,\u201d and American modern art had become a continuation of politics by other means.<\/p>\n

\u201cUp until World War II, America had never produced large, influential art movements like in Europe,\u201d says the narrator of the Conspiracy of Art video above<\/a>. After the war, \u201csomething unexpected happened: a brood of radical American painters helped make New York City the center of the art world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock: they and other artists \u201ccaptured the world\u2019s attention with large-scale works of pure color and form.\u201d This movement came to be known as abstract expressionism<\/a>, and in the eyes of the newly established Central Intelligence Agency, it came to show promise as propaganda. If shown abroad, it could function as propaganda, highlighting \u201cthe differences between American and Soviet politics\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 and more specifically, \u201cthe appeal of American culture over Soviet Culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWas Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War?\u201d asks the New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Louis Menand<\/a>. While Pollock was indeed promoted abroad with CIA money (usually provided through layers of organizational misdirection), you don\u2019t look at a painting like Lavender Mist<\/em><\/a> and \u201cthink about \u2018artistic free enterprise\u2019 or the CIA, or the cultural politics of Partisan Review<\/em><\/a>. You think about how a painter could have taken all he had experienced across a creative threshold that no one had crossed before, and produced this particular thing.\u201d But its \u201cimportance for a certain strand of Cold War cultural politics is part of the story of how it got to us, a generation or more later, and that history is worth knowing.\u201d It\u2019s also worth asking, should the United States once again find itself face-to-face with a formidable political and cultural adversary, whether it will be prepared to draft a few Pollocks back into service.<\/p>\n

\n