![]() ![]() Saunders also highlighted links between the CIA and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which was instrumental in promoting Abstract Expressionism. “In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years,” she wrote. In 1999, the British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders published a book about the CIA and the “cultural Cold War” in which she asserted: “Abstract Expressionism was being deployed as a Cold War weapon.” A synthesis of her argument is available online, in an article that she wrote for the Independent newspaper in 1995. Could it be that the CIA also had a hand in promoting Abstract Expressionism on the world stage? Was Pollock, wittingly or not, a propagandist for the US government?Ī number of essays, articles and books followed Kozloff’s piece, all arguing that the CIA had somehow manipulated Abstract Expressionism. As a result, people started to become suspicious. A few years before they were published, in 1967, the New York Times had revealed that the liberal anti-Communist magazine Encounter had been indirectly funded by the CIA. They were the opposite of the Cold Warriors.”ĭespite this, however, Kozloff’s ideas took hold. So here you had this nexus of non-conformist artists, who were completely alienated from American culture. Barnett Newman was a declared anarchist – he wrote an introduction to Kropotkin’s book on anarchism. According to David Anfam, co-curator of the Royal Academy exhibition, “Rothko said he was an anarchist. ![]() Pollock once said that everyone at his high school in Los Angeles thought he was a “rotten rebel from Russia”. After all, most of the Abstract Expressionists were volatile outsiders. In many ways, the idea seemed preposterous. In 1957, a year after Pollock’s death in a car crash, the Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for his Autumn Rhythm – an unprecedented sum of money for a painting by a contemporary artist at the time. By the ‘50s, it was generally accepted that the most exciting advances in painting and sculpture were taking place in New York rather than Paris. Although the artists associated with it took a long time to find their signature styles, once the movement had crystallised, by the late ‘40s, it rapidly achieved first notoriety and then respect. One of the most remarkable things about Abstract Expressionism was the speed with which it rose to international prominence. It is currently the subject of a major exhibition, featuring 164 artworks by 30 artists (including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko), at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Together, they formed a movement that became known, in time, as Abstract Expressionism. A strange but irresistible energy started to crackle across the city, as artists who had struggled for years in poverty and obscurity suddenly found self-confidence and success. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, something exciting happened in the art world in New York.
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