During the early years of Cold Warafter the end of the Second World War, the spread of communism became a matter of great concern to the United States and the CIA – la Central Intelligence Agency – he used the expressionist movement as a tool propaganda to counter the spread of Soviet ideology among the American population.
In the climate of suspicion that culminated in the so-called “McCarthyism”a veritable witch hunt led by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy between the late 1940s and late 1950s, anyone suspected of “sympathizing with the Communists” or even just leaning a little too far to the left, was persecuted: among them there were also some young artists belonging to the nascent current ofAbstract expressionismone of the main artistic currents of the first decade after the Second World War and the first “typically American” artistic phenomenon to influence the rest of the world.
Abstract Expressionism included two large groups: the so-called “action painter“who “attacked” their canvases with brushstrokes; hey “color field painter“which filled the canvases with large areas of few colors if not just one. Among the first there are artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning and between the seconds Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. The common goal of all, as the name suggests, is to create art that, despite being abstract, was also expressive and had an emotional effect. Their abstract art was initially interpreted as one “Soviet instrument”and it was feared that it could tarnish the image of the American people. Yet, for a large sector of the American intellectual elite, Abstract Expressionism represented the triumph of one “free culture” on totalitarianism, because it is based on the absolute freedom of the artist.
Despite the initial criticism, noting the growing consensus encountered by the movement, the CIA he realized he could exploit it as propaganda weapon against the Soviet Union. He thus applied an ad hoc strategy: it seems that using intermediary bodieslike the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a transnational organization born with the aim of supporting democratic values as a heritage of Western culture, with an anti-Soviet function), even went so far as to subsidize the work of artists and favored the exhibition and acquisition of their works of art by important museums. The MoMA of New York, the Museum of Modern Art presided over by Nelson Rockefeller, not only bought a large number of paintings, but also organized exhibitions that traveled all over the world, such as Twelve Modern American Painters and Sculptors And The New American Painting (in which it is displayed Convergence by Pollock), which were hosted by major European cities in the 1950s.
This effort paid off New York the new center of world art: it is not for nothing that the one of the abstract expressionists is also called “New York school”. The first reasons for suspicion of government interference arose in those same years, due to the unlikely speed with which the artistic movement achieved international fame. Although associated artists often took a long time to find their own stylistic peculiarities, once the movement found its footing in the late 1940s, it quickly achieved first notoriety, and then actual fame, which came to fruition. in a completely new economic evaluation. In 1957, a year after Pollock’s death, the Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for his Autumn Rhythm: This is an unprecedented sum of money for a painting by a contemporary artist at the time.
