The Painting and the Spook: Abstract Expressionism's Secret Cold War
There is something disorienting about standing before a Rothko — one of those vast, trembling rectangles of color that seem less like paint on canvas than a weather system passing through the room. The disorientation is partly optical, but it is also philosophical. The work invites you to feel something wordless, something prior to language. This, you are told, is freedom itself made visible: the unmediated outpouring of an individual human consciousness, unconstrained by tradition, ideology, or any external agenda whatsoever. The pitch has been made so many times, by so many museum plaques and art history textbooks, that it has calcified into received wisdom. The trouble is, it is not the whole story.
The history of Abstract Expressionism — the movement that repositioned New York above Paris as the world's art capital in the late 1940s and 1950s — is genuinely extraordinary. But it is considerably more complicated, and considerably more instructive, than the standard account of tortured geniuses and spontaneous self-expression would suggest. Buried beneath the dripped paint and the color fields is a stranger story: one involving intelligence agencies, geopolitical calculation, and the remarkable paradox of a government covertly funding work by artists it simultaneously considered subversive. To trace this genealogy is to discover that even the most sincere artistic radicalism can, without anyone quite intending it, be pressed into the service of power.
The movement was genuine in its origins. That much should be said plainly, before the complications set in. What assembled in New York in the 1940s — driven in significant measure by the diaspora of European artists fleeing fascism — was a real and remarkable concentration of creative energy. The Surrealists had arrived first: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst. Their influence on the emerging American painters was profound, particularly the Surrealist doctrine of automatism — the practice of allowing the unconscious mind to guide the hand without the intervention of rational control. For a generation of American artists who had come of age during the Depression and were now metabolizing the psychic wreckage of a global war, automatism was not merely a technique. It was a philosophy of survival.
The contingent that Life magazine immortalized in 1951 as "The Irascibles" — a name derived from the open letter they sent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art protesting its indifference to avant-garde work — included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Lee Krasner, among roughly a dozen others. They argued with high intensity, drank with dangerous dedication, and produced work of arresting originality. Their studios in lower Manhattan and the East End of Long Island became laboratories for a new visual language — one centered not on the depicted object but on the act of depiction itself, on the physicality of paint, the trace of the body, the record of a moment of consciousness engaging with a material surface.
Jackson Pollock's drip paintings — among them Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), executed with the canvas laid flat on the floor while Pollock circled it with sticks and hardened brushes loaded with commercial enamel — were simultaneously performance and artifact. The art critic Harold Rosenberg, whose 1952 essay in ARTnews remains the most penetrating contemporaneous account of the method, defined the stakes of what he called "action painting" in terms that reframed the act of making art entirely:
"At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or 'express' an object, drawn or imagined." — Harold Rosenberg — The American Action Painters, ARTnews, December 1952
Pollock himself, more oblique about method but no less insistent on the primacy of intuition, described the experience of working in terms that made process indistinguishable from revelation. "The painting has a life of its own," he told interviewer William Wright in 1950. "I try to let it come through." This sounds, removed from context, like mystical vagueness. In context, it was a considered epistemological claim: that the act of painting could access something genuine in human experience that deliberate composition could not.
Mark Rothko occupied a different register of abstraction. Where Pollock's canvases crackled with kinetic energy, Rothko's invited a kind of deceleration — an optical slowing-down that museum visitors either find moving or find maddening, with remarkably little middle ground between those responses. His signature large-format paintings, floating rectangular forms in adjacent, slightly mismatched hues, generated an effect that no photograph adequately reproduces: the edges of the forms appear to breathe, to pulse with a slow luminosity. Rothko was emphatic that this effect was emotional, not formal, in its origins:
"I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions." — Mark Rothko — Interview with Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 1957
Lee Krasner, whose contributions were for decades professionally diminished by an art-critical establishment that found it convenient to process her primarily as Pollock's wife, worked with comparable ambition and considerably less institutional support. Her The Eye is the First Circle (1960) — expansive, thickly worked, structured from within rather than from without — demonstrates what distinguished her from her contemporaries: an orchestration of energy and compositional intelligence that felt simultaneously improvised and inevitable. The critical neglect of Krasner, and of other women in the movement, constitutes one of its least flattering chapters, a systematic undercounting that subsequent scholarship has worked, with partial success, to reverse.
Here is where the narrative turns on itself.
By the late 1940s, the United States was engaged in a cultural competition with the Soviet Union as consequential, in its way, as the military standoff. Soviet socialist realism — its heroic workers, its legible ideological content, its state-endorsed insistence on narrative clarity — was not merely an aesthetic program. It was propaganda in the most unambiguous sense, and it was effective propaganda, particularly in Western Europe, where communist parties retained substantial intellectual prestige in the aftermath of the anti-fascist resistance. Against this backdrop, the American cultural establishment faced an awkward question: what could the United States put forward as evidence of its own civilizational achievement? What did freedom look like, translated to a canvas?
The answer, it turned out, was Abstract Expressionism. And the mechanism by which that answer was selected was far less organic than the art itself. Beginning in the early 1950s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom — a nominally independent organization that was, in fact, a covert operation of the Central Intelligence Agency — quietly orchestrated an international campaign to promote American modern art as a living demonstration of the West's commitment to individual liberty. Exhibitions toured through Europe and Latin America. Publications celebrated the New York School with conspicuous enthusiasm. Museum directors and cultural attachés found their programs supplemented by resources whose provenance was never explained. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose board included figures with direct CIA connections, served as a primary vehicle for these traveling exhibitions.
The clearest account of this machinery came not from an investigative reporter but from the CIA officer who ran it. In a 1967 article for The Saturday Evening Post — written after other journalists had begun unraveling the program — Thomas Braden, who had overseen the Agency's covert cultural operations, offered a remarkably candid defense of the strategy:
"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers." — Thomas W. Braden — I'm Glad the CIA Is Immoral, The Saturday Evening Post, 1967
The full scope of these operations was documented in forensic detail by the journalist Frances Stonor Saunders in her 1999 book The Cultural Cold War. What Saunders established — drawing on declassified documents and interviews with surviving participants — was that the CIA's program was not peripheral to the movement's international reception. It was, in significant measure, the architecture of that reception.
The irony that crystallizes when you examine the specific biographies is almost too neat for fiction, which is one reason it tends to get overlooked in the textbook version of events. The artists being promoted globally as symbols of American freedom were, in a striking number of cases, committed leftists. Pollock had been involved with a communist-affiliated artists' organization during the 1930s. Rothko and Barnett Newman were steeped in anarchist and socialist intellectual traditions. Willem de Kooning, arrived from the Netherlands with a constitutionally European skepticism of bourgeois institutions. These were not natural allies of the national security state; several of them were, at various points, precisely the sort of individuals J. Edgar Hoover's FBI maintained files on with professional attentiveness.
And yet the CIA's cultural program was not, as Braden's account makes plain, ideologically confused about any of this. The logic, strange as it appears across the distance of decades, was internally coherent: the artists' radicalism, their refusal to produce legible nationalist content, their insistence on individual expression unconstrained by didacticism — this was precisely what distinguished American art from Soviet art. The work's apparent uselessness to power was, paradoxically, its greatest propaganda value. You could not point at a Pollock and see a message, in the way you could decode the heroic tractor-driver of a Soviet canvas. The absence of message was itself the message. Abstract Expressionism's freedom from ideology was, the Agency calculated, the most persuasive possible argument for a free society.
This is a distinction worth sitting with. The CIA did not fabricate Abstract Expressionism. It found a genuine cultural phenomenon, recognized its geopolitical utility, and quietly engineered its amplification. The art preceded the promotion. But the promotion shaped — decisively, globally — which art the world came to regard as important, which artists achieved the institutional recognition that translated into museum retrospectives and art-history curricula and the particular authority that attaches to work that hangs in major collections. That is not a trivial kind of influence. Cultural power operates precisely through these channels: not in the creation of meaning but in the certification of it.
A certain school of criticism, on learning this history, reaches for deflation as its default instrument. If the movement was instrumentalized by the state, perhaps its claims to radical freedom were always fraudulent. Perhaps the museums have been selling, for seven decades, a government-approved myth wearing the costume of artistic rebellion. This reading has the appeal of coherence and the defect of being too tidy. It satisfies the appetite for a clean unmasking while misreading how cultural power actually operates — not through falsification but through selection, elevation, and institutionalization of what was, to begin with, genuinely made.
The CIA did not produce the paintings. Those paintings continue to generate experiences of genuine depth for people who have never heard of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and never will. A Rothko in a room is still a Rothko in a room. The complexity of the surrounding history enriches rather than diminishes the work — it reveals the remarkable degree to which human beings are capable of making something that exceeds the uses to which others put it. Art, at its most tenacious, refuses the purposes assigned to it.
Contemporary artists have continued to reckon with this tangled inheritance. Julie Mehretu's vast, palimpsest-like canvases — layered with architectural diagrams, erasures, and gestural mark-making that refers simultaneously to cartography and to catastrophe — extend the Abstract Expressionist tradition while engaging explicitly with the political and historical forces that tradition was recruited to obscure. Mark Bradford's mixed-media paintings, which incorporate the material detritus of commercial signage and street culture, examine precisely the social and economic histories the original movement tended to elide. The inheritance is complicated, and the artists who have claimed it most vitally tend to be those who have been most honest about that complication.
There is, finally, a lesson embedded in this history that reaches beyond art. The Abstract Expressionists made work from the inside of their own experience — from authentic encounter with grief, exhilaration, existential uncertainty, and the peculiar intimacy of a person alone in a room with a surface. The intelligence community read that experience as a message legible to a geopolitical audience. Both things were simultaneously true. The painting on the wall and the painting in the world are always two different objects: one is an experience, the other is a fact trailing agents and interests and unintended consequences behind it like a wake.
What the movement ultimately demonstrated — despite itself, or perhaps because of itself — is that genuine expression has a way of surviving conscription. The CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism as an argument for freedom. The artists made it as an act of freedom. That the two could be the same thing and irreconcilably different things at once is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is, if you are willing to look at it steadily, the movement's most enduring and most honest achievement.