A weapon and a wreck

In the 1950s Abstract Expressionism became a tool of American foreign policy, and most of the painters never knew. This is a real story with a documented record, and it is easy to tell badly in either direction, so here it is carefully. During the early Cold War the United States was competing with the Soviet Union in culture as well as weapons, and the Soviets pointed to their official art, socialist realism (heroic, legible, propagandistic paintings of happy workers and strong leaders), as proof of a healthy society. American officials wanted a counter-image, and Abstract Expressionism made a perfect one: free, individual, expressive, abstract, the visual opposite of state-dictated realism.

The promotion was covert. Working largely through a front organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a web of foundations, the CIA secretly funded exhibitions and magazines that showcased this American painting abroad, roughly from 1950 into the late 1960s; the historian Frances Stonor Saunders documented the operation in The Cultural Cold War (1999). Now the careful part, both ways. The CIA did not create Abstract Expressionism; the painters had invented it on their own years earlier, and most of them never learned their work had been used this way, and they were not agents of anything. The accurate statement is narrow and strange enough on its own: a secret arm of the American state quietly used these paintings, made by mostly left-leaning artists who would have been horrified, as a Cold War advertisement for American freedom. Not a fake movement, not a conspiracy that painted the pictures. State patronage that hijacked art the painters thought was nobody’s business but their own.

The man at the center of the myth did not get to enjoy it for long. Jackson Pollock was a lifelong alcoholic, and his drinking got worse as his fame grew and his painting stalled. On the night of 11 August 1956, drunk, he drove his car off a road near his home in Springs and crashed into the trees. He was killed, and so was a young woman riding with him, Edith Metzger; a second passenger, Ruth Kligman, survived. Pollock was forty-four. There is nothing romantic in it, and the legend tends to launder the death into tragic poetry. A man whose drinking had worsened as his fame grew drank himself into a state where he killed himself and an innocent passenger with a car.

What the movement left behind is enormous, and it outlasted every one of these quarrels. Abstract Expressionism moved the center of the art world to New York and kept it there for a generation, and it set the terms everything afterward had to answer: the giant scale, the abstraction, the heroic gesture, and the whole modern machinery of dealers, critics and a market that turns living artists into stars. Its direct heir was Color Field painting, which ran straight out of Frankenthaler’s soak-stain through Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland and gave you the pure glowing field with the gesture drained out.

The two movements that came next had a simpler choice: match this art’s huge, earnest, self-serious scale, or mock it. Pop Art chose mockery, trading the heroic inward self for the cool surfaces of advertising, comics and the supermarket. Minimalism kept the scale and dumped the soul, holding onto the big empty field but stripping out the drama and the personality for something impersonal, industrial and literal. Either way, the next generation needed something enormous to push against, and Abstract Expressionism was it.