Abstract expressionism and the Cold War

Abstract Expressionism was never an ideal label for the movement which grew up in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. It was somehow meant to encompass not only the work of painters who filled their canvases with fields of color and abstract forms, but also those who attacked their canvases with a vigorous gestural expressionism. Yet Abstract Expressionism has become the most accepted term for a group of artists who did hold much in common. All were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes, and most were shaped by the legacy of Surrealism, a movement which they translated into a new style fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and trauma. In their success, the New York painters robbed Paris of its mantle as leader of modern art, and set the stage for America s post-war dominance of the international art world.
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. In the United States,Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky
Since the mid-1970s it has been argued by revisionist historians that the style attracted the attention, in the early 1950s, of the CIA, who saw it as representative of the USA as a haven of free thought and free markets, as well as a challenge to both the socialist realist styles prevalent in communist nations and the dominance of the European art markets The book by Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War—The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, details how the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Notably Robert Motherwell s series Elegy to the Spanish Republic addressed some of those political issues. Tom Braden, founding chief of the CIA s International Organizations Division (IOD) and ex-executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art said in an interview, "I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."
Against this revisionist tradition, an essay by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, called Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and the Cold War, argue that much of this information (as well as the revisionists interpretation of it) concerning what was happening on the American art scene during the 1940s and 50s is flatly false,´-or-at best (contrary to the revisionists avowed historiographic principles) decontextualizedOther books on the subject include Art in the Cold War by Christine Lindey, which also describes the art of the Soviet -union- at the same time-;- and Pollock and After edited by Francis Frascina, which re-print-ed the Kimmelman article.
References

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-abstract-expressionism.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism
http://www.azad-hye.org/uploads/images//p1/arshil-gorky-02.jpg

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