Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

by Harald Jähner

which Pollock was the most striking example—American art had liberated itself from the great shadow of Paris and become a leader in the international art scene. With the outsized amount of attention that artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman attracted in Europe, America could easily fight back against its clichéd image as a nation without culture. The United States was now actively assuming a pioneering role. This led to a paradoxical situation: “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot,” President Truman had said in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947, confident of the thunderous applause this statement would receive from the majority of Americans. That didn’t prevent his Cold War strategists from seeing that very same art as the best way of putting America effectively on the world stage. Certain that Congress would never authorise the funds required to export that art, the CIA turned abstract expressionism into a clandestine operation. So it was that artists who were mocked in the US Congress as heretical daubers were deployed by American foreign policy experts for aesthetic propaganda. Rothko, Pollock and Motherwell might have seen themselves as homeless radicals and lonely individualists at home, but abroad a concerted exhibition effort turned them into ideal representatives of America. The task was delightfully paradoxical