Jackson Pollock and other modern artists were secretly subsidized and promoted by the CIA as an antidote to the iconography of Soviet Realism and as a counter-punch to the body of post-war art, which was radicalizing both artists and viewers.

In the 1930s, Pollock and other artists were involved in a variety of government and later, Communist activities. Artists who cut their teeth painting WPA murals for Roosevelt gravitated left-ward, Pollock himself worked with famed radical muralist David Alfaro Siquieros. As his work left representation of any form behind (one critic called a painting a "Melted Picasso"), the US State Department saw the perfect weapon. Since there was no political content, no theme to the work, in fact, there was often nothing at all but the most self-obsessed swirls in Pollock's huge canvases, his art was easily commandeered and made a weapon. Stalin could hug as many children and lead as many peasants to the wheat fields in an evil Norman Rockwell universe as he liked, Pollock's empty confusion spoke to the people of a shattered Europe, the wizards of America's corporate towers and their brainwashed suburban peasants.

Behind the mess and splashes of paint, there was something scary and profound enough to be real.

The State Department's anti-Communist allies, the Rockefellers, who owned the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), got behind Pollock. MoMA trustee John Jay Whitney had a position on Psychological Strategy Board after World War II and also strongly supported Pollock and other modernists. The rarified tastes of the ruling elite were secondary though, the Communists regularly denounced modern art, so the United States supported it as a reflex. Pollock himself hinted that his art was a reflection of his times, times that lived almost completely in the shadow of the Cold War. He said "modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in . . .the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique."

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (a CIA front) sponsored exhibits at MoMA and other museums, supported over a dozen journals and magazines and managed to use its enormous funds to lure the radical artists of the 1940s away from the political left and towards . . . what?

The blasted landscapes of a post-apocalyptic city? The sizzling synapses of a drunken Beat hero? Whatever it was, it sure was big, and expensive too. Perfect for the era of conspicuous consumption as a patriotic duty.

Other modern artists like Mark Rothko renounced the reddish tones in their palette and became fully committed and public anti-Communists, but Pollock's final days were more ambiguous, or at least more drunken.

He died behind the wheel of an Oldsmobile, a classic American vehicle, before he signed his soul away to the CIA. Even the US State Department couldn't protect Pollock from his own personal demons.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.