http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGVuJ3q8fuQ           

                                     Pollock became a “weapon of the Cold War”.

                                                                                         —John Cockcroft

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) financed, organized, and assured the success of the American abstract expressionist movement, using artists like Jackson Pollock.   Pollock was an important figure for the CIA because during the peak of the Cold War in the 1950’s, the CIA secretly promoted abstract expressionism in order to discredit the socialist realism of the Soviet Union. The Agency’s purpose  to shift the center of the art world away from Europe to the United States, and to create a national art that would  celebrate  liberty.