The not-so-hidden agenda of cultural exchange

In this country, one of the most chewed-over examples of energetic US government involvement in the arts was the money put into an exhibition of abstract expressionists at the Whitechapel gallery. The show did not only introduce our own artists to a movement that went on to revolutionise painting around the world - the Triumph of American Painting as it is generally known - it was also part of a US-funded PSYOP, broadcasting to the world that America was the home of freedom, the kind of freedom discernible in the slashes and drips of Jackson Pollock.