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Photo by: Robert Motherwell | A Cold War weapon?

It sounds like a Ben Affleck script, as improbable as secret agents making a faux sci-fi flick in Iran. It's even weirder, if one considers how influential modern painters of abstract expressionism (de Kooning, Motherwell, Pollock) have been on visual culture. But it's true. The CIA, through its IOD, secretly promoted America's avant-garde art abroad as a way to counter perceptions of Americans as philistines in global intellectual circles. The CIA's secret patronage of the lefty avant-garde was kept quiet for decades, but it seems the architects of the plan (which, it must be said, helped make giant art stars of more than a few midcentury painters) have confirmed that it took place. 

Read the complete story at The Guardian.