The State Department plainly needed to find other ways to skin this diplomatic cat. Michael Krenn’s “Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit” (North Carolina; $39.95) is a history of government efforts to send American art abroad after 1946 without throwing raw meat to the demagogues. The problem with “Advancing American Art” was that it was entirely a government program: the State Department actually owned the work that it was exhibiting. The solution was to enlist the participation of institutions like museums, foundations, and arts groups, and to give the government’s role a much lower profile. By these means, Krenn says, between 1945 and 1970 the State Department, the United States Infor-mation Agency, and the Smithsonian Institution managed to send hundreds of exhibitions of American art abroad, often to positive reviews and enthusiastic audiences.

As Krenn shows, it was not a straight road. It swerved as Cold War anxieties swerved, and the fortunes of the exhibitions had little to do with their content. You would not imagine that a show named “Sport in Art,” sponsored in part by Sports Illustrated, would arouse the anti-Communists, but it did. When the exhibition previewed, in Dallas, in 1956, it was attacked by an outfit called the Dallas County Patriotic Council, whose chairman expressed distress that “our tax money is going into the pockets of artists devoted to the destruction of our way of life.” He meant that the artists were Communists, and though the show went on in Dallas, an international tour was cancelled by the U.S.I.A., nominally because of “budgetary considerations.” A major exhibition, “American Painting, 1900-1950,” was cancelled soon afterward for the same reason: charges that some of the artists were Communists or fellow-travellers.

The official line, of course, was that art in the United States was beyond politics. Eisenhower had more patience than Truman did with modernism; he thought of cultural diplomacy as a branch of psychological warfare, and his Administration was the first to provide systematic funding for international arts exhibitions. “As long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be healthy controversy and progress in art,” Eisenhower said in 1954, for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art. “How different it is in tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and tools of the state; when artists become the chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed.” His Administration helped sponsor tours of American art, opera (“Porgy and Bess,” meant to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism), musical theatre, dance, and jazz.

Still, the promotion abroad of American art and letters after 1946 required a delicate form of intrigue between private institutions and government agencies. The more radical or modernist the art and letters, the more covert the government’s participation needed to be. The State Department and the U.S.I.A. could send “Oklahoma!” around the world (and did), but they could not very comfortably arrange emergency funding to keep Partisan Review afloat, as the C.I.A. seems to have done in 1953, or promote a style of avant-garde painting offensive to congressional tastes. The revelation about Encounter was part of a general exposure of the considerable extent to which the C.I.A., by means of dummy foundations and front organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, headquartered in Berlin, had subsidized and promoted activities that it calculated to be anti-Soviet. The fall-out was unpleasant. Many of the writers and editors associated with Encounter claimed that they had had no idea about the man behind the curtain; these people looked like dupes. Others claimed that “everyone knew”; these looked like the people Julien Benda warned about in “The Treason of the Intellectuals.” A shadow of suspicion fell over everything that might have elicited the interest and assistance of the C.I.A., and one of those things was Abstract Expressionism.

What would have been the geopolitical uses of abstraction? The theory, as it was proposed in articles published in Artforum and other journals in the nineteen-seventies, and then elaborated in Serge Guilbaut’s “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art” (1983) and Frances Stonor Saunders’s “The Cultural Cold War” (1999), is that abstract painting was an ideal propaganda tool. It was avant-garde, the product of an advanced civilization. In contrast to Soviet painting, it was neither representational nor didactic. It could be understood as pure painting—art absorbed by its own possibilities, experiments in color and form. Or it could be understood as pure expression—a “school” in which every artist had a unique signature. A Pollock looked nothing like a Rothko, which looked nothing like a Gorky or a Kline. Either way, Abstract Expressionism stood for autonomy: the autonomy of art, freed from its obligation to represent the world, or the freedom of the individual—just the principles that the United States was defending in the worldwide struggle. Art critics therefore developed apolitical modes of appreciation and evaluation, emphasizing the formal rigor or the existentialist drama of the paintings; and the Museum of Modern Art favored Abstract Expressionists in its purchases and international exhibitions, at the expense of art whose politics might have been problematic—the kind of naturalist art, for example, that was featured in the “Advancing American Art” exhibition. But the C.I.A. lurked in the shadows. It turned out that a Pollock had a politics.

This was a revisionist interpretation of art history, and it had two prongs. The first was the suggestion of actual collusion between MOMA and the C.I.A. The evidence for this has always been largely circumstantial. The man who directed cultural activities at the C.I.A. in the early years of the Cold War, Thomas Braden, had previously been the executive secretary of MOMA. According to Saunders, a number of MOMA trustees were also on the board of the Farfield Foundation, a C.I.A. front. The president of the museum in the nineteen-forties and fifties was Nelson Rockefeller, whose family had supported MOMA from the beginning, and who had close ties to the intelligence community and an unabashed commitment to the patriotic uses of art. (It was Nelson who had demanded the removal of Diego Rivera’s murals from the walls of Rockefeller Center, because they depicted Lenin.) During the war, Rockefeller had been the Roosevelt Administration’s coördinator of inter-American affairs; the head of the art section in that office, René d’Harnoncourt, joined MOMA in 1944 and became its director.

What this suggests, though, is simply that the leaders of MOMA, like the leaders of most mainstream institutions in the United States after the war, were anti-Communists. As Saunders acknowledges, there were no explicit arrangements between the government and the museum, and the reason was that there didn’t need to be. Everybody was on the same page. Rockefeller and Alfred Barr, the founding director of MOMA, who, after the war, served as chairman of the painting and sculpture collections, did not have to be encouraged to use American art to promote the nation’s image abroad. They never pretended that they were up to anything else. Barr was a lover of European modernism, but he was on a mission to persuade Americans that theirs was a modern culture—a mission that he pursued by mounting exhibitions on modern architecture and design, and starting the museum’s department of film, headed by the formidable Iris Barry and dedicated to the proposition that Hollywood movies were part of the modern movement in the arts.

The other prong of the revisionist thesis was the attack on the critical doctrine, dominant in the nineteen-fifties and into the nineteen-sixties, that the conditions of a painting’s production and reception are irrelevant to its significance as art. On this point, the revisionists were right. Everything was shaped by Cold War imperatives after 1945, because everything is always shaped by circumstance. The “apolitical” interpretation of abstract painting derived, quite self-consciously, from a politics. Both Greenberg, the critic most responsible for the view that Abstract Expressionism was pure painting, and Harold Rosenberg, the critic most responsible for the view that it was pure expression, were left-wing anti-Communists who had been associated with the antiStalinist Partisan Review in the nineteen-forties, and whose theories of art were formed in reaction to Soviet aesthetic dogma, according to which abstraction was individualist self-indulgence. Greenberg and Rosenberg were both outspoken champions of the Americanness of Abstract Expressionism. Rosenberg called it “American action painting.”