Life magazine’s portrait of the Abstract Expressionist artists known as ‘The Irascibles,’ 1951. Front row: Theodore Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, and Mark Rothko; middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne (Nina LeenTime Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Abstract Expressionism: McCarthyism 

The Abstract Expressionist painters were some of the only artists of any medium in America to convey their emotions after World War II due to the amount of censorship during this era. According to a web source, “As a movement the Abstract Expressionists were seen as rebels and sometimes even troublemakers. The extreme censorship of the McCarthy era after World War II was a hot topic amongst artists and because of the sheer abstraction the artists could not be censored because there’s really nothing in the paintings to censor” (The Art History Archive). Unlike movies, music, and other forms of art that were heavily censored during the Cold War, Abstract Expressionism artwork did not deliver a clear enough un-American message to be censored. According to Raymond Williams, " According to Jane de Hart Mathews, “ While opposition to works of art never assumed the proportions in this nation that it did in totalitarian countries, where offending artists often suffered imprisonment as well as loss of official patronage, the impulse to censor was undeniably present in the United States in the Cold War years. The simplest and most direct expression of that impulse involved opposition on political rather than aesthetic grounds. Critics objected to the message communicated through immediately perceptible images conveying the artist’s convictions about past injustices and present wrongs (Mathews, pg. 763). The Abstract Expressionism artwork was accused of being an instrument of Communism but could not be censored because the artist’s intentions were often unknown.  Another example of this is seen in a statement by Eva Cockcroft, in a book by Francis Frascina, “By giving their paintings an individualist emphasis and eliminating recognizable subject matter, the Abstract Expressionists succeeded in creating an important new art movement. They also contributed, whether they knew it or not, to a purely political phenomenon – the supposed divorce between art and politics which so perfectly served America’s needs in the cold war” (Frascina, Cockcraft, pg. 154). The Abstract Expressionism art movement was seen as a weapon of the cold war because artists could publicly express their beliefs in their artwork without being censored.