How Political Upheaval Shapes the Art We Make: Abstraction, Crisis, and the Canvas

By Simon Kenny | 9 min read

Political upheaval has shaped abstract art from its origins in World War II displacement to the 2024 Venice Biennale. Abstract Expressionism was born from catastrophe, weaponised in the Cold War, suppressed under totalitarian regimes, and used as direct resistance during the AIDS crisis. When the world breaks open, abstraction is where painters go.

There is a question I keep returning to, one without a clean answer. When you stand in front of an abstract painting and something shifts in you, how much of that is the painting and how much is everything the painter carried into the studio? The history of abstract art suggests the two are inseparable. What governments have done to abstract art across a century, funded it, suppressed it, weaponised it, burned it, suggests that some people in power understood this long before others did.

In January 2026 I gave a TEDx talk on creativity, harmony, and the fault line between chaos and order. The practice behind it spans more than 100 exhibitions across 14 countries, with gallery representation through DeMontfort Fine Art and Clarendon Fine Art. That context matters here, as the history of abstract art and political upheaval is not one I came to from a distance. My own practice emerged from periods of real personal chaos, and understanding how the painters I most admire made work in the wreckage of their particular worlds has shaped how I think about what painting can do, and what it is for.

Where did Abstract Expressionism really come from, and what does political catastrophe have to do with it?

Abstract Expressionism was not a stylistic experiment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art frames its origins explicitly around crisis, describing the movement’s founders as troubled by humanity’s dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanting to make an art of meaning and substance in the ruins of the Second World War.

The biographical evidence is substantial. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, and Fernand Léger all fled Europe for the United States as Nazism spread. Hans Hofmann emigrated from Germany in 1932 and began transmitting European abstraction to a generation of American painters through his New York school. When Newman, Gottlieb, and Rothko wrote to the New York Times on 13 June 1943 to defend their mythological paintings, they declared that only subject matter, which is tragic and timeless, is valid. The Gottlieb Foundation archive confirms that letter is now recognised as a founding manifesto of the movement.

Arshile Gorky is the most direct embodiment of this connection. Born around 1904 in the Ottoman Empire, he fled the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and watched his mother die of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Arriving in America at sixteen, he changed his name entirely, claiming a Georgian noble identity rather than an Armenian refugee one. MoMA’s 2024 to 2025 exhibition describes him as having developed an abstract visual language from the materials of trauma, exile, and mourning. His grief sits inside the abstraction of his art.

Evidence: The Metropolitan Museum of Art states that the crisis of war and its aftermath are central to understanding Abstract Expressionism, describing its founders as “anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability” and wanting to make “an art of meaning and substance.”
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Abstract Expressionism entry.

Did the CIA really use abstract art as a Cold War weapon, and what does that tell us about the power of art?

The answer is yes, and the evidence is on the record. Thomas W. Braden served as MoMA’s executive secretary from 1948 to 1949 before joining the CIA in 1950 to run its cultural activities division, openly confirming the programme in a 1967 Saturday Evening Post article.

In that article, titled “I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral,’” Braden confirmed the agency had funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the magazine Encounter, and international cultural tours, arguing that American avant-garde art won more acclaim for the United States than a hundred political speeches could have. Nelson Rockefeller, president of MoMA’s board and owner of significant Latin American business interests, had been directing cultural diplomacy through the museum since the 1940s.

The exhibition “The New American Painting” (1958 to 1959), curated by Dorothy C. Miller for MoMA’s International Program, toured eight European countries, including a showing at the Tate Gallery in London. Eva Cockcroft’s Artforum essay of Summer 1974, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” established that the artists’ wild canvases were positioned deliberately against the rigid conformity of Soviet Socialist Realism. Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning were kept entirely in the dark. As Cockcroft concluded: the artist creates freely, but their work is promoted and used by others for their own purposes.

The CIA understood something real: abstraction speaks on a frequency that propaganda cannot reach. You cannot decree what a Rothko means. That uncontrollability was, paradoxically, what made it useful as a weapon, and what makes it dangerous to every authoritarian system that has encountered it.

Evidence: Thomas Braden confirmed CIA funding of international cultural tours in the Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967. MoMA organised 33 international Abstract Expressionism exhibitions by 1956. Eva Cockcroft documented the institutional mechanisms in Artforum, Summer 1974.
Source: Thomas Braden, Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967; Eva Cockcroft, Artforum, Summer 1974; MoMA archive.

What happens to abstract painters under totalitarian rule?

Under totalitarianism, abstract art is not merely unfashionable; it is a threat. Soviet Socialist Realism, formally imposed at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, required art to be proletarian, realistic, and partisan. Art that refused to depict the world as the state demanded was suppressed, confiscated, or destroyed.

Stalin described artists under this doctrine as engineers of souls. Kazimir Malevich, whose Black Square (1915) is one of the most radical gestures in art history, was arrested on 20 September 1930 and imprisoned. Peer-reviewed documentation confirms he was tortured before being released after six months. His paintings were confiscated, his passport applications rejected. He died in 1935, impoverished and under surveillance.

In Germany, the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition opened on 19 July 1937 in Munich, displaying 650 works by 112 artists including Kandinsky, Klee, Kirchner, and Dix, positioned as evidence of cultural corruption. The V&A in London holds the only surviving copy of the Nazi confiscation inventory: a 479-page listing of more than 16,000 works seized from German museums. Beckmann fled to Amsterdam on the opening day. Kirchner committed suicide in Switzerland in 1938.

The reason these regimes feared abstraction is not complicated. A figurative painting can be read and assessed for its ideological content. An abstract painting resists that process entirely. Its meaning is generated in the encounter between the work and its viewer, not in a message that can be decoded and policed. That resistance is a political act.

Can abstract art bear witness to atrocity in a way documentary approaches cannot?

Mark Rothko insisted throughout his career that his paintings were not abstract at all, but direct expressions of basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom. He argued that people who wept before his canvases were having the same experience he had when painting them. This suggests what non-representational art can do.

Theodor Adorno’s 1949 dictum, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” has been widely misread. Adorno did not say art was impossible after catastrophe. He said that continuing to produce culture as though the catastrophe had not happened was to participate in the denial that made it possible. He later conceded in Negative Dialectics (1966) that perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream.

David Wojnarowicz gave the argument its most visceral form. After his mentor Peter Hujar died on 26 November 1987, Wojnarowicz wore a leather jacket at the ACT UP “Seize Control of the FDA” protest on 11 October 1988, bearing the words: “If I die of AIDS, forget burial, just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.” He was among 176 people arrested that day, documented in the Wojnarowicz Foundation archive at NYU’s Fales Library. His 1991 memoir Close to the Knives directly inspired activist David Robinson to deposit his partner’s ashes on the White House grounds in 1992. Art became political cause and effect.

How does politics influence the art being made right now?

The 60th Venice Biennale, which ran from 20 April to 24 November 2024, was curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the first curator from the Global South to lead the exhibition, under the theme “Stranieri Ovunque” (Foreigners Everywhere). It featured 331 participating artists and was shaped, structurally and thematically, by the conflicts of its moment.

The geopolitical tensions were structural, not merely thematic. Russia’s pavilion, vacated since 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine, was loaned to Bolivia. The Israeli artist Ruth Patir shut down her state-subsidised exhibition before the opening in protest over the war in Gaza. Poland’s pavilion engaged directly with onomatopoeia about the sounds of war, as reported by Flash Art.

Pedrosa’s curatorial argument made an explicit historical claim about abstraction. The exhibition placed hundreds of twentieth-century abstract works from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East alongside contemporary practices, framing non-representational art as a global language of resistance.

Evidence: The 60th Venice Biennale ran from 20 April to 24 November 2024, featuring 331 participants. Russia’s pavilion remained vacant since 2022. Ruth Patir closed the Israeli pavilion in protest before opening. Poland’s pavilion engaged directly with sounds of war.
Source: Venice Biennale official publications, 2024; Artnet, 2024; Flash Art, 2024.

How does the world enter an abstract painting, even when the painter is not intentionally creating political art?

No artist can create work in a vacuum. The world enters the studio whether or not the painter invites it. I am drawn to what the cosmos tells us about creation and destruction, and to what happens when I let that move through me onto the canvas. Barnett Newman’s 1948 essay “The Sublime Is Now” argued that the modern painter is not engaged in making beautiful objects but in confronting the viewer with the conditions of existence. That ambition means the darkness or luminosity of the palette, the tension or release of the mark, are shaped by everything witnessed, including the world outside the studio window.

I find I cannot entirely separate the paintings I make now from the world I am making them in. Rothko described this as unavoidable: the canvases he made in 1958, at the height of Cold War anxiety, carry a different formal quality from those made in periods of relative calm, even though neither depicts anything political. The emotional seismography of abstract painting is not metaphorical. You can read more about this journey, and where it started, on my biography page.

The question of how the world enters the studio, how it shapes what the hand does without the conscious mind dictating it, is the most interesting question in the practice of abstract painting. I do not have a clean answer, and I am not sure if the work would be any good if I did.

What do people most often ask about art, politics, and crisis?

Why did the CIA support Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War?

The CIA supported Abstract Expressionism because its apparent freedom and individualism contrasted sharply with Soviet Socialist Realism. Thomas Braden, who ran the agency’s cultural programme from 1950 to 1954, confirmed in a 1967 article that the strategy was to demonstrate creative freedoms possible only in a democratic society, targeting international intellectuals rather than domestic audiences.

What was the Entartete Kunst exhibition and why does it matter?

The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition opened on 19 July 1937 in Munich, displaying 650 works by 112 artists including Kandinsky, Klee, and Kirchner, framed as evidence of cultural corruption. Over two million people attended. More than 16,000 works were confiscated from German museums in 1937 to 1938. The V&A in London holds the only surviving copy of the complete Nazi confiscation inventory.

How does abstract art resist censorship more effectively than representational art?

Abstract art resists censorship because its meanings cannot be fixed by external authority. A figurative painting can be assessed for ideological content and approved or rejected. An abstract painting generates its meaning in the encounter between the work and the viewer; no state or censor can dictate what that encounter produces. This is why both Soviet and Nazi authorities targeted abstract work specifically.