The House of World Cultures’ exhibition tells the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s use of an aesthetic of freedom, and contextualizes the lasting legacy of modernism within the geopolitical power struggles of the Cold War.

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BERLIN — Jackson Pollock — the art world’s Marlboro man, an icon of freedom in postwar America — may owe part of his legacy precisely to that image, and its potency for America’s Cold-War cultural battle. A new exhibition in Berlin’s House of World Cultures (HKW), Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War, looks at the little-known history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an association of intellectuals and cultural producers that first met in West Berlin in 1950, and dispersed in 1967 when its funding ties to the CIA were exposed. The history of the CCF is no secret — you can read all about it on the CIA’s own website. But the HKW exhibition tells the parallel story of the CCF’s aesthetic of freedom, and contextualizes the lasting legacy of modernism within the geopolitical power struggles of the Cold War.

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