Abstract expressionism (ie modern art) was actually pushed by the CIA as well (source), though the motivation in this case is murkier
Was modern art a weapon of the CIA?
The Abstract Expressionists emerged from obscurity in the late 1940s to establish New York as the centre of the art world. But were they pawns of US spies in the Cold War?
Unless you lived in that era it’s really hard to imagine how the reds lived in the imagination of every American. if you’re old enough to remember the war culture during the start of Iraq/Afghanistan. it was like that on steroids. 50 years of Cold War means a couple generations were completely consumed by it.
I’m not old enough to remember the first one and I’m not American so I was never really caught up in the second one, so it is genuinely hard for me to understand why the CIA cared so deeply about Soviet artistic preferences that they conducted psyops to oppose them. I’m not doubting that it happened, it just seems bizarre to me
I always thought Suprematism was what the Soviets were pushing, now I read the wiki article and it seems it was not, and Socialist realism was, and I guess it was the hyper-realism you talk about?