Yes, indirectly. In the 1950s the CIA secretly paid for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and that money helped carry American abstract painting, Jackson Pollock's included, around Europe. The artists were never told, and Pollock died in 1956, before the tour that reached London.
The idea sounds like a joke: a spy agency standing behind a man who poured paint onto canvases laid on the floor. Much of the story is documented. The part with Pollock's name on it is thinner than the headlines suggest.
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The agency did not make Pollock famous. Life magazine did, in 1949, under a headline that was already an answer: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the body that later carried CIA money into the art world, was set up with CIA funds the following year.
Then came the tours. In 1958 a Museum of Modern Art show called The New American Painting opened in Basel with seventeen artists, and Pollock was one of them. When it reached London in February 1959, he had been dead for two and a half years. Four of his paintings hung at the Tate, and later accounts show that the visit had been paid for with CIA money passed through a foundation that carried a rich man's name on its letterhead.
What interested the agency was getting American paintings onto European walls with no sign of its own hand. How it managed that, and how much of Pollock's reputation it can claim, is where the story gets harder to tell in a headline.
What You'll Discover
What made him famous first.
Why Washington hid its hand.
Who paid for London.
What Pollock could have known.
Who still disputes the story.