Pollock's work has been the subject of important critical debates. The critic Robert Coates once derided a number of Pollock’s works as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless.” [52]
Jean Helion the French abstract painter on the other hand, on first seeing a 'Pollock' remarked 'it filled out space going on and on because it did not have a start or end to it'.[53]
In a famous 1952 article in ARTnews, Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting", and wrote that "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint'. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value—political, aesthetic, moral." Many people assumed that he had modeled his "action painter" paradigm on Pollock.
Clement Greenberg supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds. It fit well with Greenberg's view of art history as a progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content. He considered Pollock's work to be the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition via Cubism and Cézanne to Manet.
Reynold's News in a 1959 headline said, "This is not art—it's a joke in bad taste."[54]
The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization to promote American culture and values, backed by the CIA, sponsored exhibitions of Pollock's work. Certain left-wing scholars, most prominently Eva Cockcroft, have argued that the U.S. government and wealthy elite embraced Pollock and abstract expressionism to place the United States in the forefront of global art and devalue socialist realism.[54][55] Cockcroft wrote that Pollock became a "weapon of the Cold War".[56]