Alloway's catalogue preface acknowledges the encouragement and support of the United States Information Service (USIS) and his friend Stefan Munsing, declaring that, “Without the USIS it would not have been possible to bring this exhibition to London.” In 1959 he detailed the USIS's UK contributions: eleven exhibitions in London from 1954 to 1956 inclusive; and fifteen exhibitions in 1957 and 1958. The point Alloway was seeking to make was that “… Britain was, culturally, the place that Washington forgot…” until the American Embassy converted part of its library into a gallery. Others would have interpreted the statistics differently. Revisionist accounts of Abstract Expressionism that re-cast it as Cold War propaganda begin in the radical years of the early 1970s and included Max Kozloff's “American Painting During the Cold War” (1973) and Eva Cockcroft's “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” (1974) essays, leading to Serge Guilbaut's book detailing How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983).

Alloway was dismissive of any conspiracy theory, reflecting on the widespread rejection by both European critics and the general public of most new American art in the 1950s: “This art was not the way to solicit good cheer among foreign governments…” He also points out that Newman would have “deplored anything that suggested he was a defender of imperialism or a lackey of the Rockefellers…” But this confuses a personal liberalism and an ideological system. Newman himself has called on a discourse of freedom. Discussing his approach to painting in 1962, he is happy to accept that “one of its implications is its assertion of freedom, its denial of dogmatic principles, its repudiation of all dogmatic life. Almost fifteen years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer still goes.” Newman may have been claiming to reject both dominant Cold War ideologies, but its assertion of individual freedom over state control was itself part of the ideology of “state capitalism,” and so hardly independent of it. Nor was Alloway's argument convincing that the “propaganda” was belated and followed initial indifference and hostility to the artists.