Book excerpt: History is written by the winners and art history is no exception. The winners in America's history of art are the abstract painters who, subsidised by the CIA from the early 1940s, showed the world the avant garde art American democracy and freedom could produce. The losers were the artists working in the figurative tradition, who were seen from then on as old-fashioned and derivative. And the artists who had political leanings have been virtually erased from the story of American art. I would like to try to put them back.The main aim of this book is to answer the question: what made a revolutionary artist?