In a society split by Cold War polarities, French art criticism frequently and occasionally blindly followed suit. Focussing on the early 1960s French art movement known as Le Nouveau Réalisme, I argue that Cold War discourse had a crucial impact on the reception of Nouveau Réaliste art. Amidst the fiercely polemical, politically divided art world of 1960s France, Nouveau Réalisme was aligned by critics with “American-style” consumerism, political apathy, and/or outright celebration of the capitalist economic system. Critics opted for simple polarized readings of such art as "for" hegemonic U.S. values, and "against" socialism, Marxism, and left-wing oppositional art. The highly polemical atmosphere of the French art world, however, arguably encouraged art critics and audiences to overlook various contradictions, ambiguities, and ironies present in certain Nouveau Réaliste works. In my discussion, I shall focus on Jean Tinguely's Hommage to New York (1960), Martial Raysse's La France Americaine (1962) and on putatively rival art movements such as American Pop Art and French Figuration Narrative to explore these politically inflected tensions and ambiguities.

I shall also refer to one or several of the following aspects of Nouveau Réalisme’s critical reception :

-The impact of art critic Pierre Restany—a staunch French anti-communist, supporter of de Gaulle, ex-government speechwriter, and founder of the Nouveau Réaliste group.
- Le Figaro magazine director, media personality, and right-wing anti-communist Louis Pauwels's support of Restany and Nouveau Réalisme on television and in print as an emblem of social as well as cultural 'progress".
-Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste's condemnation of Nouveau Réalisme as a reactionary mirror of capitalist spectacle.
-The French art critic and Figuration Narrative supporter Gérald Gassiot-Talabot's "Barthesian" characterization of Nouveau Réalisme as a mouthpiece of American values, visual tautology and capitalist myth.