Question

Passage A
For decades, the dominant critical framework for interpreting Abstract Expressionism was strict formalism, which evaluated these massive paintings almost exclusively in terms of their physical properties and medium specificity. Proponents of this view argued that the modern artist's primary obligation was to acknowledge the flat, two-dimensional surface of the canvas, treating it not as a transparent window to the external world, but as an autonomous aesthetic arena. Consequently, the true meaning of an Abstract Expressionist work was located entirely within the internal interplay of color, gesture, line, and scale. Any attempt to read biographical nuances, psychological states, or historical narratives into these radically non-representational canvases was dismissed by formalist critics as a fundamental misunderstanding of the movement's vanguard status. By severing the art from its messy external environment, formalism provided a rigorous, ostensibly objective vocabulary for evaluating works that otherwise seemed chaotic or arbitrary to the public, thereby securing the movement's place at the pinnacle of modernist achievement.

Passage B
The enduring assertion that mid-twentieth-century American abstract art can be adequately understood in a vacuum, divorced from its specific historical moment, has been severely undermined by recent revisionist scholarship. This newer perspective insists that the global triumph of Abstract Expressionism cannot be fully explained by its formal innovations or internal aesthetic logic alone. Instead, cultural historians must examine the movement's extraordinary utility within the fraught geopolitical climate of the early Cold War. During this period, the United States government, working in tandem with influential cultural institutions, actively promoted this aggressively non-representational art on the international stage through touring exhibitions. Crucially, because the paintings lacked overt political content or decipherable narratives, they could be successfully championed abroad as vibrant embodiments of American freedom, individualism, and democratic vitality—characteristics intended to contrast sharply with the rigid, state-mandated constraints of Soviet Socialist Realism. Thus, the supposed autonomy of the canvas—the very characteristic that earlier formalist critics championed as the movement's highest aesthetic achievement—was precisely what made it such a malleable and potent ideological tool. To ignore the political utility of these artworks is to misunderstand the mechanisms by which they achieved their monumental historical significance.

Which one of the following most accurately describes the relationship between the two passages?