In the Spring 1998 issue of Modern Painters, the painter Trevor Winkfield described Abstract Expressionism “as a monolith” that has been “accorded a reverential deference which … seems a mite slavish, if not downright unhealthy.” Winkfield was writing about the New York School’s domination of the standard histories of American art, and the other (often eccentric) artists who all but disappear beneath its shadow. The myth of Abstract Expressionism—with its cadre of ambitious artists and their conquest over the School of Paris—is of Promethean proportions, and the authority Abstract Expressionism holds over the art world is by no means diminished today. Many artists rue it as the last time serious art was, indeed, serious; others see it as a cultural nemesis—a patriarchal and nationalistic bugaboo—in need of deconstruction. Abstract Expressionism, epic and immovable, is a historical and artistic moment to which we all invariably return.

Of course, one doesn’t have to be a post-modernist to question how long the Ab Ex orthodoxy can hold. We are, it seems, never lacking for exhibitions dedicated to the New York School, and repeated contact with its paintings has been, for some of us anyway, sobering. There is good Ab Ex painting and (as Winkfield implies in his article) “individual members” of the New York School are significant artists. The passage of time, however, has revealed many of its members to be minor players whose art can’t support the major claims made for it. Key figures like Willem de Kooning and