The good thing about revisionist art history, besides its providing desperate graduate students with topics for theses, is that it broadens our understanding of the past by adding subtlety to oversimplified conceptions. At best, revisionism allows us to reconsider serious, gifted practitioners who have been eclipsed by shifts in taste or changes of fashion; at worst, it dredges up forgotten artists who have little to recommend them but their obscurity. Either way, though, it is useful to be reminded that art history is not a tidy progression of easily categorized “isms,” but (the undeniable phenomena of period and national styles notwithstanding) something far more interesting: a messy, unstable accumulation of individual efforts. I am thinking of a phrase used by the late E. C. Goossen—always a perceptive art historian and critic—to admonish colleagues who grouped things too neatly for his taste: “No movements, only artists!”

But movements—which is to say, generalizations—are far easier to deal with than individuals. And oddball artists, artists whose efforts do not lend themselves readily to generalization, are sometimes overshadowed by others whose work seems more obviously typical of a given period. I am aware that the idea of being “characteristic” is highly subjective and variable, but there are artists who appear to define the desiderata of an era, either because their work is so powerful or because it conforms to our (culturally and chronologically determined) preconceptions. For many of us, I suspect, especially for those of us whose grasp of history is bound