If the path to hell is really paved with good intentions, as my father always maintained, then the organizers of the raucous survey “High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975” at the National Academy Museum, should prepare themselves for an uncomfortable afterlife.[1] That this unwieldy, baggy monster of a show means well is beyond dispute. The concept is appealing: a close look at a little examined, provocative moment in the history of recent art. The subject is promising: the years when the aesthetic certainties of post-war abstraction began to weaken under the pressure of new materials, new formal possibilities, new political crises, and new social concerns. And the timing seems right: we’re far enough away from the decade or so under review that it should be possible to examine the art of the period with fresh eyes. That the organizers succeeded in bringing their concept to life is admirable and impressive. We have to applaud both the sheer hard work and dogged perseverance required to locate and assemble so many widely dispersed, representative works, and the intellectual effort expended on making sense of this free-wheeling, super-charged era. And we must be grateful for the insight the exhibition offers into the formative, early works of some of today’s most respected practitioners “of a certain age,” and grateful, too, for the way the show evokes the aesthetic climate in which those works were made and first exhibited.

But—and it’s an important “but”—the reach of “High Times/Hard Times” far exceeds