At its beginning, this past exhibition season held out great promise for anyone interested in American art. With separate shows planned for Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and John Marin, the prospects were especially good for a serious treatment of early American modernism—a period that is only now beginning to receive the kind of scholarly attention it deserves. Yet at least two of these shows turned out to have serious, and disturbing, flaws. What is more, the horrifying spectacle of the Wyeth affair—in which prestigious American institutions lent their space, and their reputations, to showing the famous “Helga” pictures—cast an ominous shadow over everything to do with American art. One ended the season less with a sense of exhilaration than with a sense of doubt about the state of our museums and the direction they are taking.

Since there is much to criticize, we should first turn our attention to shows of real merit. “Marin in Oil,” organized by Klaus Kertess for the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton,¹ was a model of its kind, and vividly demonstrated the heights Marin could reach in the oil medium. We had long suspected that Marin was an even better painter in oil than in watercolor, and this show went a long way toward proving it. The late oils were a special revelation; in work after work one understood convincingly just why Clement Greenberg could say in 1946 that “if it is not beyond doubt that Marin is the greatest