“Definitive Statements” is a show about American art between 1964 and 1966 that Kermit Champa, who teaches at Brown University, organized in collaboration with a group of graduate students there. The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue set out to demonstrate how postwar American art reached a high tide of achievement in the Minimalism, Color-field, and Pop Art of the mid-1960s. Paintings and sculptures by LeWitt, Marisol, Oldenburg, Olitski, Stella, Warhol, and twenty-six others are presented as works of established, unquestioned value. Both the show, which was elegantly installed at the List Art Center at Brown in March, and the catalogue, with its scholarly apparatus all in place, bespeak a serene confidence in the significance of everything that’s under consideration.[1]

In a preface to the catalogue, Champa explains that “The challenge in Definitive Statementswas to attempt an essay—both in the exhibition itself and in the accompanying catalogue—in art history of the most recent sort.” Champa thinks that “American art of the 1964-66 period has become, in spite of its recentness, historical rather than any longer contemporary.” He sees the period as “a kind of sealed aesthetic unit containing both major work and major criticism” that is “positively ripe for scholarly review.” There’s a touch of glee in Champa’s preface: the professor here finds himself sending his students off to study not Paris in 1860 or 1910, but a past he actually lived through and in which, as he tells us, he “played a ‘bit’ part.” It must