Not long ago, I was invited to lead a semi nar on Abstract Expressionism at a well-regarded New York art school, part of a course on “contemporary ideas.” The stu dents were bright, articulate, and eager to talk—they even seemed to have done the as signed reading—but it was evident that they thought of Abstract Expressionism as a remote historical phenomenon, more or less the way they thought of Cubism. How much did these hip young aspiring artists know about what Clement Greenberg called “‘American-type’ painting,” the new ab stract art of the Forties and Fifties? Hard to say. The debate, still so lively and compelling in the early Sixties, when I was in school, be tween the followers of Harold Rosenberg, who claimed de Kooning as the paradigm, and the Greenberg camp, who looked to Pol lock, came as a kind of revelation to the stu dents of the Nineties. They were content to assume that Rosenberg’s hectoring essay on “action painting”—part of the assigned read ing, along with Greenberg’s pieces on American-type painting and some of the American-type painters—was an adequate and accurate description of everything that went on all those years ago.

I pointed out that there was more to it than that and if they had been paying atten tion, they could have seen a fair amount of Abstract Expressionist work in New York in the past year. Admittedly, the rather over blown show at Gagosian Gallery last spring hadn’t told us much