The exhibition called “Art of the Forties” at the Museum of Modern Art has come and gone without leaving much of a residue of discussion or debate.[1] For the public, it seems to have been taken as another easy dose of nostalgia for a period now mainly associated with old movies and World War II memora bilia. For the critics, it was also something of a blur. The younger critics seemed content to take the show at face value, accepting it as a more or less accurate account of a decade that is as distant from their personal ex perience as the 1890s were from that of their counterparts fifty years ago. As for the older critics, who had plenty of reason to know what was wrong with the show, there just aren’t that many around anymore who write about such events. So the many false notes, the misleading claims, the glaring omissions, and the woeful distortions that made “Art of the Forties” a travesty of both history and aes thetics were pretty much allowed to pass without question or protest. A crucial decade in art, culture, and politics was cheerfully reduced to a package tour of styles and fashions and signs of the times without a hint of the issues that made the Forties the gate way to a new era.

It was somehow appropriate, then, that the most enthusiastic public endorsement of the exhibition should have come from a quarter we seldom associate with aesthetic