The first thing to be said about “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” this spring’s ambitious survey at the Jewish Museum, is that it is full of wonderful things.[1] The span of the show—from the period beginning immediately before World War II, through the post-war years, to the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s—brackets the crucial years when American artists achieved international recognition as innovators and were acclaimed for dramatically expanding the possibilities of modernism. The show begins with a bang—with first-rate paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Hans Hofmann, followed by good Clyfford Stills, Ad Reinhardts, and Barnett Newmans, and, in the section devoted to sculpture, two superb David Smiths. These high standards are largely maintained in the later sections. There are splendid, luminous paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, a significant, very early sculpture by Anthony Caro, and, for contrast, an implacable, moody Stella Pinstripe, a gritty 1970s Philip Guston, and a classic Jasper Johns number painting. There are even a few gratifyingly unexpected inclusions, such as one of Anne Truitt’s polychrome monoliths, some early, better-than-usual works by Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell, a muscular Lee Bontecou, and an unusually large, multi-part Saul Steinberg.

The next thing to be said about “Action/Abstraction” is that it has a provocative mission: an examination of the legacy of the two New York critics who were post-war American art’s most passionate and most articulate spokesmen, respectively,