Jackson Pollock, The She-wolf (1943) © 2010 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Here’s a short quiz for current museum-goers. What is “Abstract Expressionist New York,” the exhibition filling the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art through April 25, attempting to do?[1] A) celebrate the glories of moma’s holdings of American art of the 1940s and 1950s; B) present an overview of adventurous New York abstraction during those years; C) offer a revisionist account of the period; D) allow the show’s organizer, Ann Temkin, moma’s Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, to indulge her own predilections; E) all of the above. The answer, despite the inherent contradictions among the various listed aims, would have to be E. It’s the only possible explanation for the new exhibition’s overlapping strengths, idiosyncracies, and lacks, or for its ability to exhilarate and exasperate, sometimes simultaneously. And given the essential incompatibility of choices A through D, “E) all of the above,” also helps to explain why responses to the show have ranged from enthusiastic compliments to peevish complaints, which generally lament the dominance of “greatest hits” and/or the lost opportunity for dramatically changing the canon.

Whichever answer we choose, the first thing to be said about “Abstract Expressionist New York” is that it is full of wonderful works by some of the most inventive, original, and adventurous American painters of the years