In 1948, Look magazine published a list of the “ten best painters in America today,” based on a poll of museum directors and critics across the country. The pioneer modernist landscape painter John Marin placed first. Another pioneer modernist Max Weber placed second, presumably on the strength of his expressionist images of Hasidic Jews; he had long since abandoned the loose-jointed Cubism of his early work. Also ranked were the progressive but essentially traditional figurative painters Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Edward Hopper, and Charles Burchfield, and the politically engagé commentators Ben Shahn and Georg Grosz. Lyonel Feininger—spiky cityscapes—and Jack Levine—heavy-handed social satires—tied for tenth place.

The most forward-looking artist was Stuart Davis, the painter of raucous, Cubist-derived, vernacular-inflected abstractions, who rated a remarkably high fourth place on a list not otherwise notable for attention to truly innovative painters. By 1948, after all, Jackson Pollock was making poured paintings (and had already sold a pre-pour painting to the Museum of Modern Art), Arshile Gorky had found his distinctive voice (and had been represented in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art for almost a decade), Adolph Gottlieb had been making Pictographs for seven years, and Willem de Kooning had painted some of his most powerful black and white abstractions (one of which was purchased by MOMA in 1948). In relation to what these artists—and Davis—were doing, most of Look’s “ten best painters in America” were not only faithful to the notion of painting as representation, admittedly to varying