NEW YORK—In a summer of great New York museum shows, one not to miss is “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” at the Jewish Museum through September 21. Organized in collaboration with the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and drawing upon loans from both those institutions and elsewhere, this fascinating show is less the historical survey of Abstract Expressionism its title suggests than an examination of the movement's theoretical underpinnings. Pollock and de Kooning are both represented here along with some 30 other artists, but the real protagonists of the show are the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, both of whom were prominent Jewish intellectuals in their day (“that’s how come we can have the show here,” one Jewish Museum insider told ARTINFO).

Though both Greenberg and Rosenberg cut their critical teeth in New York’s left-leaning political debates of the 1930s, their subsequent paths could not have been more divergent. Greenberg evolved a highly "formalist" theory, which would eventually become an orthodoxy of abstraction, as influential as it was narrow, that understood all artistic mediums as moving toward a pure form, stripped of all inessential characteristics. In the case of painting, for example, this left nothing but flat color. Rosenberg, on the other hand, took his lead from European existentialism, developing a romantic concept of art as an identity statement in which the artist’s “action” was more important than the object it produced.

Though the two critics were hugely influential in the early days of Abstract Expressionism, both seemed increasingly out of touch as the 1950s slipped into the ’60s and Ab-Ex was outstripped by other waves of modernism. Part of the exhibition’s strength is that it acknowledges Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s shortcomings and even highlights their blind spots — primarily the contribution of women artists to the development of postwar American art.

ARTINFO spoke to Norman Kleeblatt, chief curator at the Jewish Museum, just as the show was opening.

Norman, it seems strange that no one has done this show before, given the infamously antagonistic relationship between Greenberg and Rosenberg.

Their dysfunctional relationship is one aspect of the show, but I think the most important thing is using Greenberg’s notion of formalism and Rosenberg’s idea of action as counterpoints to drive a new wedge through this period, to present pairings and groupings of the artists that they either championed or denigrated, and to use this dialectical approach to come at the period with a fresh eye.

Which of the pairings of artists here does this most successfully, do you think?

The gallery with Pollock and de Kooning is a very obvious one: You really see the energy of those two artists and the relationship between them, but also the real disparity between them. The Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky gallery presents an unusual pairing, and I was actually a bit concerned about how that would work. They are radically different artists, yet both Greenberg and Rosenberg were fervent admirers of both of them and when you put them together you see something very unusual. Looking at Gorky’s The Liver is the Cock’s Comb of 1944 and Hofmann’s Fantasia of 1943 gives you a fresh understanding of the varieties of abstraction that went on in America at that time and how artists could come at abstraction in so many different ways. The palettes [of the two paintings] are almost identical, but the brushwork is totally different. Hofmann’s Fantasia was actually the first drip painting: The white glue medium was dripped in 1943, well before Pollock started his famous drip mode between 1947 and 1950.

You suggest that Hofmann was influential very early on.

Hofmann was very important beginning in the 1930s. He brought European ideas to America. American artists had their antennae up for what was going on in Europe and how they could take European ideas and give new energy to their own work. Very few of the Abstract Expressionist artists went to Europe before the war. Greenberg had gone to hear several sessions at Hofmann’s art school before he wrote “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939, and Hofmann is the only artist who is mentioned there. As Greenberg observed, he was able to fuse Cubism and Fauvism. He brought a synthesis of the new European movements to the United States.