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.

Norman Kleeblatt, chief curator at the Jewish Museum

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.

I'm also struck by your inclusion of a room full of sculpture here. Neither Greenberg nor Rosenberg paid much attention to sculpture in their accounts of Abstract Expressionism.

There was always more of a representational impulse to American sculpture as it emerged from Surrealism, and one of the things that I felt immediately on reviewing Greenberg and Rosenberg's writings was that sculpture presented a problem for both of them: It didn't mesh with Rosenberg's notion of action — you know, throwing paint at the canvas — or with Greenberg's notion of formalism and flatness and abstraction. But both critics did write about sculptors, including Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Herbert Ferber, and David Hare.

You also pointedly include a group of women artists and one black artist, Norman Lewis, whom you feel Greenberg and Rosenberg overlooked.

The challenge was: Do we make their exclusions explicit, or do we go with the critics' blinkered vision? I felt that at this moment in time it was really necessary to show their blind spots and show how women in particular got ignored. Oddly enough, Grace Hartigan was included in two major shows at MoMA during the 1950s — she was a very energetic painter, and she was very popular — but these two critics didn't give her much time. Women were certainly still considered second-class citizens, and I think that it was important to bring that out in a historical approach.

The part of your show that feels least persuasive to me is the room of later works titled "Anxious Objects."

As a counterpoint to Greenberg's notion that purity and color field represented the next direction for American art [after Abstract Expressionism], Rosenberg had his own taste about what was acceptable — or what was of interest — after gestural abstraction. The term "Anxious Objects" actually comes from Rosenberg, and it's about artwork that challenges itself about whether it is art. The artists in that gallery — Saul Steinberg (who was one of Rosenberg's closest friends), Lee Bontecou, Joan Mitchell, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Peter Saul — were among the artists that Rosenberg admired; what we see in that gallery is my codification of Rosenberg's taste. We know that Rosenberg liked the residue of the gesture in a work of art, whether that gesture is second-generation Abstract Expressionism in Joan Mitchell, the embalmed encaustic brush strokes in Jasper Johns, or the drips of glue in Lee Bontecou.

And then the show concludes with Frank Stella and Allan Kaprow, who both seem like curious choices.

Frank Stella was coming out of formalism and Allan Kaprow was taking Rosenberg's notion of action painting to a next level. At the end of the '50s the art world was poised to go in several different directions, and Stella and Kaprow point in two of them — minimalism and performance art. Greenberg couldn't really cope with Stella, and Rosenberg never accepted Kaprow's idea of performance. For my purposes, including them allows you to see that the two most important critics of the period had their limits.