These days critics aren’t nearly as influential as they used to be, but youngsters who doubt that they once had the power to make a big difference in the small world of art need only pay a visit to “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1978,” which opens next month at the St. Louis Art Museum after a long and well-received run at New York’s Jewish Museum. In this small but potent exhibition, the work of the abstract-expressionist painters who dominated American art throughout the Forties and Fifties is seen from the points of view of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the two critics who did the most to bring it to the attention of the public at large (and who both, needless to say, figured prominently in the pages of COMMENTARY). The genius of this show is that it situates the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and their contemporaries and followers in two separate but related historical contexts. Not only is their work considered as part of the intellectual debate over modernism, but we are also shown how it fit into the wider scheme of postwar American culture-without diminishing in the least the impact of the paintings qua paintings.

If you can’t get to “Action/Abstraction,” I commend your attention to the show’s handsomely designed catalogue, edited by Norman L. Kleebatt (Yale, 332 pp., $65). Though a folio can only hint at the visceral impact of such large-scale paintings as Jackson Pollock’s “Convergence” or Helen Frankenthaler’s “Mountains and Sea,” this one compensates by including ten essays that cover a considerable amount of intellectual and art-historical ground. I especially liked Charlotte Eyerman’s “Abstraction and Representation: A Brief History,” which is so good that I wish she’d expand it into a short book:

For American museum-going audiences today, perhaps no art seems more mainstream, familiar, and appealing than Impressionism. It is perhaps difficult to explain in 2008-as it was in 1948-that Impression was once considered as radical, as unfamiliar, and as abstract as a Jackson Pollock painting.

The illustrations, which include all of the historical ephemera that helped make the show so interesting, are worth the price of the catalogue all by themselves. Remember “The Connoisseur,” Norman Rockwell’s 1962 Saturday Evening Post cover that showed a distinguished-looking gentlemen peering at a Pollock-style canvas? It’s here, along with “How to Look at Modern Art in America,” the wickedly funny Ad Reinhardt cartoon that appeared in PM in 1946.

The only things missing from “Action/Abstraction” are representative essays by Greenberg and Rosenberg themselves. Greenberg’s writings, of course, are well known to critics and scholars, but most of Rosenberg’s work is now more remembered than read, and it would be useful (if not exactly pleasurable) to be able to read what he had to say about the “action painters” he praised so passionately. He was, alas, better at spinning theories than looking at paintings, whereas Greenberg, though he never quite managed to shake off the Marxist habits of mind that inspired his lifelong belief in the historical inevitability of abstraction, had the keenness of eye that Rosenberg lacked. If “Action/Abstraction” were a contest, not an exhibition, Greenberg would win in a walk.

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