As early as 1945, the art dealers Sidney and Harriet Janis offered an astute remark about Marcel Duchamp, who had supposedly resigned from art-making roughly twenty years earlier.

The painter Larry Poons once described Dick Bellamy as “the wrong man at the right time.” Best remembered, if remembered at all, as the founding director of the Green Gallery in the early 1960s, Bellamy responded intuitively to the art that flared up after Abstract Expressionism’s moment passed.