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NEW YORK – Art is long, art criticism is often very, very brief, its Internet afterlife notwithstanding. Its viability relies on a mixture of prose style, sound-bite concepts, timing and its ability to clarify visual experience. Naming a major art movement can also help embed a critic in a period's cultural achievement or its mythology.

Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg met many of these requirements, especially the myth part. Tenacious Jewish intellectuals formed by the leftist ferment of New York between the world wars, both entered the 1940s as lapsing Marxists drawn to culture and especially to the new painting they saw emerging around them. In the late 1940s and '50s, they were abstract expressionism's most prominent champions, defining its leaders, principles and achievements, often in diametric opposition to each other. Mounting mutual dislike was their bond.

Rosenberg and Greenberg are reunited in "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976," a fast-moving exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Their names aren't on the marquee, but their rivalry provides the structure for this exceedingly handsome if somewhat peripatetic show. It was organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, the museum's chief curator, in consultation with curators from the museums to which it will travel: Douglas Dreishpoon of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and Charlotte Eyerman of the St. Louis Art Museum.

Greenberg and Rosenberg were giants among giants, sharing drinks, opinions and insults with painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman.

"Action/Abstraction" is not so much a historical survey as a series of lavishly illustrated talking points. It proceeds through various pairings and groupings that illuminate whom Greenberg and Rosenberg promoted or ignored, where they differed or overlapped. They shared, for example, an abhorrence of mass culture, and an ambivalence about their Jewishness and a love of Barnett Newman's painting.

Concentrating at first on abstract expressionism's first generation, the show touches down wherever the Greenberg-Rosenberg dichotomy is best served. (It omits, for example, Adolph Gottlieb and Franz Kline.) It gives a brief nod to sculpture, which lagged behind painting during the '50s, but looks remarkably good here, represented by David Smith, David Hare and especially Herbert Ferber.

A section titled "Blind Spots" (work by Norman Lewis, Grace Hartigan and Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife) represents artists who were not white and male and were almost uniformly neglected by Greenberg and Rosenberg. Three pithy "context" galleries organized by Maurice Berger, a senior researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, add vividness, as does Mr. Berger's extensive timeline in the outstanding catalog (eight essays, all good). In a short film clip in the first such gallery, De Kooning asks Rosenberg, "Harold, am I an action painter?" It's a good question: Rosenberg deleted all artists' names from his best-known article, The American Action Painters of 1952.

Also on view are the delusional letters that Clyfford Still wrote to Rosenberg and Greenberg denouncing their (favorable) ideas about his painting, proving that a smaller art world was not always a friendlier one. The artworks and ephemera assembled here rub salt in all kinds of old wounds, even if the wounded are long gone.

PLAN YOUR LIFE "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976" continues through Sept. 21 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd Street, New York. 212-423-3200, www.jewishmuseum.org.

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