“American art, as Robert Hughes has written, oscillates between dependence and invention. You could also say that it can’t, or couldn’t, decide just how American it ought to be. On the one hand were those who believed in the transcendency of the landscape; painters who saw manifest destiny in the Hudson River or Niagara Falls, and those all-American originals like Peto and Homer. On the other were those Modernists touched by Europe.”