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The post-WWII period saw the apex of high Modernism in painting with the abstract expressionists, led by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. They took the Modernists' radical approach to painting to the utmost extreme, by actually separating the brush from the canvas and completely rejecting representational art. At the same time, though, a new group of painters were laying the groundwork of Postmodernism, and were searching for new ways to break free of the canvas. Darling's show begins with the sudden and spontaneous explosion from all over the world, starting around 1948, of painters began actually attacking, distorting, and destroying the surface of their paintings. From the earliest pieces, in which artists began tearing, cutting, and–in the case of Niki de Saint Phalle actually shooting –their canvases, the assault on the very idea of painting is ratcheted up in the 1960s by a new wave of evermore radical artists. While the selection is worth seeing, it lacks the surprising urgency of Target Practice and is, in fact, completely representative of everything the more impressive artists in that show were fighting against.

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Sometime in the early 1670s King Charles II invited the Dutch marine painter Willem van de Velde and his son, also named Willem, to London, and the genre of marine painting in Britain was begun. So it is no surprise to read on the exhibition wall labels (the lack of a scholarly catalog is my only complaint about this show) that paintings and drawings from the van de Velde studio were widely collected and copied by many of the succeeding British marine painters, among them Peter Monamy (1681-1749) and Dominic Serres (1722-1793), both of whose works are also on view. His "Warships in a Stiff Breeze Off the Dutch Coast" (1785) is a pleasant enough picture, though apparently some of the ships' designs are Dutch and date from the 17th century, suggesting that they may have been lifted from works by the van de Veldes. But for me this show is really about the historical significance of the sea, the means by which Britain acquired its military and commercial dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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