Looking back over a decade or so, the shows tend to blur together in the mind. There are those—the painters—who say it gets worse every year. But from a slightly more objective viewpoint, it would seem more like a series of variations on a mediocre theme. There was the year when everybody painted like everybody else. There was the year when everybody painted like somebody else, and you couldn’t tell the painters without a program. And there was the year when the jury turned down one of the first of Tobey’s great sumi ink paintings (the usual case of unfamiliarity breeding contempt); but everything