Last year, when the Western Association of Art Museums annual conference was held in Portland, Oregon, one delegate from Southern California looked around wearily at the paintings on the walls of a home she was visiting and muttered her unenchanted opinion of the Northwest School: “Roots, branches and twigs.” This September, when WAAM met in Vancouver, B.C., for the first time, the delegates arrived for the usual round of parties, semi-digestible luncheons and banquets and, if we guessed correctly, the anticipation of an unbearably provincial enclave: woods and paintings both full of twigs,