The Jewish Museum’s ponderously titled new exhibition, Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, might more aptly have been dubbed “Greenberg v. Rosenberg: Battle of the Self-Important Critics.”

This is a show that is only tangentially about art. It does flaunt several gorgeous objects: Willem De Kooning’s “Gotham News” demands attention with its thick, creamy strokes and aggressive sensuality; Jackson Pollock’s agitated “Convergence” explodes a few feet away, its black and white under-drawings blotted out by frenzied arcing drips of yellow, orange, blue and white. But these salvos of painting merely illustrate an intellectual rivalry between Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, critics who hitched their reputations to abstraction and brawled publicly over its meaning.