When leftist Philip Evergood's big show opened in a Manhattan gallery last week, artists and critics alike flocked to get a look at it. There were also a few capitalist connoisseurscheckbooks in hand.
They came to buy a brand of expressionism which seemed far to the right of Evergood's politics. His strict sense of how to draw usually made a solid scaffold for his rags and flags of dramatic, loosely brushed color to fly from. When he was bad, Evergood was horrid. Some of his most obviously propagandistic work (American Tragedy, Jobs Not Dimes') looked careless-on-purposelike that of a politician who...