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The show does not so much advance toward the 20th century as peter out in it—a curious evolution, owing perhaps to the difficulty of getting the right pictures lent—and the last section, spanning about 1900 to 1950, makes the contribution of women to modern art seem less than it actually was. Painters of large and unquestionable talent, like Lee Krasner, are not seen at their best. One could hardly guess from her work on display here that Germany's Hanna Höch—now 87 and the last surviving artist-member of the Berlin Dada group—was in the 1920s one of the most brilliant and acerbic collagists ever to wield scissors. On the other hand, quite trivial artists are included; probably one cannot have a historical show of women's art without the boring and insipid fribbles of Marie Laurencin, but why include a third-rate vendeuse of exotic surrealist tack like Leonor Fini? In such company, artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kathe Kollwitz, Nataliia Goncharova and Sonia Delaunay look extraordinary; one's eye goes with relief to Goncharova's crude, provincial but raucously vital cubist portrait of her husband Mikhail Larionov (1913), the face kippered flat and streaked with voracious slashes of color; it luxuriates in the shimmer of rosy light, circle on circle, that fills the surface of Delaunay's masterpiece of 1916, The Flamenco Singer. Moreover, if the exhibition does seem to end on a dying fall, it hardly matters. What counts is that an area of great consequence for art history has now been opened up. "Women Artists: 1550-1950" is one of the most significant theme shows to come along in years. Robert Hughes