(4 of 4)
His work is a ringing and deeply engaged rebuke -- clumsy sometimes, and bathetic when it fails, but usually as pictorially brilliant as it is morally earnest -- to the ingrained limitations of its time. It sets its face against the sterile irony, the despair of saying anything authentic about history or memory in paint, and against the general sense of trivial pursuit that infests our culture. It is a victory for the moral imagination.