Not without irony did the late Annette Michelson, writing for the New York Herald Tribune in 1957, note for her American readers that the art of the modernist avant-gardes had become traditional. This she had concluded from her viewing of a set of Robert Delaunay's rhythmic abstract paintings, shown retrospectively in a post-war and post-occupation Paris. Read today, Michelson's statement about the repetitive tonalism of the Orphic abstractionist seems to predict the coming implications for generations of painters responding to modernism and locates a problem for how we might understand the work of art for some time. According to the martial logic of historical progessivism, painting was now in crisis with itself.