Boston will never be an art capital. It blew its chance to become one by malignantly neglecting the Boston Expressionists in the 1940s and ’50s. Had Boston museums lavished the kind of attention on them that New York museums devoted to the young painters of post-war abstraction, it would have signaled to the world that the city was a supportive home for artists working in a modern mode, and perhaps it might have become a creative enclave in its own right.
