The scene is an evening at Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in 1947. One of the guests is Clement Greenberg, art critic and champion of Abstract Expressionism, particularly of the artist Jackson Pollock, who is on the cusp of national fame. (Life magazine will come calling two years later.) The predominantly American-led movement is threatening to usurp Europe's longstanding domination of the art world, and as it happens a European Surrealist, the German Max Ernst, is also at Guggenheim's gathering. Apparently provoked by Greenberg's preaching on art (it didn't help that the critic had it in for the Surrealists), Ernst dumps an...