Denman Waldo Ross (1853–1935), professor at Harvard, was one of the most influential American art theorists and collectors of the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival texts and images, this essay places Ross's innovative work within its contexts of Platonic theory, racial anthropology, and homosexuality.

The spread of modernist painting in the early-twentieth-century United States was met with cries of "degeneracy" and "homosexual conspiracy." This essay explores the claims and counter-claims. Above all, Stoneley argues that the battles reflected larger shifts in art-world authority, with the museums and the "museum professional" emerging as controlling forces.