Radislav Matuštík, “New American Painting: Notes on the Exhibition Painting in the United States since 1945 in the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava,” translated from Slovak by John Minahane, originally published as “Nové americké maliarstvo: Poznámky k výstave Maliarstvo USA po roku 1945 v SNG v Bratislave,” in Výtvarný život 14, no. 10 (1969): 22–29 (excerpt)

doi:10.4324/9781003009979-10392

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Radislav Matuštík, “New American Painting: Notes on the Exhibition Painting in the United States since 1945 in the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava,” translated from Slovak by John Minahane, originally published as “Nové americké maliarstvo: Poznámky k výstave Maliarstvo USA po roku 1945 v SNG v Bratislave,” in Výtvarný život 14, no. 10 (1969): 22–29 (excerpt)

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ABSTRACT

In the 1960s Radislav Matustik was Professor of Modern Art at Comenius University, Bratislava, a position he was compelled to vacate when the Prague Spring ended. In the summer of 1969 the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava hosted a traveling exhibition of American art, presented by the Smithsonian Institution. The concluding chapter of the exhibition presents the New Abstraction, championed especially by Clement Greenberg, who has minted for it the name of "Post-Painterly Abstraction". European Constructivism turned inwards and had a measure of man, for whom it was meant to be a new world; American New Abstraction is aimed outwards, it has a measure of the technical civilization of the people world. Expressionism, or more precisely, romanticism, a fundamental and inevitable romanticism, with the risk and the tribulation that all romanticism brings, but also with its simple force, in harmony with the might of Nature and the fraternal hopes of the nascent collectivity.