Sílvia Chicó, “The Last Twenty Years,” translated from Portuguese by Ruth Rosengarten, originally published as “Os últimos vinte anos,” in Jornal de letras, artes e ideias 23 (July 8, 1983), II

Sílvia Chico undertakes a historic revision of the evolution of modern painting in the two decades from 1960 to 1980, in particular in the USA. While for most critics in the 1960s, abstraction had become outmoded, Chico launches a defense of abstract art, attempting to show that after Abstract Expressionism, abstraction came to be relevant again. In 1960, despite a sense of the potential and pertinence of abstract art that was brought about by Abstract Expressionism, abstraction was still considered to be up for grabs, a passing phase, a fad. The beginning of the 1960s also saw the assertion of the independence of North American art from that of Europe, a logical outcome of the processes explored by the New York School, from Abstract Expressionism to Color-Field painting. Emerging from Color-Field painting, another movement was baptized Post-Painterly Abstraction by Clement Greenberg in 1964.