Fernando Pernes, “Ten Years of Painting and Sculpture at the Tate Gallery,” translated from Portuguese by Ruth Rosengarten, originally published as “Dez anos de pintura e escultura na Tate Gallery,” in Colóquio: Artes 30 (October 1964): 22–30 (excerpt)

Fernando Pernes was a leading art critic and curator whose trajectory kept pace with the artistic changes taking place from the 1960s to the late twentieth century. The retrospective impetus of the exhibition Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 54—64 (Tate Gallery, 1964) was influential on several generations of Portuguese artists and critics, having been an important source for the collation of recent trends in American art. Gottlieb and Motherwell are differently positioned in relation to the two juxtaposed facets of American painting that, across the Atlantic, find in Willem de Kooning and Hofmann their most authoritative voices. For American painters the aesthetic experience belongs fundamentally to an imperious moral order. It has to be sought in continued experimentation with available means, and it should situate itself in an absorption in its immersion in physical facts, in the process of transforming a common element into something of artistic merit.