Efi Ferentinou, “Issues in the Arts: American Painting,” translated from Greek by Michael Eleftheriou, originally published as “Καλλιτεχνικά Θέματα: Αμερικανική ζωγραφική,” in Kathimerini (May 7, 1958)

Efi Ferentinou was a major advocate of post-war abstraction and American art in Greece. In this chapter she reviews the exhibition Nine Generations of American Art , which was sponsored by the US Information Agency and organized jointly by the Detroit Institute of Arts and the National Gallery in Athens in 1958. The Nine Generations of American Painters exhibition staged at the Zappeion Megaron by the Art Institute of Detroit in collaboration with our own National Gallery presents us with a portrayal of the development of American painting over the last two centuries. The division between “older” and “modern” American painters does not coincide chronologically with the analogous distinction among their European counterparts. American painting via the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries makes it clear that the first steps taken by artists in the United States were firmly underpinned by developments in Europe.