Giorgos Petris, “Abstract Art and Us,” translated from Greek by Michael Eleftheriou, originally published as “Η αφηρημένη τέχνη κι εμείς,” in Επιθεώρηση Τέχνης 45 (1958): 223–226

The 1958 article, published in the influential Art Review, is Giorgos Petris’s response to an earlier text by the leftist modernist architect, Aristomenis Proveleggios, who had defended postwar US abstraction and harshly criticized Petris for his negative view of abstract art. He criticizes the US for “imperialist” policies in the promotion of abstract tendencies in Greece as well as in Europe generally. Proveleggios commits an inconsistency of the first order: having got himself all worked up because A. Tassos has supposedly underestimated the readers of the Art Review, he actually underestimates artists as a group by presenting them as weaklings who will say anything anyone wants them to say. Indeed, in his critique of abstract art published in the same issue, he describes our views as “spiteful, dogmatic and banally inaccurate.” Proveleggios probably wanted to relieve abstract art from the burden of American friendship.