Rui Mário Gonçalves, “Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: 1954–1964,” translated from Portuguese by Ruth Rosengarten, originally published as “Pintura e escultura de uma década 1954–1964,” in Arquitectura: Revista de arte e construção 84 (November 1964): 147–156 (excerpt)

doi:10.4324/9781003009979-54

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Rui Mário Gonçalves, “Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: 1954–1964,” translated from Portuguese by Ruth Rosengarten, originally published as “Pintura e escultura de uma década 1954–1964,” in Arquitectura: Revista de arte e construção 84 (November 1964): 147–156 (excerpt)

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ABSTRACT

Rui Mario Goncalves was the most influential critic to emerge in Portugal in the 1960s, while also being significant as an art historian. Emerging from a humanist tradition and linked to the legacy of Surrealism, his art criticism probed the role of the imagination in relation to the new historical and social conditions. The exhibition Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 54–64 at the Tate Gallery in London in 1964 facilitated the exercise of a thorough revision of the lines of predominant trends of this time, namely Hard-Edge and Pop art, in an essay published in the journal Arquitectura: Revista de arte e construcao. The exhibition of painting and sculpture at the Tate Gallery in London, organized this year by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, has enjoyed international impact. Among the other American Pop artists, James Rosenquist seems to have grasped the “battle of images” in which humanity is immersed, in the sense described by André Breton.