Dragoslav Djordjević, “The Exhibition American Vanguard Painting,” translated from Serbian by Stefana Djokic, originally published as “Izložba savremene Američke umetnosti,” in Borba (October 1, 1961): 8

Dragoslav Djordjevic was a respected Yugoslav art critic and curator, with a traditional understanding for art rather than a sensibility for the most current art trends. In this article he reviews the exhibition American Vanguard Painting of 1961, comparing it with the earlier Modern Art in the United States, shown in Belgrade in 1956. In comparison to the exhibition of 1956, this exhibition of contemporary American art appears to be more limited and simpler, not to say poorer, than its predecessor. Action painters are the most characteristic for both Abstract Expressionism, here unreasonably differentiated into several sub-groups—Action painting, mathematical structure, the influence of Cubism, Abstract Impressionism, and Imagism and Surrealist exploration—and for American painting. The Neoplastic tradition, represented here by the geometric abstraction of Kelly and Reinhardt, points to the survival of the square throughout history as the “impression of the object’s absence.”