Lazar Trifunović, “Contemporary American Art,” translated from Serbian by Stefana Djokic, originally published as “Savremena Američka umetnost,” in Umetnost 17 (January–March 1969): 5–11

Lazar Trifunovic’s review of the exhibition The New Vein: The Human Figure 1963–1968 questions the rehabilitation of figurative art and draws ironic parallels between Pop art’s celebration of the “American way of life” and Socialist Realism’s celebration of the “Socialist way of life.” America is experiencing an artistic revival and is today fiercely fighting for its own specific art both in artistic creation and in society. Do Ms. Perkins and her associates believe that the new tendencies of American art in the 1970s meaningfully change the position of the figure and its aesthetic and philosophical connotations? For this purpose, it is useful to return to an exhibition organized in 1959 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Peter Selz, a distinguished American art historian and critic. The New Vein: The Human Figure just as Selz’s own construction, contains no new directions, no clear ideas, and does not give a wider cross section of American contemporary art.