ABSTRACT
Euro-centrism is of course no less open to contestation than America-centrism and the bold claims made by critics who declare Picasso a minor conformist gentleman in relation to Pollock’s vigor and vehemence, his American successor. Such judgments, however, basically replace one narrow-minded position with another. As Domenach confessed, one cannot properly understand Europe and the latter does not reveal itself in its entirety as a fact of consciousness unless, as an American. Such a confrontation between American painting and our European traditions is designed to achieve a better definition of our very alterity and unique cultural difference. This mixing manifests itself in a manner that defies chronologies. There are attempts in the painting of the last few years—of the last decade in fact—that explicitly connect the art of the moment with the tradition of nineteenth-century Realism, and even with the traditions of a sort of photographic quality of a positivist nature.
