This kind of newspaper review was published without a byline, which was typical during this time, because such articles were considered routine, technical assignments that required no creativity. This journalistic tendency to ignore the name of the author was also prevalent in the publishing industry in Venezuela in the mid-twentieth century. This review identifies the four trends represented at the exhibition in question: an Impressionist style of landscape painting (by members of the so-called Caracas School), abstract painters, most of whom were students of the landscape painters, Realists, and Expressionists. The author of the article, who does not consider himself an art critic, asks a few questions that suggest that this (and every) Salon reflects a need for identification, which was a major concern in Venezuelan art circles at the time. This diminished over time and was replaced by a growing interest in “the possible;” in other words, the invention of new visual and sociopolitical realities that characterized a second wave of Venezuelan Modernism.
The review stresses the consequences of an absence of responsible criticism in the local art field, in terms of both a lack of reflection and a dearth of debate about vital questions, beginning with the concern of the place of Venezuelan visual arts, which were neither dead nor condemned to an academic repetition of European inventions. This criticism was attributed to the art critic Alfredo Boulton, who was well known in local art circles and was one of the jurors for several of the prizes awarded at the XIII Salón de Arte Venezolano, the subject of the review. The author acknowledges the concern felt in the local art milieu over the impact of the Second World War, during which Venezuelans were isolated from “the problems and discoveries of the visual arts in the rest of the world.” Seven years after the war ended, that concern was still palpable, as Cruz-Diez mentions in his interviews.
Other than what is mentioned in the article, abstract art was still absent, especially when considering the importance it assumed after the founding of the Venezuelan group Los Disidentes (1950) in Paris, and the first steps toward the fusion of art and architecture that were being taken at the Universidad Central de Venezuela under the direction of Carlos Raúl Villanueva, where it played a key role.