In the early days -between 1945 and 1955- abstract painting was considered very much to the most distinctive sign of the avant-grade movement. This was true to the extent that everybody, the real avant-garde painters and others, fought for abstract art by doing all within their power to earn for it a natural position in the avant-grade movement.

Abstract painting was no more than a method: A way of overcoming the exigencies of representation and of finding out how to express reality, while remaining as far away from it as possible. To aim at the abstract for its own sake was equivalent to forcing a negative to be positive, because the abstract, understood as the negation of representation, could only be negative. The vast majority of the more rhetorical avant-grade painters joined the avant-garde movement for the sake of abstract art and remained there, painting in the abstract, limited to their world of simple representative negation.

On the other hand, the remaining avant-garde painters, although they had entered the movement through the door of abstract painting, moved on to express a reality, which was synthetic and significant, even if it was by no means representative.

The former were engaged in trying to affirm a negation, thus denying their own art any opportunity of bearing fruit. The latter, by looking synthetically for the expression of reality, refused to accept the negation and proceeded to give their own painting a definitive, affirmative character of its own. Furthermore, since art never moves in the direction of what it negates, but rather in that of what it affirms, those, who adopted an affirmative attitude to their painting, even though they may not have been particularly aware of it at the time, traced the path of this avant-grade movement.