Anyone fortunate enough, closely to have monitored the birth and development of Arte Povera, to have witnessed Kounellis’ live horses and Merz’s igloos displayed at the Galleria L’Attico in Rome, in early 1969, to have listened to Beuys retelling the legend of his life, to have read and leafed through Celant’s book, with its illustrations of Land Art, Anti-Form, ‘Poor’ and Conceptual Art, and to have heard about Szeemann's exhibition in Berne, When Attitudes Become Form, could not fail to be tempted to go along with Renato  Barilli’s prediction that future art historians, discussing the  history of  20th-century art, would divide the entire period into two halves - the  age preceding, and the age following the critical year, 1968.

General Characteristics of the New Attitudes to Art

Although the evolution of art undoubtedly follows a continuous pattern without sudden interruptions marked by fixed dates, a number of symptoms support the claim that a new situation arose some ten years ago, in the late 1960s,  which, it seems, can be justifiably treated as a specific period in the history of post-war art. It goes without saying that the new developments contained many direct or indirect influences and elements discernible in the period preceding it, but it also shows a sufficient number of characteristic constitutive elements that gave it a separate identity.

Two quotations – actually, two paragraphs taken from the wider context of some lengthier texts – summarise the principal developments in art of the 1970s:

 ‘The ’seventies were not just a decade like any other in the twentieth century, but a crucial period in which Modernism made its last original contribution, before surrendering to the various forms of Postmodernism that came into being, from the middle of the decade onwards.’ (Tomaž Brejc).

Contemplating nowadays [1990] the artistic events which most closely linked the Yugoslav art scene to comparable developments in Europe, both from a conceptual and an organisational point of view, one cannot overlook some major dates in the early 1960’s. These dates (and events) hinge on two international exhibitions, held at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb under the titles of New Tendencies (1961) and New Tendencies 2 (1963).