While visiting an old friend in Belgium, the art historian Barbara Rose met Roberto Polo, a Cuban-born, American-educated artist, connoisseur, and art collector who directs an important gallery in Brussels. I suspect the two dedicated art lovers initially found common ground in their shared disgust with the present-day art world and their dislike of the great majority of the art, usually termed Post-Modernist, deemed admirable and desirable by that art world. But what seem to have solidified their connection were the abstract paintings by contemporary Belgian artists that Rose saw in Polo’s apartment. Their authors were unknown to her, yet, she later wrote, she found their work “fascinating, and in some strange way . . . oddly familiar.” The Belgians’ paintings seemed to embody values that Rose admired in the work of the American artists she had enthusiastically followed over the years—serious painters, committed to abstraction, whom she described as “making complex and layered works, requiring many years of skill and training.”

The highly individual, varied approaches of both the Americans who interested Rose and the Belgians she had just discovered posited fresh ideas about space, surface, and materiality in abstract terms, without rejecting the possibility of suggestive allusions and ambiguous associations. Unlike most contemporary art considered worthy of attention today, these works celebrated the act of painting itself instead of illustrating social, political, and ecological “issues.” Rather than deploying “alternative media” to present concepts that could be verbally stated, works of this kind emphasized the wordless