…In his American Experiences Murtić has shifted the horizon of thematic interest. The constantly widening breach from tendentious realism, which was now definitely accepted, brought Croatian painting back to the centre of happenings, of which it had been a part before socialist realism was introduced, back into the currents of modern European art.
The two exhibitions are of great historical importance. In the first place they presented a radical challenge to the "firm-hand" theory of art, and the new ideas introduced spread victoriously for the first time in a socialist country! Painting was re-established with all its full rights and it could not by any decree be ostracized from the possibilities of the implicit development of artistic forms, a thing that sometimes does occur independently from the form of social life.
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The main point of American Experiences was not the introduction of abstract expressionism. In Brooklyn Bridge or in Manhattan, Murtić draws much closer to John Marino than to William de Kooning. A certain degree of abstraction of forms from the visual reality, which can be found in some of the pictures from this cycle, was not so revolutionary or so "American" as to force the government to take sanctions against his experiments. But it was certainly no accidental happening.
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No one, not even the critics unfavourably inclined towards Murtić could doubt that American Experiences was in the reality of the artistic world in Yugoslavia, at the time, an attempt at an aesthetic revival. This act of freedom will be taken as an example in the social and intellectual circles of the times, echoes of which will also be heard outside the borders of Yugoslavia.
The notion of freedom should not only be expressed by metaphoric transfiguration of reality, as it was the practise up until then, but also by pure artistic values, which should not be predetermined according to already established iconological elements. In my opinion this ideal was attained in American Experiences. The maximal structural openness of this cycle was the basic pre-supposition of the exuberant enrichment of Murtić's painting that was to occur in the years to come.
Vladimir Maleković
Director of the Museum of Applied Arts, art critic and theoretician