After the war, the need to accommodate new forms of art, especially abstraction, led a handful of influential critics--such as the Argentines Marta Traba and Jorge Romero Brest; the Brazilians Ronaldo Brito, Ferreira Gullar, and Aracy Amaral; and scores of others--to embrace new critical approaches to art based on a blend of social history, French art-critical methods, and, more rarely, formalist