The paper studies the language of militant modern art criticism in Italy between 1945 and 1954, the year of the Arte Figurativa e Arte Astratta conference. The analysis focuses on the lemmi and technical syntagma used by artists and art critics in declarations of poetics, manifestos, essays, reviews, diaries and letters. The final thesis proposed is that the words of the contemporary art critics of the time did not much wish to be restricted to the updated visual languages of the works, explaining their characteristics and aims, but mainly absolved another function: that of strengthening critical rankings (ideological, academic, generational) united by a prejudicial look at the works. The main linguistic question of the militant art criticism of the period was the crisis of the language of pure visibility. This was initially averted (until 1950) by reusing the key words of pure visibility but charged with a new philosophical and political meaning; and, secondly (after 1950), by a marked technification of the language, concentrated on explaining the formal mechanics of the work. The real turn, anticipated by Emilio Vedova's piece in the minutes of Arte Figurativa e Arte Astratta, took place in the late 1950s when the language of art criticism had to measure itself against works characterised by a new material or gestural quality; and thus had to resort to words no longer derived from the tradition of pure visibility but from the vocabularies of existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis and anthropology.