The contribution analyses the role played by the conference held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in 1954 in the career of a then young art critic, Enrico Crispolti, pupil of Iionello Venturi in Rome, who a few years after that event focused his interest on the history of the Informal, on its origins and developments between the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s. The talks at that conference were in fact the initial premisses for a discourse that was then to develop in the following years, surpassing the ambiguities of the "abstract-concrete" term coined by Venturi, which tacidy pervaded much of the thinking presented on that occasion. Attention is focused in particular on the talk by the painter Emilio Vedova, to whom Crispolti dedicated a first exhibition in 1957, and in whose expressive research he recognised an emblematic case of development of the premisses of the first postwar years in a modern and topical sense.