Lawrence Alloway

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Alloway, Lawrence (1926–1990). British art critic and curator, active for much of his career in the USA. He suffered from tuberculosis in his childhood and had little formal education, but he attended classes in art history at London University. After working as a lecturer at the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, he moved to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where he became assistant director, and was one of the leading figures in the Independent Group, founded there in 1952. It was from this group that British Pop art grew; Alloway himself coined the term and argued that ‘acceptance of the mass media entails a shift in our perception of what culture is. Instead of reserving the word for the highest artefacts and noblest thoughts of history's top ten, it needs to be used more widely as a description of what a culture does.’ He was opposed to the anti-Americanism dominant in British intellectual and artistic circles during the early years of the Cold War, and in particular was a strong supporter of Abstract Expressionism. In his book Nine Abstract Artists (1954) he argued against the association between abstraction and an idealist social philosophy that been a feature of much pre-war writing on the subject; for him, a taste for geometric form was a taste like any other, not to be buttressed by reference to a Platonic world view. He was equally critical of the tendency in Britain to domesticate abstract art by associating it with the natural world: ‘Landscape is the tender trap of British art', he wrote in 1959. In the light of such views, his emigration to the USA in 1961 seemed an obvious step. He was appointed a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1964 but resigned two years later over a disagreement about the artists chosen for the US Pavilion at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Subsequently he became professor of art history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island, 1968–81. He organized several major exhibitions and his books include The Venice Biennale: 1895– 1968 (1968), American Pop Art (1974), and Topics in American Art since 1945 (1975). From 1963 to 1971 he was art critic to the Nation.

In 1954 Alloway married the British-born painter Sylvia Sleigh (1916– ), who settled with him in the USA. There she became involved in the feminist movement, and she is best known for paintings of the male nude in which the figures parody Old Master depictions of the female nude.