Lawrence Alloway

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Lawrence Alloway

American curator and art critic

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Born:: Sept. 17, 1926, Wimbledon, Eng.

Died:: Jan. 2, 1990, New York, N.Y., U.S. (aged 63)

Notable Works:: “The Arts and the Mass Media”

Subjects Of Study:: Abstract Expressionism; Pop art

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Lawrence Alloway (born Sept. 17, 1926, Wimbledon, Eng.—died Jan. 2, 1990, New York, N.Y., U.S.) was an English-born American curator and art critic who wrote widely on a variety of popular art topics. He is credited with coining the now-common term Pop art, although its meaning came to be understood as “art about popular culture” rather than “the art of popular culture,” as he had suggested.

Although Alloway took a few art history courses at the University of London, he never received a university degree. He first gained public attention while serving (1954–57) as director of the London Institute of Contemporary Art. Shortly thereafter he published an influential essay in the February 1958 issue of Architectural Design titled “The Arts and the Mass Media,” in which he articulated the key concepts that would eventually frame all his subsequent work, namely, that “there is in popular art a continuum from data to fantasy.” This essay was a refutation of the high art versus kitsch dichotomy advanced by the American critic Clement Greenberg in an influential 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” It also functioned as a rationale for Alloway’s pluralistic sense of critical priorities, based on the assumption that high and low culture should not be understood as being at odds with each other. As Alloway saw it, they were instead to be understood as the raw and the refined versions of the same set of evolving cultural codes and practices, versions that furthermore often informed and motivated each other. Alloway pointed to the emergence of Pop art in England during the late 1950s and in the United States during the early 1960s as representing the best examples of this view. His view about the complementary continuum between fine art and popular expression was made even more explicit in 1964 when he predicted an inevitable ascendance of “the anthropological definition of culture,” characterized as “an impulse to open-ended as opposed to formal descriptions of events and to a speculative rather than a contemplative aesthetics.”

Because of its avowed skepticism of rigidly enforced aesthetic hierarchies and its situational descriptions emphasizing a given artwork’s relationship to a specific context, Alloway’s writing can be seen as an important precursor to the postmodern art criticism of the 1980s. He was the first male critic to publicly endorse the claims made by the feminist art movement during the early 1970s, and he also had a keen interest in analyzing art’s changing relationship to the functional sociology of the art world, as witnessed by his book on the history of the Venice Biennale (1968). Alloway was a regular art critic for The Nation (1968–81) and a contributing editor for Artforum (1971–76). His extensive writings on American Abstract Expressionism emphasized the rootedness of that movement in a complex cultural fabric, thus challenging formalist and existentialist accounts of its development. Alloway’s major writings include the essay collections Topics in American Art Since 1945 (1975), Network: Art and the Complex Present (1984), and the posthumously published Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of Critic (2006). He also wrote a definitive monograph on the work of the painter Roy Lichtenstein (1983).

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Pop art

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Ed Ruscha with Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas

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Pop art summary

Pop art

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Last Updated: Jul 4, 2025 • Article History

Key People:: Lawrence Alloway; Richard Hamilton

Related Topics:: art; soft sculpture

On the Web:: Art in Context - Famous Pop Art Paintings Â– Iconic Pop Artists and Artworks (July 04, 2025)

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Pop art, art movement of the late 1950s and ’60s that was inspired by commercial and popular culture. Although it did not have a specific style or attitude, Pop art was defined as a diverse response to the postwar era’s commodity-driven values, often using commonplace objects (such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers) as subject matter or as part of the work.

Predecessors

Pop art was a descendant of Dada, a nihilistic movement current in the 1920s that ridiculed the seriousness of contemporary Parisian art and, more broadly, the political and cultural situation that had brought war to Europe. Marcel Duchamp, the champion of Dada in the United States, who tried to narrow the distance between art and life by celebrating the mass-produced objects of his time, was the most influential figure in the evolution of Pop art. Other 20th-century artists who influenced Pop art were Stuart Davis, Gerard Murphy, and Fernand Léger, all of whom depicted in their painting the precision, mass production, and commercial materials of the machine-industrial age. The immediate predecessors of the Pop artists were Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and Robert Rauschenberg, American artists who in the 1950s painted flags, beer cans, and other, similar objects, though with a painterly, expressive technique.

Pop art in Britain

In many ways, the Pop art movement began as a form of academic inquiry. In 1952–55 a group of artists, architects, and design historians met regularly at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London to discuss disparate topics such as car styling or pulp magazines. The Independent Group, as they called themselves, were committed to developing a broad-based understanding of culture from its supposedly “high” forms to its popular ones. This philosophy informed the cerebral works of their main artist member, Richard Hamilton. Hence, in a work such as $he (1958–61), he combined allusions to fine art (recalling Duchamp) with esoteric references to American television advertising aimed at women. Another key member of the Independent Group was Edouardo Paolozzi, who had famously lectured to the group in 1952 about his collection of American science-fiction and other pulp imagery. Paolozzi also had strong sculptural interests, and his brutalist bronze-cast pieces had connections with the ravaged figuration of the likes of Jean Dubuffet. As Pop gathered momentum as a movement, Paolozzi combined his sculptural and popular-cultural interests in an iconography of robots.

The Independent Group constituted the first generation of British Pop. In the early 1960s a second generation emerged from the Royal College of Art in London, including Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Richard Smith, and Joe Tilson. Blake—who was perhaps best known for helping design one of the iconic images of British Pop art, the cover for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)—often made collage-based paintings that included mass-produced objects, postcards, and magazine images. Boty, on the other hand, often considered the objectification of women in magazines through photo-based works. A younger generation of artists included David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield, and the American-born R.B. Kitaj. Hockney in particular acquired notoriety for rather fey and deliberately camp images of male nudes, which reflected his homosexuality. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he produced disconcertingly bland homages to California’s sun-drenched swimming-pool lifestyle.