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Lawrence Alloway's scope as an art critic became international in 1950, but his criticism only changed significantly the following year after a review of a Roberto Matta exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). This review marked Alloway's transition from connoisseurship and simple evaluation to a far more dense and demanding art criticism. This section focuses on Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1952–1961. It provides an overview of ICA in the early 1950s and its Independent Group, Alloway's attitudes toward abstraction and figurative art, his cultural continuum model, his views on graphics and advertising, art autre, Alloway's first trip to the United States, and the emergence of Pop art.

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1961–1971, beginning with his travel to the United States in 1961 and his dispute with Clement Greenberg with regards to art criticism, particularly of junk art. It also considers Alloway's writings on American Pop art, the mounting of the exhibition Six Painters and the Object and Six More in 1963, Alloway's relationship with Alexander Liberman and Paul Feeley, his views on abstraction and iconography as well as newness and avant-garde art, his reviews of a number of films and his pluralism.

This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic in the period 1971–1988, beginning with the emergence of disorienting art as an expression of dissent in the art world, Alloway's response to the politicisation of art, his new pluralism, the uses and limits of art criticism, criticism and women's art, Alloway's writings on Photo-Realism and Earth art, the decline of the avant-garde, and crises in the art world concerning criticism, feminism and curatorship. It also looks at Alloway's last years.

For Lawrence Alloway, the 1960s was ‘a period of exceptional high pressure, affluence, creativity, [and] confidence’, which was in stark contrast to the 1970s. This changed outlook in art was implied in the subtitle of Alan Sondheim's 1977 book on the contemporary avant-garde, Post-Movement Art in America. This section focuses on Lawrence Alloway's life as an art critic, beginning with his commitment to pluralism and his attitude towards Post-Modernism. It also discusses his views on art history and art criticism, his reputation as an art critic and the legacy of his pluralism.

Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) can be considered one of the founders of contemporary cultural ideals. One of the most esteemed art critics of the post-war years, Alloway was significantly involved with both the Independent Group and the Place and Situation painters in London during the 1950s. At the beginning of the 1960s, he moved to New York, where he became a leading interpreter of Pop art, ‘systemic’ abstraction, and the realist revival as well as women's art. He wrote more than 800 texts ranging from books to reviews and catalogues essays and displayed wholehearted commitment to pluralism and diversity in both art and society. In post-war London, Alloway witnessed an art scene that was impoverished but received a boost from the newly elected Socialist government's emphasis on culture. Art News and Review, a magazine launched by Richard Gainsborough in 1949, proved invaluable to Alloway as an aspiring art critic in the post-war years in London.