Lawrence Alloway

Lawrence Reginald Alloway (17 September 1926 – 2 January 1990) was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from 1961. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US. He first used the term "mass popular art" in the mid-1950s and used the term "Pop Art" in the 1960s to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images. From 1954 until his death in 1990, he was married to the painter Sylvia Sleigh.

Early life and education Between 1943 and 1947, Alloway studied art history at the University of London, where he met the future critic and curator David Sylvester. In Nine Abstract Artists (1954) he promoted the Constructivist artists that emerged in Britain after the Second World War: Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Roger Hilton, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore, and William Scott.

Alloway's theory of art reflecting the concrete materials of modern life gave way to an interest in mass-media and consumerism. Alloway joined the Independent Group in 1952 and lectured on his theory of a circular link between popular cultural "low art" and "high art". From 1955 to 1960 he was assistant director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He organised the exhibition Collages and Objects (1954). In 1956 Alloway contributed to organising the exhibition This Is Tomorrow. When reviewing that show and other works he had seen on a trip to the US in a 1958 article, he first used the term "mass popular art".

Career in the US In 1961, through his contacts with the American painter Barnett Newman, Alloway was offered a lecturer position at Bennington College in Vermont. He and his wife, the realist painter Sylvia Sleigh, lived in Bennington for only one year before Alloway was appointed curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, a position he held until 1966.

In 1966, Alloway curated the influential Systemic Painting exhibition that showcased geometric abstraction in American art via Minimal art, Shaped canvas, and Hard-edge painting. He coined the term Systemic Art to "describe a type of abstract art characterized by the use of very simple standardized forms, usually geometric in character, either in a single concentrated image or repeated in a system arranged according to a clearly visible principle of organization". Alloway was also an ardent supporter of Abstract expressionism and American Pop artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. He resigned from the Guggenheim after Thomas M. Messer, the museum's director, overruled Alloway's selections—consisting mostly of sculptures—for the upcoming Venice Biennale.

In 1966–67, Alloway was appointed visiting professor at the School of Fine Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where John McHale and Buckminster Fuller were also on staff.

Origins of the term Pop Art Concerning the origins of the term Pop Art, Alloway said, "The term, originated in England by me, as a description of mass communications, especially, but not exclusively, visual ones."

Death Alloway suffered from a neurological disorder and died of cardiac arrest on 2 January 1990, aged 63.