After 1966, painting was displaced by the increasing number of alternative options open to artists but, in the first half of the decade and in spite of predictions of its demise, Alloway thought that painting was a discipline that continually reinvented itself. In 1961, just prior to his appointment at the Guggenheim, he had written in his review of American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists that “the experiments of twentieth-century painters have repeatedly been described as the end of art as we know it. There is an extensive and outdated literature on the theme of ‘beyond painting’, ‘the way beyond painting’, ‘the synthesis of (all) the arts’, and so on. It seems to me, rather, that the core of twentieth-century art has been a proliferation of easel painting.” This was a judgement that he saw no reason to revise by the time of his departure from the Guggenheim in 1966. The development of Post-Painterly Abstraction and One Image art, the emergence of Pop, the new sensibility of Systemic painting, and the continuation of mainstream abstraction all testified to the validity and vitality of painting.

The art scene in the USA was thriving and, looking back on “The Past Decade” in 1964, he noted that, whereas radical artists in the 1950s were usually ridiculed by the public, “younger artists now receive cordial comment and precipitate honours.” For example, James Rosenquist's first solo exhibition in 1962, at the age of twenty-nine, was a sell-out and resulted, in the same year, in his being included in exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas before, the following year, being selected for the Museum of Modern Art's Americans 1963, Alloway's Six Painters and the Object, and exhibitions in Washington, Houston, and Oakland. The character of the avant-garde had changed by the mid-1960s: “Whereas, formerly, the new in art existed in an aggressive and dynamic relation to an established, fixed style, revolution is no longer its only justification. Revolutions, and what look like revolutions, still occur, but paced now by publication and exhibition” and—with Pop art at least—sometimes out-paced by publicity and media interest.