Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- 1 Art criticism, 1951–1952
- 2 The ICA in the early 1950s
- 3 The Independent Group: aesthetic problems
- 4 The Independent Group: popular culture
- 5 Art criticism, 1953–1955
- 6 Alloway and abstraction
- 7 Alloway and figurative art
- 8 This Is Tomorrow, 1956
- 9 Information Theory
- 10 Group 12 and Information Theory
- 11 Science fiction
- 12 The cultural continuum model
- 13 Writings about the movies
- 14 Graphics and advertising
- 15 Design
- 16 Architecture and the city
- 17 Channel flows
- 18 Art autre
- 19 The human image
- 20 Modern Art in the United States, 1956
- 21 Action Painting
- 22 First trip to the USA
- 23 The New American Painting, 1958
- 24 Alloway and Greenberg
- 25 Cold wars
- 26 British art and the USA: The Middle Generation
- 27 A younger generation and the avant-garde
- 28 Hard Edge
- 29 Place and the avant–garde, 1959
- 30 Situation and its legacy
- 31 The emergence of Pop art
- 32 Alloway's departure
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
1 - Art criticism, 1951–1952
from Section B - Continuum, 1952–1961
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- 1 Art criticism, 1951–1952
- 2 The ICA in the early 1950s
- 3 The Independent Group: aesthetic problems
- 4 The Independent Group: popular culture
- 5 Art criticism, 1953–1955
- 6 Alloway and abstraction
- 7 Alloway and figurative art
- 8 This Is Tomorrow, 1956
- 9 Information Theory
- 10 Group 12 and Information Theory
- 11 Science fiction
- 12 The cultural continuum model
- 13 Writings about the movies
- 14 Graphics and advertising
- 15 Design
- 16 Architecture and the city
- 17 Channel flows
- 18 Art autre
- 19 The human image
- 20 Modern Art in the United States, 1956
- 21 Action Painting
- 22 First trip to the USA
- 23 The New American Painting, 1958
- 24 Alloway and Greenberg
- 25 Cold wars
- 26 British art and the USA: The Middle Generation
- 27 A younger generation and the avant-garde
- 28 Hard Edge
- 29 Place and the avant–garde, 1959
- 30 Situation and its legacy
- 31 The emergence of Pop art
- 32 Alloway's departure
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
1950 had been the year when Alloway's scope became international, but the really significant change in his criticism occurs right at the beginning of 1951 in a longer review of a Matta exhibition at the ICA. In this, Alloway writes in a style that was to become associated with his Independent Group (IG) mode of writing between 1952 and 1955. Connoisseurship and simple evaluation is replaced by a far more dense and demanding interpretation of the artist's activities: “In the new concept of ‘continuous creation’ we have, perhaps, the physicists’ version of automatism in modern art. Matta is the painter of non-Euclidean space. A controlled automatism, compatible with extensive and monumental design, is at the root of his method of creating the vertiginous world-picture.” He fused automatic Surrealism and Expressionism but, in contrast to Tanguy, “… Matta is not haunted by the horizon and Kandinsky does not, like Matta, confuse us between galaxy and viscera. Matta refuses to acknowledge the distinction between cosmic and microscopic configurations.”
A significant progression for Alloway was viewed as a regressive move by some of the readers of Art News and Review, two of whom wrote from Cambridge University decrying the critic's “brand of pretentious and esoteric nonsense.” Alloway's contrasting of Matta and Kandinsky by analogy with “galaxy and viscera” particularly incensed them:
Either Matta is a painter or he is a psychiatrical witch-doctor cum punster with his finger in a paint box such as Mr Alloway seems to want us to believe him… To employ arbitrary terms—“viscera,” “galaxy”—without any attempt at explaining or even hinting at their meaning is not only to show a lack of courtesy, but, in addition, to further that oracular gibberish which has done so much to harm art criticism… Matta, whatever one may think of him, disappears under the smoke-screen of Mr Alloway's alarming erudition.
Alloway published a lengthy reply that made substantive points. First, he attacks the readers’ complaint that artworks cannot be said to have “verbal equivalents” to visual forms, suggesting that their opinion is an implicit assumption of Roger Fry's “formal approach.” Formalism and all it stood for, from Fry to Clement Greenberg, was Alloway's enduring enemy until its final overthrow in the late 1960s.
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- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 21 - 24Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012