Lawrence Reginald Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from 1961.
14 Facts About Lawrence Alloway
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Lawrence Alloway 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.
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Between 1943 and 1947, Alloway studied art history at the University of London, where he met the future critic and curator David Sylvester.
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Lawrence Alloway wrote short book reviews for the London Times in 1944 and 1945, at which time he was between 17 and 19 years old.
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Lawrence Alloway started writing reviews for the British periodical Art News and Review in 1949 and for the American periodical Art News in 1953.
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Lawrence Alloway joined the Independent Group in 1952 and lectured on his theory of a circular link between popular cultural "low art" and "high art".
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In 1956 Lawrence Alloway contributed to organising the exhibition This Is Tomorrow.
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In 1961, through his contacts with the American painter Barnett Newman, Lawrence Alloway was offered a lecturer position at Bennington College in Vermont.
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Lawrence Alloway chaired the jury of the 1964 Guggenheim Awards, one of which was refused by the painter Asger Jorn.
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In 1966, Lawrence Alloway curated the influential Systemic Painting exhibition that showcased geometric abstraction in American art via Minimal art, Shaped canvas, and Hard-edge painting.
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Lawrence Alloway 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".
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Lawrence Alloway was an ardent supporter of Abstract expressionism and American Pop artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol.
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Lawrence Alloway used the term 'mass popular art' in his oft quoted 1958 article but he did not use the specific term "Pop Art" in the piece.
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Lawrence Alloway suffered from a neurological disorder and died of cardiac arrest on 2 January 1990, aged 63.