Lawrence Reginald Alloway (September 17, 1926, London - January 2, 1990, New York) is an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States of America since 1961. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the British art group , and in the 1960s earned a reputation as an influential critic and curator of the United States. One of the first to use the term "mass popular art" in the mid-1950s, and then the term " pop art " in the 1960s, to designate art based on the images of popular culture and faith in their strength [4] . From 1954 until his death in 1990, he was married to the artist Sylvia Sani [5] .
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The early years
Between 1943 and 1947, Alloway studied art at the University of London , where he met future critic and curator David Sylvester [6] . In the years 19-19-1945, at the age of 17-19, Alloway wrote short book reviews for the Times of London [6] .
Career
Career Start and Independent Group
In 1949, Alloway began writing art criticism reviews for the British periodical ArtReview (at that time called Art News and Review ), and since 1953 he began to collaborate with the American periodical Art News [6] . In Nine Abstract Artists (1954), he talked about constructivist artists who appeared in Britain after World War II : Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill , Roger Hilton , Kenneth Martin , Mary Martin, Victor Passmore and William Scott.
Alloway came to the theory that art, which reflected the specific materials of modern life, gave way to the interests of the media and consumerism. In 1952, Alloway joined the Independent Group and lectured on his theory of the circular connection between the "low art" of popular culture and "high art." From 1955 to 1960, he worked as an assistant director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Under his leadership, the exhibition Collages and Objects (1954) was held. In 1956, Alloway took part in the organization of the exhibition This Is Tomorrow . Surveying the exhibits of this exhibition and other works that he saw during a trip to the USA in a 1958 article, he was one of the first to use the term "mass popular art".
US Career
In 1961, thanks to his contacts with the American artist Barnett Newman, Alloway received an invitation to a lecturer at Bennington College in Vermont [7] . Together with his wife, realist artist Sylvia Sani, he moved to Bennington , but spent only one year there, as he was appointed curator at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York . He held this position until 1966 [7] . In 1963, he organized the Six Painters and the Object pop art exhibition, which featured works by Jim Dyne , Jasper Johns , Roy Lichtenstein , Robert Rauschenberg , James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol [8] . Alloway was chairman of the 1964 Guggenheim Prize jury when Danish artist Asger Jörn refused one of the awards [9] [10] [11] .
In 1966, Alloway oversaw the Systemic Painting exhibition, which demonstrated American geometric abstraction in the areas of minimal art , figured canvas, and hard contours . In the description of the exhibition, to designate the type of abstract art using repeating simple forms, he introduced the term “ systematic art ” [12] . Alloway was an ardent supporter of abstract expressionism and American pop art , supporting artists such as Roy Lichtenstein , Klas Aldenburg and Andy Warhol . He left the Guggenheim Museum after Thomas Messer , director of the museum, did not accept Alloway’s offer of exhibits, mainly sculptures, for the upcoming Venice Biennale [13] .
In 1966-1967, Alloway worked as a visiting professor at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, where John McHale and Buckminster Fuller also worked. [6]
In the 1970s, Alloway wrote for The Nation and Artforum and lectured at Stony Brook University of New York , where he served as professor of art history . Together with critic Donald Cuspit, he founded the journal Art Criticism . With the advent of the feminist art movement, Alloway supported the work of women; he noted, for example, “3 to 1 prevalence” of men over women at the 1977 Whitney Museum annual exhibition [14] .
The origin of the term pop art
Regarding the origin of the term “ pop art,” Alloway wrote: “The term was coined by me in England as a designation of mass communications, especially visual, but not only” [4] . In a commentary on the Pop Art essay, he also stated: “The first use of the term I know in print is: Alloway, Lawrence. The Arts and the Mass Media // Architectural Design. - London, 1958. - February. The ideas of pop art were discussed by Reiner Bunham, Theo Crosby, Frank Cordell, Tony del Renzio, Richard Hamilton , Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi , Alison and Peter Smithson, sculptor William Turnbull and I " [4] .
However, there are contradictory recollections of the origin of the term: according to the son of John McHale, his father first used the word in a conversation with Frank Cordell in 1954, and then the term was used in discussions of the Independent Group no later than mid-1955 [15] . In a 1958 article, Alloway used the term “mass popular art”, and not specifically “pop art” [15] .
Death
Alloway suffered from a neurological disorder and died of cardiac arrest on January 2, 1990, at the age of 63 [16] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 BNF identifier : Open Data Platform 2011.
- ↑ 1 2 Encyclopædia Britannica
- ↑ 1 2 RKDartists
- ↑ 1 2 3 Alloway, Lawrence. Pop Art the Words // Topics in American Art Since 1945. - New York: WWNorton and Company, 1975. - P. 119–122.
- ↑ Sleigh, Sylvia // Dictionary of Women Artists. - London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997 .-- Vol. 2. - P. 1280-1281.
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Whiteley, Nigel. Art and Pluralism: Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism. - Liverpool University Press, 2012.
- ↑ 1 2 Teaching Art Criticism: Lawrence Alloway at Stony Brook // Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator. - Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. - P. 128-147.
- ↑ Six painters and the object. Lawrence Alloway [curator, conceived and prepared this exhibition and the catalog (Computer file)] . WorldCat.org (July 24, 2009). Date of treatment December 30, 2015.
- ↑ Guggenheim Prize Of $ 2,500 Refused By Danish Painter , The New York Times (January 17, 1964).
- ↑ Guy Debord, Correspondence, vol. 2, September 1960 – December 1964. - Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard , 2001. - P. 273.
- ↑ Tom; McDonough. The Many Lives of Asger Jorn (Eng.) // Art in America : magazine. - 2002. - July.
- ↑ "Systemic art", Systemic art , Oxford: Oxford University Press
- ↑ Esterow . Curator Resigns from Guggenheim, The New York Times (June 15, 1966).
- ↑ Lawrence; Alloway. Art (Eng.) // The Nation : magazine. - 1977 .-- February 5.
- ↑ 1 2 Comenas. Interview with John McHale (Jr.), the son of the 'Father of Pop' . Warholstars.org (July 2006). Date of treatment March 23, 2018.
- ↑ Glueck . Lawrence Alloway Is Dead at 63; Art Historian, Curator and Critic, The New York Times (January 3, 1990).
Links
- The Lawrence Alloway Archive, 1935-2003. Getty Research Institute , Los Angeles , No. 2003.M.46. The archive contains letters, working documents, manuscripts and folders, personal notes and many photographs and slides of contemporary art.