Art and Pluralism Lawrence Alloway's Cultural Criticism

Lawrence Alloway (1926-1990) was one of the most influential and widely-respected art writers of the post-War years, often considered as one of the founders of contemporary cultural ideals. From his central involvement with the Independent Group and the ICA in London in the 1950s, he moved to New York, the new world centre of art, at the beginning of the 1960s. There, he was a key interpreter of, first, Pop Art, then non-gestural, "Systemic" abstraction and, later, Land Art. In the early 1970s he became deeply involved with the Realist revival and the early Feminist movement in art - Sylvia Sleigh, the painter, was his wife - and went on to write extensively about the gallery and art market "as a system", examining the critic's role within it.This book advances our understanding of pluralism in art and culture, and its importance then and now. A new interest in pluralism came after Formalism and before Post-Modern theory's influence on art, and its relationship to these two value systems needs to be better understood. Alloway deals with issues that have relevancy for visual culture as a whole in the 1950-1980 period. Art and Pluralism provides a close and critical reading of Alloway's writings, and sets his work in the cultural and political context of the London and New York art worlds of the 1950s to the early 1980s. A invaluable work for all twentieth-century artists and art historians.

Nigel Whiteley was Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Lancaster.