#lawrence alloway

[garadinervi]

Nine Abstract Artists, Introduction by Lawrence Alloway, Alec Tiranti Ltd., London, 1954 [Pallant House Gallery Bookshop, Gallery Bookshop Ltd., Chichester. Room&Book, London]

Feat.: Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Roger Hilton, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore, and William Scott

[thegetty]

Calling all transcribers!

The Digital Art History team at the Getty Research Institute needs your help! Their newest project, Mutual Muses, aims to crowdsource transcriptions of art critic Lawrence Alloway and artist Sylvia Sleigh’s intense romantic and intellectual correspondence. As lovers and confidants, the couple wrote letters to each other for over six decades, and this project currently focuses on their musings from 1948–1953.

To start, take a quick tour of the transcription project on Zooniverse and join over 500 participants already transcribing. Each letter has its own transcription page. 

Happy transcribing! 

[suobscenidad]

Catalogue for the exhibition An Exhibit by Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Lawrence Alloway at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. I.C.A. ,1957, copyright Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, photo copyright Tate Archive

[equatorjournal]

Lawrence Alloway installing Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966.

[suobscenidad]

an Exhibit (1957) was originally conceived by Hamilton in close collaboration with writer-critic Lawrence Alloway and artist Victor Pasmore for the ICA’s original premises at Dover Street in London. Organised around a modular hanging system, a kit of suspended Perspex panels was devised to be freely configured whilst installing, with the intention of giving visitors opportunity ‘to generate their own compositions’ as they walked through.  

[robertsmithsonlibraryandbookclub]

Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club  [Alloway, Lawrence. Violent America: The Movies 1946–1964, 1971] Oil paint on carved wood, 2018

[galleryexit]

The definition of culture is changing as a result of the pressure of the great audience, which is no longer new but experienced in the consumption of its arts. Therefore, it is no longer sufficient to define culture solely as something that a minority guards for the few and the future (though such art is uniquely valuable and as precious as ever). Our definition of culture is being stretched beyond the fine art limits imposed on it by Renaissance theory, and refers now, increasingly, to the whole complex of human activities. Within this definition, rejection of the mass-produced arts is not, as critics think, a defense of culture but an attack on it. The new role for the academic is keeper of the flame; the new role for the fine arts is to be one of the possible forms of communication in an expanding framework that also includes the mass arts.

Lawrence Alloway, The Arts and the Mass Media

[gottliebfoundation]

“Ten Americans After Paul Klee” is now on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. 

The exhibition includes five Adolph Gottlieb paintings which span from 1941 to 1950, representing early and late examples of what Gottlieb called “Pictographs.” On “Pictographs,” art critic Lawrence Alloway writes, 

“Gottlieb’s Pictographs explored a broad range of symbolism, but without exceeding the then-traditional small scale of American easel painting. Nonetheless within these limits, he showed an unquenchable inventiveness. …The grid, for all its flexibility, ceased to satisfy Gottlieb by the late 40’s. Color expanded without linear intervention, as in Sounds at Night, 1948, in which there are no walls to hold the scattered pictographs. In Labyrinth I, 1950, there is a conspicuous grid, but it is in negative, produced by peeling tape from already painted areas; in retrospect we can see this as a part of Gottlieb’s interest in continuous planes of color.” — Lawrence Alloway, “Adolph Gottlieb and Abstract Painting,” from “Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective” (1981). The exhibition will be on view at the Phillips Collection through May 6th, 2018. 

Get more information on the Phillips exhibition. Read the entire Lawrence Alloway essay here.