Alloway discussed figurative art in another Carbondale-written article of 1967, his celebrated “Art as Likeness.” In 1964 he had referred to the recent “iconographical explosion (of which Pop art is a part),” but the majority of the non-Pop artists he cited had made their reputations in the 1950s. Pop had been at the center of the explosion, but now the smoke had cleared, it was possible to see the variety that Pop's mode of figuration had obscured. His motivation in writing about realist-oriented paintings developing out of Pop art is that “almost everything is still to be done.” Figurative painting had been eclipsed, first, by abstract art and, second, by Pop. It was not that figurative painting merited any special status: he recalled the “embarrassing slogans” about the revival of humanism at the time of New Images of Man in 1959 and, for similar reasons, he was condemnatory of Peter Selz's Human Concern/Personal Torment exhibition at the Whitney in 1969. As far as Alloway was concerned, “Realism, like abstract art, is an option, not an imperative.” The fact of the matter is that it was critically ignored, while sophisticated attention had been given to abstraction. An unwelcome effect was that abstraction was seen as profound, and figuration often as merely pleasing but trivial—the legacy of Formalist prejudice. Figurative art needed to be rescued from its relative invisibility because “it is a statistical part of the multi-style abundance of this century's art.” Alloway restated his enduring premise: “Only a pluralistic aesthetic is adequate for the first move towards seeing figurative painters straight and not as marginal courtiers or saboteurs around the throne of abstract artists.” Art critics had been “undiligent” and figurative art lacked abstract art's vocabulary. The Formalist divorce of form and subject matter had to be reversed and reconsidered: “The still point of a painting at which figurative imagery becomes mute, where action is suspended, is not the result of the triumph of form over content, but of our awareness of the interaction of representation with medium, the coalescence of presence and absence.”

Pop's success meant it had become a blanket-term for a wide range of figurative art that alluded to the city, and Alloway now sought to differentiate between Pop artists and others.