At the time Golub was exhibiting at the ICA in 1957, art from the USA was making a huge impact. The impact occurred almost explosively. In late 1954 Alloway could regret that “American art is rarely seen in London.” The first Pollock painting to be exhibited in London was shown in Opposing Forces at the ICA in January 1953, an exhibition that focused on the work of European artists associated with the Action Painting end of art autre, such as Mathieu, Michaux, and Riopelle, but also included was work by the American Sam Francis, then resident in France. Pollock's Painting 1949 joined the show from Switzerland a few days after it opened. His semi-legendary status at the time was symbolized by a photograph of him at work in the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition in September to October 1953, and in December of that year at the ICA, Toni del Renzio included his work in his lecture on “Non-Formal Painting” which explored the significance of Action Painting and its new, open compositions. In 1954 the ICA showed three Pollock paintings, and was the venue in 1955 for a Mark Tobey exhibition in which Alloway, in his catalogue foreword, positioned Tobey as more important as a forerunner, as well as a contemporary, of American non-figurative art.

The full-blown arrival of modern American art in Britain occurred in January 1956 with the exhibition at the Tate of Modern Art in the United States: a selection from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was, as MoMA's director, René d'Harnoncourt wrote in his introduction to the catalogue, the first major showing in the UK of exclusively twentieth-century American art. D'Harnoncourt listed some of the contemporary British artists whose work could be seen in museum collections in the USA—Armitage, Bacon, Butler, Chadwick, Hepworth, Sutherland, and Moore, amongst others—but regretted how few American artists were known in Britain. Modern Art in the United States incorporated a contemporary section that included paintings by Tobey (four works); de Kooning (three); Baziotes, Gorky, Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, and Rothko (two works each); and Guston, Kline, and Still (one each).