Back in London, the Whitechapel's Jackson Pollock exhibition in late 1958 provided the opportunity for an in-depth assessment of the artist's work, but it was the major exhibition of The New American Painting, organized by the Museum of Modern Art and shown in eight European countries during 1958 and 1959, that most excited Alloway: “I thought it was absolutely marvellous…,” he recalled in 1987, “The New American Painting was, at last, the show we had been waiting for for years. It had almost nothing but Abstract Expressionists in it.” But, whereas Modern Art in the United States had, within its limited scope, emphasized the Action Painters in the contemporary section, The New American Painting gave equal attention to the Field Painters. Indeed, for Alloway, “It was the Field painters, really, who astonished and exhilarated me. I thought de Kooning was terrific, but so what! I found myself turning 'round all the time and checking the Rothkos, the Stills, the Pollocks.”

His response was not typical of British critics, and he wrote a piece for Art News and Review titled “sic, sic, sic” in which he exposed the prejudices of his compatriots. These ranged from the faint praise that the artists had created “a new type of background art, perfect for penthouse parties…,” to the faint damnation that Rothko's paintings displayed “delightful mildness” (making them sound, Alloway thought, “like a cigarette brand”!). Critics from the Left and Right were equally dismissive. John Berger in the New Statesman referred to the exhibition “one of the most dramatic examples of a society strangling its young…” In the conservative Daily Telegraph, one critic described the canvases as being covered with “blobs, stripes, scrawls, smears, runnels, drips, filth… Utterly degenerate… muck, lucrative muck…” These “fraudulent absurdities” made the writer regret that “Hitler died too soon.” Alloway reminds his readers that some of the artists in The New American Painting were Jews. If there was pro-American, Cold War intention behind the exhibition, it did not seem to be succeeding as propaganda. The lesson Alloway drew from the collected criticism was that it was parochial and judged American art “solely in relation to local problems… and never with respect to informed opinion in New York or, indeed, Paris, Rome, Switzerland, Venice (every other summer), and so on.”