Like other aspiring art critics in the post-War years, Alloway found Richard Gainsborough's Art News and Review, launched in 1949, to be invaluable. The magazine had an eight-page, tabloid format, and was a low cost fortnightly publication, largely devoted to reviews of a wide range of exhibitions—contemporary and historical—in London. Alloway's earliest pieces of criticism, which did not credit the twentytwo- year-old by name, aspired to no more than conventionality. Some “Recent Acquisitions at Greenwich,” for example, were “charming” in that they “enchant the eye and relax the mind…” The language was often that of connoisseurship with references to such qualities as “freshness” and “elegance.” Alloway soon became “L.A.”, and he celebrated his new-found sense of identity by showering praise on the faux-naïf painter Frances Hodgkins whom he thought was “not only among the finest painters of this century, she is probably the best woman painter of all time.” Her Purbeck Courtyard, Afternoon “is a work so completely successful that no other modern landscape I can think of could be placed beside it without appearing deficient in some respect.” Alloway was not all breathless praise, and his barbed wit occasionally surfaces. For example, he wrote of one artist's “hard-won mediocrity [that] consists of a provincial version of the picturesque,” concluding, disparagingly, that “his ideal of painting seems to be a trivial competence which, fortunately, he is unable to sustain completely…”

1950 was a transitional year in his criticism. In 1949 the exhibitions he was assigned were either of regional or national scope. In 1950, within the modest, 300-word format review of the magazine, he began to write about some major international pre-War Modernist artists such as Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, and Wassily Kandinsky. Pre-War Modernists did not eclipse historical figures and he wrote his first piece on Hogarth, an artist whom he continued to rate highly throughout his life. Reviewing the artist's The March to Finchley, Alloway writes that “There is no other English artist who approaches Hogarth in his handling of figure compositions, that Italian idiom which haunted the imaginations of Hayden and Cézanne… It was Hogarth's genius to take over the style of the Baroque, discard its rhetorical trappings—the nudes on clouds and the mythological allusions—and adapt its dynamic style to the realistic and satirical needs of the eighteenth century.”