Influences were from the USA in the late 1950s particularly in the case of Hard Edge. The appeal of this new abstraction was its shedding of the (expendable) convention of content: “It is the optical effect of geometric art, not its theoretical justification, which is the point of continuing hard-edge abstraction, and in this it differs from academic abstract art.” Alloway paralleled the new abstraction to different ways of looking at Mondrian's work. Rather than seeing Mondrian's paintings as equivalences to his de Stijl theory about the new consciousness, order and equilibrium, they could be responded to perceptually. This would involve acknowledging the “flicker… that optical flash at the junction of black horizontal and vertical lines [that]… has been neglected by his critics…” The irony in the change is the diminution of the importance of content, in seeming contradiction to the importance accorded to content in Alloway's discussion of figurative art. However, the perceptual approach to abstraction was a reaction to idealist and academic values prevalent in abstract critical theory from the early years of the twentieth century up to Herbert Read in the 1950s. It did, nonetheless, place Alloway in the Greenberg camp in relation to content.

In the spring of 1960, Alloway presented West Coast Hard-Edge: Four Abstract Classicists at the ICA. The exhibition featured the work of John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and Karl Benjamin and had previously been on display at the San Francisco Museum of Art in the Autumn of 1959 under the title Four Abstract Classicists. Although Alloway has been credited with inventing the term Hard Edge, he acknowledges that it was coined by Jules Langsner, the author of the San Francisco catalogue essay. In that essay, Langsner gets close to the term, stating that “Abstract Classicist painting is hard-edged painting,” but, for the ICA exhibition, Alloway elevated the phrase Langsner had used conversationally and descriptively, into the title that gives currency to a new tendency. Alloway attacks the use of the word “classical” because of the word's art historical baggage, and the implication that Romanticism is, therefore, always “fuzzy and personally autographic.” For Langsner, Hard Edge continued classicism's characteristics of order and balance, simply stated. Alloway agreed that the forms were “economical, their surfaces immaculate, their edges clean, but classicism fits none of them particularly well.”