The art brut depiction of the human image influenced by popular culture in the work of Paolozzi, McHale, and Cordell represents an important contribution to art autre by artists working in Britain. The human image had been of great interest to Alloway since 1953 but was largely confined to artists influenced by art brut and the new kind of human imagery that resulted. In 1954 he had presented his seminar paper on the human image at the ICA in which he included Giacometti, Dubuffet, Bacon, and de Kooning. We can gather from his seminar notes that Giacometti was interpreted on conventional Existential grounds, whereas both Dubuffet and Bacon were proof that a “Fine-popular arts continuum now exists”—the first recorded use of his continuum term—because both took imagery from art sources and “Pop art.” De Kooning was described as an “Abstract-Expressionist with trunk-murderer sexuality”! The reworkings of a canvas were like “attacks not revisions.” This fine art imagery took its place alongside the “technological pop art” that a “mass audience looks at, reads, or hears… movies, ads, comics.” Reference was made to science fiction figures, Superman, “black” cowboy figures, horror monsters, and “skinny models” and “dress designer's chic” in Vogue. The “topical and urgent” human imagery in popular culture existed on a continuum with the “violent” and “raw” representations in fine art to give the figure a rebirth as relevant imagery in the 1950s.

Alloway drew attention to the influence of the science fiction illustration of Startling Stories on Paolozzi in terms of the way a human image can lose its particular identity while retaining its basic configuration. In an article that near-coincided with both Paolozzi's exhibition at the ICA and his lecture on the human image, he praised Paolozzi's ability to—in effect—expend conventions of depiction yet retain “schematic symbols of eyes, teeth, nose, and skull. The minimal nature of the symbols is a way of asserting humanity. … Paolozzi is not creating monsters, like a Surrealist, but clinging to the human image.” The strong humanist interpretation evident here had started a year earlier when Alloway's earliest writings on Paolozzi appeared.