Alloway may have been perceived by one group of artists and critics as “Mr. Abstract” during the 1950s, but his interest in figurative art was just as strong. His early, conventional criticism had largely dealt with historical figurative art but, in the mid-1950s, there was an occasional concern with revisiting past artists in order to re-evaluate their reputations. The most conspicuous was William Hogarth whose works might certainly have been described by Formalists as “narrative” and even “literary.” He wrote about Hogarth on three occasions in the 1950s, praising him for his “topicality,” a quality that Alloway was to identify as one of figurative art's great potentialities. Hogarth is praised not just because of his topicality, but because “The synthesis he made, of formal style and vitally topical subject-matter, is one that realists are in desperate need of once again.”

An unexpected benefit of the growth of abstraction around 1954 was that “The current division of modern art into non-figurative and figurative styles has shown up the conventional state of realist aesthetics. Recent articles and correspondence in London show a new care and ingenuity being given to the definition of realism.” Realism was now being thought of in a way similar to abstraction, as a set of options each with their history and baggage. The spectrum of realist possibilities ranged from the “revival meeting realism” of Stanley Spencer, through forms of social realism, to artists like Paolozzi and McHale whose “new images of man” carried great potential, in Alloway's judgement, as we shall see. One group of painters around the mid-1950s—Jack Smith, Derrick Graves, Edward Middleditch, and John Bratby—became known as the “Kitchen Sink” school because of their concern with what Alloway termed “monochromatic realism… grim squalor presented without reformist zeal.” There was directness in their work that he applauded, even though it was a very different approach to the IG's: “Their art, simplified and assertive, is part of the anti-theoretical outlook widespread among younger artists and art students” in England in mid-decade. But he had reservations: “The group problem is how to paint naturalistically without being merely observant (and hence only a spectator) or elaborately formal (too arty)… At the moment their rough art and hard life are near enough to give their rhetoric a truthful rasp and make their art look unspecialized.