Alloway pinned his hopes for British art on a younger generation of artists, including Robyn Denny, Richard Smith, and William Green. They began to emerge in 1957, the year when the shift from French to American influences occurred. At the Metavisual Abstract Tachiste exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1957 which, with the previous year's Statements 1956, represented the highpoint of art informel in Britain, Denys Sutton wrote in his catalogue preface that the new gestural painting on display was “the hybrid child of the Frenchman Dubuffet, the German Ernst, [and] the American Jackson Pollock”—European and American art seen as part of the same development. But with increased awareness of individual American artists through solo exhibitions of the work of Sam Francis (1957), Jackson Pollock (1958), and Adolph Gottlieb (1959), culminating in the New American Painting of 1959 at the Tate, the American influence became pre-eminent. Alloway had spotted the first signs of this at the Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1957, singling out Richard Smith as “an artist who has successfully replaced the realist and pseudo-antique discipline of art school with a thorough assimilation of post-War American art.” He selected Smith and some other younger generation painters, such as Gillian Ayres, Ralph Rumney, and Denny, for inclusion in the Dimensions exhibition at the O'Hana Gallery in 1957 that surveyed British Abstract Art, 1948–1957, and a year later Smith and Denny appeared in the Abstract Impressionism exhibition; Smith was praised by Alloway for upholding the spatial qualities of Action Painting while “pastoral references are kept down.”

The major artists of the Middle Generation had been born between 1893 (Hitchens) and 1920 (Heron); the younger generation were slightly younger than Alloway: Denny (1930), Richard Smith (1931), and William Green (1934) were only in their twenties during the later 1950s and were as much influenced by American culture as American art. The younger generation's attitude to America was symptomatic of a cultural change in Britain in the late 1950s. Alloway pointed out in 1960 that the implications of the new values were not confined, therefore, to the artworks: “Modern British artists try not to separate their work and their leisure: there is only what they do.