Alloway first wrote (very briefly) about Andy Warhol while he was still at Bennington, reporting that a “heated argument” had broken out at the college about the validity and meaning of Warhol's soup cans. What amused Alloway was that none of the students had seen an “original” Warhol, and only about one-in-six had seen a reproduction: “Clearly Warhol had the power to create art works that did not need to be seen to make at least a part of their effect.” Whereas Duchamp had shown that art need not be hand-made, Warhol (more-or-less) made his works by hand but… suppressed personal handling in the interest of polemical literalness.”

American Pop art surfaced as a movement at the same time as it did in England. Between late 1961 and mid-1962, Billy Al Bengston, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and Warhol had their first solo shows. New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum in September/October 1962, followed by the International Exhibition of the New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in November, are credited with being the first fully Pop exhibitions, although Janis termed them “Factual artists” and “New Realists” in his catalogue, while acknowledging the term “Pop art” as current in England. Art News published “The New American ‘Sign Painters’”— including Dine, Robert Indiana, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Warhol, and Richard Smith—in its September issue with the author, Gene Swenson, wondering whether this “re-examination of the nature of painting and its changing relationship to the world” constitutes a movement. By the end of the year, the Museum of Modern Art was hosting a Pop Art Symposium. The critical reception of Pop in 1962, amongst American critics, was generally negative. Jules Langsner, champion of Hard Edge, described himself as being “cantankerously at odds” and “as bored with the painting as with the object it presents” in the New Paintings of Common Objects exhibition. Max Kozloff in the tellingly named “‘Pop Culture’, Metaphysical Disgust, and the New Vulgarians,” worried that “the art galleries are being invaded by the pin-headed and contemptible style of gum-chewers, bobby-soxers, and worse, delinquents.”