Six Painters and the Object was originally intended as a comprehensive survey of new developments in the USA, but was cut back to showcase the work of six New York-based artists: Dine, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, and Warhol. It was, according to Nancy Spector, “the earliest full-scale museum exhibition to investigate the phenomenon” of Pop, a textbook example of Alloway's unofficial policy of 1961 that a museum exhibition of contemporary art could (a) make use of a theme and (b) include artists who were established, but not yet at the stage of a retrospective. Alloway emphasized that the exhibition did not include objects, even though two of the artists—Rauschenberg and Dine—were object-makers. His point in doing this was to focus on what was happening in painting. In 1962 he wondered if it was being eclipsed by inter-media work and assemblage, and the only interesting new painting was fundamentally abstract, such as Hard Edge. “It is hoped, therefore, that by presenting six painters in this exhibition, they can be detached from an amorphous setting and, also, that the definition of painting can be extended to cope with the problem that their work presents.” It is interesting to note that Alloway, with his endless enthusiasm for the new, did not see inter-media art as overthrowing established types of practice. New media may displace, but they did not replace conventional media: innovation increased the number of options available to the artist. Painting would be “extended” rather than eclipsed, and there was no sense of retrenchment in Dine's move from the uncharted territory of Happenings, to the mapped terrain of painting. What the painters in the exhibition shared “is the use of objects drawn from the communications network and the physical environment of the city”—flags, magazines, media photographs, mass-produced objects, comic strips, and advertisements. Alloway's essay discusses each artist's approach in turn, emphasizing not only what is innovative, but also what links them to the past. The paintings’ up-to-dateness in terms of subject matter—their “topicality”—“should not be supposed to constitute the total content of the work. In fact, the more sensitive one is to the original topical material, the more aware one becomes of the extent of its transformation by the artist, the spreading of the ephemeral image in time.”