Fred W. McDarrah, Vintage Silver Gelatin Photograph Guggenheim Museum Architecture Photo Alloway, 1964

Lawrence Alloway Museum Director Jan 28 1964
Photographer – Fred McDarrah

Over a 50-year span, McDarrah documented the rise of the Beat Generation, the city’s postmodern art movement, its off-off-Broadway actors, troubadours, politicians, agitators and social protests.
Fred captured Jack Kerouac frolicking with women at a New Year’s bash in 1958, Andy Warhol adjusting a movie-camera lens in his silver-covered factory, and Bob Dylan offering a salute of recognition outside Sheridan Square near the Voice’s old office.
Not just a social chronicler, McDarrah was a great photo-journalist.
For years, McDarrah was the Voice’s only photographer and, for decades, he ran the Voice’s photo department, where he helped train dozens of young photographers, including James Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Robin Holland and Marc Asnin. His mailbox was simply marked “McPhoto.”
An exhibit of McDarrah’s photos of artists presented by the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea was hailed by The New York Times as “a visual encyclopedia of the era’s cultural scene.”
artists in their studios, (Alice Neel, Philip Guston, Stuart Davis, Robert Smithson, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline), actors (Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro on the set of “Taxi Driver”), musicians (Janis Joplin, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan) and documentary images of early happenings and performances (Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, Al Hansen, Jim Dine, Nam June Paik). The many images of Andy Warhol include the well-known one with his Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964. Woody Allen, Diane Arbus, W. H. Auden, Francis Bacon, Joan Baez, Louise Bourgeois, David Bowie, Jimmy Breslin, William Burroughs, John Cage, Leo Castelli, Christo, Leonard Cohen, Merce Cunningham, William de Kooning, Jim Dine, Mark di Suvero, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Federico Fellini, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Indiana, Mick Jagger, Jasper Johns, Kusama, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Elvis Presley, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Lou Reed, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, and others.
McDarrah’s prints have been collected in depth by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. His work is in numerous public and private collections.

Lawrence Reginald Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from 1961. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US. He first used the term “mass popular art” in the mid-1950s and used the term “Pop Art” in the 1960s to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images.
Alloway started writing reviews for the British periodical ArtReview, then styled Art News and Review in 1949 and for the American periodical Art News in 1953. In Nine Abstract Artists (1954) he promoted the Constructivist artists that emerged in Britain after the Second World War: Robert Adams, Terry Frost, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Roger Hilton, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin, Victor Pasmore, and William Scott.
In 1961, through his contacts with the American painter Barnett Newman, Alloway was offered a lecturer position at Bennington College in Vermont. He and his wife, the realist painter Sylvia Sleigh, lived in Bennington for only one year before Alloway was appointed curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, a position he held until 1966. In 1963 he organised the pop art show, Six Painters and the Object. He chaired the jury of the 1964 Guggenheim Awards, one of which was refused by the painter Asger Jorn. Alloway was also an ardent supporter of Abstract expressionism and American Pop artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol.