But, more than just charting a different aesthetic and/or a different way of making, or inventing new terminology, Alloway was attempting to break with the Formalist rejection of meaning: “What is missing… is a serious desire to study meanings beyond the purely visual configuration.” Meaning, he argued, was always present in abstract painting. It might be in an “abbreviated and elliptical form,” such as the crucifix in Ad Reinhardt's work. Or it may be in a general form such as the circle, repeated in Noland's paintings, to which we respond with a “knowledge, built-in and natural by now, of circular systems of various types.” These are unconvincing examples. While Formalists were guilty of ignoring meaning at the level of content in the paintings of Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky, to claim that “The presence of covert or spontaneous iconographic images is basic to abstract art…” seems a fanciful assertion. It is one thing to argue that nothing can be without meaning and associations; another to claim that particular or even generic associations have anything of significance or even interest to tell us about the art under review. Alloway was justified in stating—it is the final sentence of his Systemic Painting essay—that “Formal analysis needs the iconographical and experiential aspects, too, which can no longer be dismissed as ‘literary’ except on the basis of an archaic aestheticism,” but how this was going to be achieved at any useful or illuminating level was going to be problematic.

Alloway's interest in iconography, as we have seen, pre-dated the Independent Group. One of its appeals was that it could link visual material as disparate as the sixteenth-century painting and contemporary film. With a more iconological use of imagery, artists such as Paolozzi, McHale, and Golub could convey something of the contemporary condition. In the Guggenheim International Award 1964 he had referred to the recent “iconographical explosion (of which Pop art is a part),” but all of these references are to figurative or semi-figurative art. In the same essay he touched on the relationship of iconography and abstract art, stating, as he did in Systemic Painting, that it “can now be considered as iconography. However it is an iconography without explicit literary sources; it is the repetition and modification by the artist of his characteristic image which yields the iconographic meaning.”