Un art autre had been the subject and title of what was, in Alloway's opinion, an “enormously influential” book written by the French art critic Michel Tapié, and published in Paris in 1952. What Tapié had had in mind were the post-War anti-formal and anti-classical tendencies of informel, tachiste, and Action Painting that could be observed in both European and American art. Among the artists in the book were Dubuffet, Fautrier, Michaux, Michieu, Mathieu, Riopelle, Soulages, Capogrossi, Richier, Appel, Tobey, Sam Francis, and Pollock. Dubuffet and Mathieu were the most illustrated artists, part of a strong French emphasis to this international tendency. Three British artists were included—justifiably, Paolozzi; tenuously, Reg Butler, and inexplicably, Graham Sutherland. The movement, therefore, eluded precision, but it played its part in suggesting that something widespread was happening amongst a new generation of post-War artists, and that Paris was still a major art capital.

Art autre, as we have seen, had been the principal influence on the aesthetic of Parallel of Life and Art in 1953, an exhibition that included photographs of a Paolozzi head and a Dubuffet figure. Paolozzi had been in Paris in the late 1940s and was the link to the conversion of Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull, and the Smithsons to art autre. Alloway was thoroughly versed in the tendency through his ICA connections and friendship with Paolozzi and, in 1955, had cited Tapié in his introduction to the work of Mark Tobey at the ICA. A year later he gave his fullest account of art autre when discussing “The Challenge of Post-War Painting” in the Arts Council's exhibition on New Trends in Painting. Although the exhibition, which comprised paintings from a private collection, included artists like Nicolas de Stael, the overlap with the artists in Tapié's book—Dubuffet, Riopelle, Appel, and Sam Francis, for example—gave it a genuinely art autre character. Alloway warned visitors that their “early impression… will be of violence: an impact of the quick and the big.” The “violence”—one of Alloway's prized qualities in a work, whether of fine art or a movie—indicated a “rejection of the rest of modern art.” Even former avant-garde art was made to look “suddenly traditional: although the sitter may be ‘distorted’ a Picasso half-length is nearer to Sir Godfrey Kneller's kit-kat portraits than it is to Other art.”