Alannah Coleman
Alannah Coleman was an Australian painter, gallery director and dealer in Australian art who drew valuable attention to the work of expatriates to England in the 1950s–1990s and increased awareness of Australian art and artists in Europe.
Early life
Alannah Coleman, christened Eileen, and who was called Lana by her family, was born in 1918 in Melbourne. Her parents Irene Monica and Ernest Coleman separated when she was seven. She then lived in a spartan rear flat at 31 Marine Parade, St Kilda with her politically active mother and Irish grandparents, from whose Irish Catholicism she developed a strong sense of identity. She attended the St Kilda Primary School, went briefly to a convent school and then to the Emily McPherson College where she met Elizabeth Paterson, daughter of artist Hugh Paterson and niece of John Ford Paterson, and who was to become Sidney Nolan's future first wife.War years
With the outbreak of WW2, in 1940 Coleman figured frequently in the social pages where she was noted for her fashion sense. Her contemporary, poet and broadcaster Alister Kershaw, whose portrait she painted was runner-up in the 1944 Archibald Prize, remembered:Back in the Thirties and early Forties there were about fifty square yards at the top of Melbourne's Little Collins Street where the sight of a beard didn't provoke a display of popular indignation. You could even get away with sandals. The bewitching young artist Alannah Coleman could get away with more than that. Her costume was, as a rule, richly international. Once when we were having dinner together, she arrived wearing velvet trousers and a Breton fisherman's striped shirt. A cape like those worn by officers of the Bersaglieri hung to her ankles. An Egyptian fez was perched becomingly on her long blonde hair. A quiver of arrows slung over her shoulders added a Robin Hood or Saxon touch. If she had anything on her feet at all, it can only have been a pair of Roman sandals. Anywhere else in the city, she might have been run in on a charge of disturbing the peace; here, she received no more attention than was due to an exceptionally attractive young woman.
She contributed to the RAN Relief Fund performance at the National Theatre, Melbourne, and joined the official party accompanying commander of the Free French Forces in the Pacific, Commandant Jardin, for the gala first recital of Arise, O France, also at the National Theatre, in 1941.
Splits in the Contemporary Arts Society state branches over the control of it by the Angry Penguins versus the communist adherents started to appear publicly in 1943 but as Haese notes, in the Victorian council John Sinclair, Nolan, Perceval, Harris, Boyd, Allan Henderson and Alannah Coleman, democratic principles prevailed; 'the Angry Penguins controlled rather than dominated the Melbourne branch because until 1945 the communist members maintained constant pressure on their leadership.' Coleman was close to Rupert Bunny when in 1936 he became the Vice-President of the Contemporary Art Society, and they remained friends until his death in 1947.
In 1943, Coleman married a Catholic, the Australian journalist and magazine editor, Des Fennessy who later became Australian Trade Commissioner in Seoul. The marriage was annulled in 1949.
Artist
Coleman's most productive period as a painter of portraits, still-life, and landscapes, was through the war years from 1943, and until 1949. George Bell, reviewing her April 1944, widely publicised, joint show with Joan Malcolm, wrote favourably of their 'dynamic style' and of Coleman's 'great variety of manners of seeing and treating her subject.' He considered that 'a certain weakness In construction will no doubt be overcome in time,' as the 'landscapes have all been treated with a worthy determination to avoid banality'. Bell listed as 'outstanding' portraits by Coleman, James Quinn, Lawson and Matthews, and landscapes by A. Keynes, G, Anderson, Isabel Tweddle in the Victorian Artists' Society Spring show of 1944. She spent a month in Sydney in November that year, working on an upcoming show, and was at Desiderious Orban's opening at Blaxland Gallery along with Douglas Watson and Charles Bush, who were then both A.I.F. war artists. Coleman participated in November 1944 in an exhibition at the South Australian Gallery with a portrait noted as 'excellent' by reviewer Esmond George.At a group show at the Blue Door Gallery, Melbourne, in November 1945, Colman's still life of shasta daisies was considered by The Herald reviewer a 'choice arrangement of appealing color-tones' from 'a young painter whose progress is definite and continuous', while critic Alan McCulloch considered the Daisies 'worthy of comment' amongst the 'younger artists,' after having remarked that she continued 'to make progress' in a review of a Victorian Artists Society show in September that year. During the war years Coleman worked in the Navy Department, and George Bell noted a 'quiet reserve' in a portrait of a naval officer which was her contribution to the Victorian Artists' Society Autumn show of 1946.
Coleman's first solo exhibition, in November 1946, drew a cold response from The Argus reviewer :
Alannah Coleman's paintings at the Myer Gallery are more likely to appeal to disciples of modern cults than to the general body of art lovers. Whether they be portraits or pictures of Sydney suburbs or slum areas, there is little beauty in the work. They might be called fashionable just now, but if art is long fashions are not.Elizabeth Webb, a radio personality who expressed negative views on modernism as 'malformation', noted that Coleman's 'portraits of Alister Kershaw, Dudley Barr, and of herself, were entries for the Archibald Prize and all three reached the finals,' and was well-disposed of evidence of Coleman's academic training in her critique of her solo show of June 1947 in Brisbane; 'Miss Coleman is not an extreme 'extremist.' She is not influenced by the 'modern' trend so completely as to ignore the basic principles of 'good drawing' in all her work.'
By contrast, Charles G. Cooper, Classics Professor at the University of Queensland, in his Courier-Mail review of the 1949 joint exhibition of paintings by Alannah Coleman and Arthur Evan Read at Moreton Galleries, Queensland, is dismissive of Read's lack of subtlety, but writes glowingly of Coleman as 'distinctly an original,' praising the 'freshness, vigour and decorative excellence' of her work, and urging audiences to 'relish her piquant blend of ingenuousness and sophistication.' Artist James Wieneke of the Brisbane Telegraph is more sympathetic to Read's depictions of the slums of Sydney, and contrasts those with the 'sensitiveness and a strong feeling of romanticism' in Coleman's work, responding most favourably to the sense of humour in her Siamese Cat which has 'a quality one could definitely describe as feline. This is conveyed through detail such as the cold blue and those long, slender, moving leaves in the background—eloquent of a chilly restlessness.'
Post-war
After the War, in 1946 Coleman managed the Contemporary Art Society exhibition in Sydney and moved into a studio flat in a three-storey house at 151 Dowling Street, Woolloomooloo, among other artists including Rod Edwards, and Oliffe Richmond in the downstairs studio. Nolan retreated there in 1948 after his estrangement from the Reeds at Heidi and before joining Cynthia Reed. At Darling Street, Coleman met Frank Mitchell and Robert Henry for whom she modelled their first fashion collection in 1949. Coleman also researched the 1865 period at the Mitchell Library for her costume designs for the film Robbery Under Arms. She held her first solo show, works made in Sydney, at the Myer Art Gallery in Melbourne in November 1946, the event unfortunately coinciding with the death of Alannah's mother Irene. Over December 1949 she worked on an entry for the Archibald Prize.Stalking and an attempt on her life in June 1950 by a jealous lover precipitated her departure for Europe on the SS Ranchi. Having been welcomed to London by Charles Bush and sharing quarters in Earl's Court with Bush, his partner Phyllis Waterhouse, Joan Currie, Joan Malcolm, Douglas Watson and Peter Blayney, she set out on an adventurous, low-budget return visit with Sheila Boyle she had been obliged to find employment as usherette in the Royal Box at Mills Brothers Circus, and in a Bond Street jewellery store J.W. Bensons. The couple had twins Alister and Simone in 1953, and on the babies' first birthday the family moved from their central London apartment in Birdcage Walk overlooking St James's Park, and which Coleman had creatively decorated herself, into 'Cherry Tree Cottage' in Langford Close, St. John's Wood, next door to Mark Hambourg. Alannah and Denis separated in 1957.
London
Coleman, after her relocation to London and second divorce, launched a new career. She established in 1959 an art dealership from her apartment, the Alannah Coleman Gallery in Putney, where she promoted such expatriate Australian artists as Arthur Boyd, Tony Underhill, Oliffe Richmond, Tony Underhill and Louis James by inviting clients to see the work in the domestic setting. Sidney Nolan and Cynthia lived nearby and she continued to sell his work. Barbara Blackman remembered her as catlike : ‘She slinks about in Royal circles, she is smelling out the buyer, she will purr up to him and whisper the right names’. She was conscientious; holding long parties to introduce artists to buyers; attending several previews in the evenings; advising clients in their own homes on the appropriate hanging of their purchases.Coleman was active in establishing the Australian Artists' Association in London, to foster connections between expatriate Australian artists and the British art world. Contemporary Australian painting achieved international status due to a number of significant exhibitions that took place in Britain between 1953 and 1964. With interest increasing, on 2 June 1961, Recent Australian Painting had been launched at the Whitechapel Gallery. Then, following the Tate Gallery's 24 January–3 March 1963 exhibition Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary – the largest such survey in the UK since 1923, but criticised for its merely token inclusion of younger artists' work—Coleman had organised another; Australian Painting and Sculpture in Europe Today at New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, Kent which Sir Kenneth Clark opened on 19 April 1963, lauding it as ‘the most impressive group show of Australian art ever in Britain'.
Peter Sheldon-Williams writing on how 'An Australian Row Comes To Britain' in The Contemporary Review of February 1963 positions Australian Painting and Sculpture in Europe Today as a representation of the Australian avant-garde, against the conservatism of Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary which imposed the reactionary aesthetic tastes of Robert Menzies, who had founded the ill-fated Australian Academy of Art, on an exhibition meant to showcase the progress of Australian art. Sheldon-Williams compares Menzies with Hitler and Khrushchev in regard to despotic fear of 'change, reform and new ideas' to conclude that 'the Austrahan Exhibition at the Tate is not giving us the whole picture, is not in fact a 'true cross-section of what modem Australian Art is achieving,' before detailing Coleman's bona fides and her achievement in the Folkestone alternative:
earliest fame came when she was a practising artist herself first a Melbourne and later in Sydney. Miss Coleman was a familiar figure in those days in the art colones of both these centres. She was present at the first inaugural meeting of the Contemporary Art Society of Australia when Albert Tucker was president. She made herself responsible for organizing important early exhibitions of Australian Modern Art including the big show of Danila Vassilieff, the Russian modern artist who settled in Australia and became the centre of one "establishment" storm after another. Miss Coleman was a close friend of many of the young painters of those days, including Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. Her association with them and others gave her keen insight into what was going on in the Australian cultural front. Now, Miss Coleman is in London. She has established herself in a magnificent salon where she is surrounded by the works of modern Australian painters and sculptors. Her address in Putney is a cultural shopwindow for the Antipodes. Nearly all Australian artists who have been in Britain or who have settled in this country have examples of their œuvre there. The first fully-public display of Miss Coleman's "collection" is being shown in the galleries of the New Metropole Art Centre in Folkestone.
Coleman organised an extension of the show with work by Boyd, Nolan, Blackman, Len French, Brett Whiteley and William Delafield-Cook at the Stadel’sches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main, opening on 4 July 1963. She was appointed commissioner general to the Paris Biennale for Young Painters in 1963 and was hired as director at Heal's Gallery in Tottenham Court Road, London, where she showed both Australian and British artists.
Also in 1963 Coleman married her third husband, John Newell. The couple divorced in 1968, the marriage strained by the demands of her co-directing the Ewan Phillips gallery in Maddox Street, Mayfair and directing Heal's Gallery and her research into Australian artists, which intensified, requiring her attendance at openings and events and lectures, such as those at the Royal Society of Arts.