‘A’ is for Allen’

March is Women’s History Month and it is timely to celebrate a woman who was once recognised for her contribution to Australian culture but is now largely forgotten. Let’s meet Mary Cecil Allen.

Mary Cecil Allen (1893-1962) was a Melbourne-born artist, writer and lecturer who, despite living most of her adult life in America, and curating the first exhibition of Australian art in New York in 1931, was best-known in Australia for her lectures which introduced the ideas of modernism to Melbourne’s art establishment.

Allen was born into the world of ideas and social connections. Her father was an anatomical pathologist and professor who became the Dean of Medicine at the University of Melbourne; and her mother was a community worker who frequently entertained members of Melbourne’s intellectual elite. She received a comprehensive private education and spent her childhood living in a staff house on the university campus. Although Allen qualified to study a Bachelor of Arts, she decided instead to pursue her love of art under Fred McCubbin at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1910 to 1917 where she excelled at her studies. After finishing at the gallery school, Allen studied with the tonal impressionist, Max Meldrum, for a short period.

During the early 1920s, Allen was recognised as a rising star of the Melbourne art world. A member of the Australian Art Association, the Victorian Artists’ Society and Twenty Melbourne Painters, her well-attended exhibitions were opened by the University Vice-Chancellor and Dame Nellie Melba. Allen’s artwork focussed on landscape and portraiture (four works were included in Archibald Prizes) and she received numerous commissions.

In addition, Allen’s ability to communicate about art led to her becoming the first female art critic for ‘The Sun’ newspaper in 1925, and the first female guide and lecturer at the National Gallery of Victoria the following year. Her talent as an educator so impressed a visiting American, Florence Gillies, that she hired Allen as a personal guide to the galleries of Europe in 1926.  After eight months touring the continent, Allen was invited by the Carnegie Trust to lecture in New York where she was immediately captivated by the city.

New York became home and in 1928/29, Allen gave a series of public lectures which were published as ‘The Mirror of the Passing World’ (1928) and ‘Painters of the Modern Mind’ (1929). In the following years, Allen lectured at New York’s universities, the New York Public Library and public galleries and was appointed head of the Art Department at the exclusive girls’ school – Miss Hewitt’s School.

In 1930, at the instigation of the Australian Commissioner-General to America, Allen organised the ‘First Contemporary All-Australian Art Exhibition’. Opening at the Roerich Museum in New York in February 1931, the exhibition of one hundred paintings subsequently toured to fourteen cities. Besides her own work, featured artists included Norman Lindsay, Thea Proctor, George Bell and Dora Toovey. The exhibition attracted large audiences, and Allen lectured on the works during its tour. Sadly, according to Allen, all the art exhibited had non-Australian scenery and titles such as ‘Landscape in Spain’. She elaborated, “If I had come upon as much as a single kangaroo I would have hailed it with delight”.

Allen’s own artwork in the show was singled out and described by The New York Times as ‘arrestingly modern’ which highlights how her travels in Europe and America had influenced her art practice and converted her to modernism. Allen now believed that ‘art should convey ideas, rather than mimic visual reality’. This led to her three key themes. The first was her preoccupation with a personalised perception of  form: ‘a conception of natural objects as the directions of planes in space, expressed by lines, colours, lights and shadows’. Second, was the significance of rhythm or ‘the inevitable relationship of one element to all others’. Finally, Allen believed art should have a strong primitivist streak. Allen maintained these principles throughout her career although over time her style moved increasingly towards abstraction.

Despite living in New York, Allen retained a fondness and strong connection with Melbourne. In July 1935 she visited Melbourne and was feted by the local art and intellectual society. However, her new art ideas were less well-received in a city still in thrall of ‘national pastoralist landscapes’ with local critics describing modernism as ‘imported and perverted art’.

‘Modern ideas’ were more commonly seen in commercial art, advertising and fashion and were not regarded as the province of serious art. The association with ‘amateur’ female practitioners and Allen’s connection with America, which at the time was viewed as crass and vulgar, in a city that preferred emulating English and European models, also encouraged conservative critics to belittle her practice. Allen’s exhibition of forty paintings of abstracted New York skyscrapers and subways at the Fine Art Society’s Gallery was not widely appreciated and many viewers interpreted her abandonment of realism as a loss of skill. Describing her show in his anti-modernist polemic, ‘Addled Art’ in 1942, Lionel Lindsay used Allen as the exemplar of trivial female artists writing: ‘[women painters] have more leisure and the superficial nature of modern painting attracts their light hands … Living close to the moment, and accustomed to follow without questioning any and every mode, they find all styles equally pleasant which have been pronounced ‘advanced’ and ‘the thing’.

(Modernism had gained a foothold in Sydney with the input of ideas from the European travels of Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, Grace Crowley, Dorrit Black and Anne Dangar. Allen’s years in New York had kept her separate from engaging with these artists and the Melbourne-Sydney art divide meant Allen was firmly situated within the Melbourne-based milieu).

While in Melbourne, Allen  spoke with many women’s groups and also lectured at the National Gallery of Victoria. Her Melbourne connections, local celebrity status, and speaking ability attracted audiences of up to a thousand people. Using slides of art by Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, Allen guided her audiences to find beauty in works that conveyed ideas rather than reproducing reality. As she noted: ‘modernism is like a foreign language which must be learnt before it can be appreciated’. Her lectures on ‘Art and Nature’, ‘Photography’ and ‘Distortion in Modern Art’ attracted record audiences many of whom could not be seated. So, although trivialised by critics, during her year in Melbourne, Allen did exert considerable influence in rendering modernism palatable to the general public.

Returning to America in 1936, Allen resumed teaching and travel. As a friend and student of the abstract expressionist, Hans Hofmann, she was a regular visitor to Provincetown, the artists’ colony in Massachusetts – eventually moving there in 1949. She held shows of her art in New York and Brooklyn, and lectured to many academic institutions on the east coast of America.

In January 1950, Allen returned to Australia and was again greeted with enthusiasm. Despite the flowering of modern art centred around Heide in the 1940s, when Allen arrived the Melbourne art scene remained fundamentally conservative. As Allen had maintained her local connections and aura of cosmopolitan glamour, she was in a better position to cultivate the appreciation for modernist abstraction that was already widespread in New York. Maintaining the same themes from her previous visit, Allen discussed how modernism was not the realm of bohemians or radicals, but a personal response to modern life. An exhibition of her recent art at the gallery in Georges department store, juxtaposed modernism with modern commodities, and her daily lunchtime talks exposed the general public to her ideas. The exhibition was largely well reviewed and the painting Sea, studio: winter – a colourful semi-abstract of Allen’s Provincetown studio – was even purchased by the NGV.

Urging local artists to draw inspiration from the local landscape, while in Australia Allen travelled to Alice Springs to ‘capture something of the strange character and beauty of central Australia’ for a forthcoming exhibition in New York. On this trip she wrote ‘Notes on Central Australia’ which was published in Meanjin in Spring 1950.

Allen lived in Provincetown for the remainder of her life, describing it as: ‘the Mecca … for the new abstract expressionist and action painter’. She made one final visit to Australia in late 1959 and, as well as exhibiting her latest work, gave many lectures and workshops. The post-war affluence, immigration and looming Olympic Games had changed the ‘climate’ in Melbourne and the local art world was more receptive to her ideas.

In January 1960, the NGV and the Council for Adult Education engaged Allen to provide a summer school of art instruction which attracted over a hundred students – including teachers, housewives, nuns and businessmen. The Art Teachers’ Association of Victoria employed Allen’s expertise in a series of workshops to train the next generation of teachers.  She also gave ‘sold out’ public lectures in which she showed art by Pollock, de Kooning, Kline and Motherwell. Likening abstraction to a ‘forest floor’ or ‘flotsam and jetsam on the beach’, Allen helped her audience see beauty in painting that they had thought was ‘just a mess’.

Allen’s exhibition at Australian Galleries in Collingwood was also a success. Entitled ‘Men in Action’ Allen’s art combined both abstract and figurative elements in her depiction of fishermen and road workers demonstrating that ‘action’ could be both the style and subject of art.

Reflecting on her final visit to Melbourne, Allen was impressed with the exciting changes and artistic developments that she had witnessed. Sadly, two years later, Allen died suddenly from a ‘sinus arrest’ (heart attack). Although still an Australian citizen, she was buried at her sisters’ request in the Provincetown cemetery within sight of the Pilgrim Monument. The year after her death, the Art Teachers Association of Victoria established an annual memorial lecture in her honour.

Few of Allen’s artworks are in Australia – although the National Gallery of Victoria has eight in its collection. While she was well-known and well-regarded in America for her art practice, Allen is best-remembered in Australia for her role as an educator.

According to Marion Scott (who delivered the 1964 Mary Cecil Allen Memorial Lecture), Allen was an extraordinary communicator who: ‘[used] words with great economy, words which were so lucid that they created no barrier between one’s eyes and the work of Art’ – a beautiful tribute to an impressive creative.

I am indebted to Anne Rees for her excellent essay: Mary Cecil Allen: Modernism and Modernity in Melbourne 1935-1960 (2010)