Alannah Coleman (3 November 1918 – 12 September 1998) 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 ('Renee') Monica (née Duffy) 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.
National Gallery schools Coleman's mother encouraged her interest in art, and from the age of fourteen Coleman studied at the National Gallery of Victoria schools in Melbourne from 1933 to 1939, under William B. McInnes and Charles Wheeler. Her attractiveness, social talents and calm demeanour noted by her associates were an asset when she served as honorary treasurer of the National Gallery art students’ annual ball at the Palais de Danse, St Kilda on 17 September 1936, with a ‘ballet of cave men and modern maidens' (Alannah Coleman and Elizabeth Paterson) against scenery painted by the student artists. The following year, at the St Kilda Town Hall, Coleman and Paterson's theme for the ball was Mexican, for which ‘huge mural decorations of futuristic Mexican figures painted on immense sheets of brown paper lined the walls.’
Elizabeth Paterson and Sidney Nolan’ were amongst several of Alannah's student colleagues to whom she remained close. On 16 December 1938, she performed as witness to their brief marriage and was godmother to their daughter. Other fellow students were Joan James (née Currie), Joan Malcolm, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, Howard Matthews, Yvonne Lennie (future wife of Arthur Boyd), Phyl Waterhouse and Charles Bush, with all of whom she continued friendships. An archive of approximately 319 Aerogramme letters and 21 postcards that Alannah wrote weekly to Bush over 1971–1989 is held in the State Library of Victoria. She was among the founders of the Contemporary Art Society when attending its first meeting with Hester, and Coleman exhibited frequently with the organisation. Coleman was the model for William Dargie’s work shown in a July 1939 exhibition with paintings by P. G. Moore and Kathleen Howitt (Mrs Dargie), at the Athenaeum gallery.
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 (the only woman on the committee), 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 AIF 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 (not likely McCulloch, who had been fired for his support of Tucker, so more probably, Arnold Shore):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 [that] 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 (yet) 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 (whom she'd met on the Ranchi, for a European tour that included Lapland, Germany and France, where she and Albert Tucker had chance encounter. They hitched a lift with Sydney-born English dental surgeon Denis Sharman whom Coleman soon quietly married in 1951, but not before (it was rumoured) 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