Nicol Allan (1931–2019) was an American

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

known for his paper

collage Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

Biography

Nicol Allan was born in

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

in 1931 of Scottish immigrant parents. His father worked as a streetcar conductor until his death of

tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB), also known colloquially as the "white death", or historically as consumption, is a contagious disease usually caused by ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can al ...

, soon after his son's birth. Nicol Allan and his mother also contracted tuberculosis and he spent two years strapped flat on a Bradford frame after two spinal operations at the age of five. He then lived in a foster home for several years before returning to live with his family. Allan was entirely self-trained as an artist and he did not attend university other than one term at

Los Angeles City College Los Angeles City College (LACC) is a public community college in East Hollywood, California. A part of the Los Angeles Community College District, it is located on Vermont Avenue south of Santa Monica Boulevard on the former campus of the U ...

. However, he had a work accepted in an open national competition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum at the age of 19 and he spent the rest of his life work as an artist. In 1963, he married Sarah (Meyers) Allan. They lived where her career as a

sinologist Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilizatio ...

took them:

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, the UK, and then the US again. He died in

Hanover, New Hampshire Hanover is a New England town, town located along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, its population was 11,870. The town is home to the Ivy League university ...

in 2019.“Exhibitions, Publications and Collections,”
Nicol Allan: Collages
' (Slimvolume, 2021), p.213. Although his work was exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, and London, and his work is in private and public collections, he lived reclusively and had little direct personal contact with the art world.

Artwork

"The collages enter into dialogue with various strands of artistic modernism, from Braque and Picasso's papier collé to Malevich's Suprematism and Mondrian's De Stijl to American colour field painting. It is as if Allan had set himself the task of working through a number of formal problems in the history of abstraction and of making them new." - Rye Dag Holmboe Allan's main medium was paper collage, and he produced about 200 pieces. He also worked in sumi, wood reliefs, watercolours, and occasionally oils. His work is generally on a very small scale, the collages usually measuring less than twenty centimeters in height and fifteen centimeters in width. They are highly compressed and abstract in form; the artist described them as "an interpretation in simple form of inner states of mind."Press release, Parsons-Dreyfus Gallery, New York, 1980, as cited in
Nicol Allan: Collages
',p.207. They nevertheless allude to the natural world and to human life, with repeated themes, such as 'rain', 'waves', 'sea', 'mountains', 'masks', 'heads', and 'dancers'. As Andrew Hunt states, their compression "hints at its opposite: expanding celestial proportions…. His are pinpricks that disrupt and explode time and space." Rye Holmboe says: "There is comfort to be found in an implied structure, to be sure, as in the continuity between art and nature, but the collages also intimate a more groundless and vertiginous dimension of experience. It is this ambiguity, more than any thematic content, that both motivates and lies at the heart of Allan's paper poetics."

Exhibitions

(Sources) * 1950 – "Survey of American Painting" – at the Los Angeles County Museum * 1952 – Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity – at the Los Angeles County Museum * 1954 – Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity – at the Los Angeles County Museum * 1959–60 – Solo exhibitions – at the Simone Gallery, Los Angeles * 1960s – Cober Gallery, New York * 1966 – Sylvan Simone Gallery, Los Angeles * 1967 – Esther Bear Gallery, Santa Barbara * 1978 – The Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery (Betty Parsons), New York * 1979 – Taranman Gallery, London * 1980 – The Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery (Betty Parsons), New York * 1982 – Taranman Gallery, London * 1982 –

Arts Club of Chicago Arts Club of Chicago is a private club and public exhibition space located in the Near North Side community area of Chicago, a block east of the Magnificent Mile, that exhibits international contemporary art. It was founded in 1916, inspired ...

* 1990s – Davis and Langdale, New York * 2008 – "Nicol Allan: Collages", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2009 – "Recent Acquisitions", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2009 – "Nicol Allan: Recent Collages", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2010 – "Nicol Allan", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2012 – "5 Artists: On Paper", Davis & Langdale Company,57th Street, New York, USA * 2012 – "Group Exhibition", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2015 – "Summer Exhibition", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2017 – "Recent Contemporary Works", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2017 – "Group Exhibition", Davis & Langdale Company, 57th Street, New York, USA * 2021 – "Nicol Allan: Collages" – at Laure Genillard Gallery, Fitzrovia, London, UK

Public holdings of Allan's work

Nicol Allan's work is held by * the

Arts Council of Great Britain The Arts Council of Great Britain was a non-departmental public body dedicated to the promotion of the fine arts in Great Britain. It was divided in 1994 to form the Arts Council of England (now Arts Council England), the Scottish Arts Council (l ...

* the

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...

, * the Christopher Hewitt Collection at the

Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University ...

, Oxford * the De Beers Art Collection, London * the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire * the

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum ARoS is an art museum in Aarhus, Denmark. The museum was established in 1859 and is the oldest public art museum in Denmark outside Copenhagen. On 7 April 2004, ARoS opened with exhibitions in a brand new modern building, 10 stories tall with a to ...

, Denmark

References

External links