{{Short description|American artist (1931–2019)}} {{Infobox person | name = Nicol Allan | birth_date = 1931 | birth_place = Los Angeles, California, United States | death_date = {{death year and age|2019|1931}} | death_place = Hanover, New Hampshire, United States | occupation = Artist | known_for = paper collages | spouse = {{Marriage|Sarah Meyers|1963}} }}
'''Nicol Allan''' (1931–2019) was an American artist known for his paper collages.
== Biography ==
Nicol Allan was born in Los Angeles in 1931 of Scottish immigrant parents. His father worked as a streetcar conductor until his death of tuberculosis, 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. 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 took them: California, the United Kingdom, and then the United States again. He died in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2019.<ref name=Exhibitions>“Exhibitions, Publications and Collections,” ''[https://www.slimvolume.org/nicol-allan Nicol Allan: Collages]'' (Slimvolume, 2021), p.213.</ref> 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.<ref>Sarah Allan, “Nicol Allan: Life and Work,” ''[https://www.slimvolume.org/nicol-allan Nicol Allan: Collages]'', pp. 200-209.</ref>
== 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<ref>Holmboe, Rye Dag (2021) ''[https://www.slimvolume.org/nicol-allan Nicol Allan: Collages]'' (Slimvolume), p.9.</ref>
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."<ref name=Press>Press release, Parsons-Dreyfus Gallery, New York, 1980, as cited in ''[https://www.slimvolume.org/nicol-allan Nicol Allan: Collages]'', p.207.</ref> They nevertheless allude to the natural world and to human life, with repeated themes, such as 'rain', 'waves', 'sea', 'mountains', 'masks', 'heads', and 'dancers'.<ref name=Press/> As Andrew Hunt states, their compression "hints at its opposite: expanding celestial proportions…. His are pinpricks that disrupt and explode time and space."<ref>Andrew Hunt, “Foreword”, ''[https://www.slimvolume.org/nicol-allan Nicol Allan: Collages]''.</ref> 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."<ref>Rye Dag Holmboe, in “Fishing without a Hook,” ''[https://www.slimvolume.org/nicol-allan Nicol Allan: Collages]'', p.12.</ref>
== Exhibitions == (Sources)<ref name=Exhibitions/><ref>[https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Nicol-Allan/69ED0B50682369CD/Biography Nicol Allan biography], ''Mutual Art''. Retrieved: 22 November 2021</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.davisandlangdale.com/Pages/NicolAllan.html|title = Davis & Langdale Company, Inc. - Nicol Allan}}</ref> * 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 * 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<ref>[https://www.nicolallan.com/about About] NicolAllan.com. Retrieved: 22 November 2021.</ref> * the Arts Council of Great Britain<ref>[https://artscouncilcollection.org.uk/explore/artist/allan-nicol Nicol Allan: Composition X 1981]. Arts Council. Retrieved: 22 November 2021.</ref> * the Art Institute of Chicago,<ref>[https://www.artic.edu/artists/33396/nicol-allan Nicol Allan] Artic. Retrieved: 22 November 2021.</ref> * the Christopher Hewitt Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford<ref>''The Christopher Hewett Collection'', by Nicholas Penny et al, Ashmolean Museum 1986)</ref> * the De Beers Art Collection, London * the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire<ref>[https://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/objects/mis.999.60.2 Composition III]. Hood Museum of Art. Retrieved: 22 November 2021.</ref> * the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark<ref>{{Cite web|date=2015-04-16|title=Afsporet fortælling om form, farve og flade på Aros|url=https://kunsten.nu/journal/afsporet-fortaelling-om-form-farve-og-flade-paa-aros/|access-date=2021-11-22|website=kunsten.nu - Online magasin og kalender for billedkunst|language=da-DK}}</ref>
==References== {{Reflist}}
== Further reading == * ''The Insiders: Rejection And Rediscovery Of Man In The Arts Of Our Time'' by Selden Rodman (Louisiana State University Press, 1960) * ''Nicol Allan'', with a preface by Gerald Nordland (Taranman, London, 1982). {{ISBN|9780906499146}} * ''Nicol Allan. Collages'', ed. by Rye Dag Holmboe (Slimvolume, 2021)
== External links == * [https://www.nicolallan.com/about Nicol Allan website] * [https://www.artland.com/artists/nicol-allan Nicol Allan entry on artland.com] * [https://www.artland.com/artists/nicol-allan Nicol Allan at the Art Institute of Chicago] * [https://artscouncilcollection.org.uk/explore/artist/allan-nicol Nicol Allan at Arts Council Collection] * [https://www.maureenmullarkey.com/essays/allan.html "Sensibility and Substance. Recent collages by Nicol Allan at Davis & Langdale"], by Maureen Mullarkey (2009).
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Allan, Nicol}} Category:1931 births Category:2019 deaths Category:20th-century American artists Category:Artists from Los Angeles Category:20th-century American male artists Category:American collage artists Category:21st-century American artists Category:21st-century American male artists