Nicol Allan (1931-2019)

Nicol Allan, an important yet little known artist, lived and worked in both the United States and Great Britain. An intensely private and reclusive man, Allan rarely showed his work. He was represented by several galleries over the years and his work was bought by institutional and private collectors, but he avoided direct personal engagement with the art world. Ultimately, what mattered most to Allan was the work itself.

Allan produced sumi, wood reliefs, watercolours and occasionally oils, but his primary medium was paper collage. These works are the subject of the new book Nicol Allan: Collages, edited by Rye Dag Holmboe, with a Foreword by Andrew Hunt (London: Slimvolume, 2021, forthcoming). The works in this finely produced volume are small, so small that most are printed at actual size. The viewer sees them in the way Allan intended, as small, physically intimate works that allude to the vast physicality of the natural world, creating a compelling tension and often disorientating sense of scale.

Many of the works included in this book have never been seen by anyone except for Nicol Allan, his wife Sarah Allan, and the book’s editor and designers.  Writer and art historian Rye Dag Holmboe, editor of Nicol Allan: Collages, has contributed an essay that situates Allan’s work in its historical context and considers his collages in relation to the major abstract art movements of the twentieth century. A biographical essay by Sarah Allan, a noted scholar in the field of early China studies, relates how and where these works were made and paints a picture of the man himself and the long and interesting life they shared.

Galleries that exhibited Nicol Allan’s work during his lifetime include: Davis & Langdale Company, New York; the Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery (Betty Parsons), New York; The Arts Club of Chicago; Taranman, London; the Sylvan Simone Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Cober Gallery, New York.

Nicol Allan’s work is included in such public collections as: the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Art Institute of Chicago, the Christopher Hewitt Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England; the De Beers Art Collection, London; the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; and the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

Collages by Nicol Allan (1931-2019) will be exhibited at the Laure Genillard Gallery, London, 20 November 2021 - 22 January 2022. The exhibition will include a selection of collages made over the length of Allan's career. For further information, go to: www.lglondon.org

Nicol Allan: Collages, edited by Rye Dag Holmboe, has been been published by Slimvolume, London (2021). To order, go to www.slimvolume.org. The book includes 130 color plates of Nicol Allan's Collages, most of them reproduced at life size, as well as and introduction and essay by Rye Dag Holmboe that situate Nicol Allan's oeuvre within the context of twentieth century art, an essay by Sarah Allan that discusses Nicol Allan's life and work, and a Foreword by Andrew Hunt.

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