Sam ATYEO

Australian 1910–90
worked in France 1937–90

Sam Atyeo returned to the land he owned in the south of France in 1950 and began a rose farm. He had not painted since 1942 when he became a diplomat and personal assistant to Dr H. V. Evatt, the Australian minister for external affairs and deputy prime minister. Evatt was elected president of the third United Nations General Assembly and when the Labor Party lost the 1949 federal election, Atyeo was sacked. Atyeo had trained in Melbourne as an architect and artist, studying at the Working Men’s College (RMIT University) while attending the National Gallery School. With his energy and intelligence and his gregarious and uninhibited personality, Atyeo was the first to embrace abstract art in the stuffy and provincial world of Depression-era Melbourne. He was also one of the first architects and furniture designers to work in the Bauhaus style. Atyeo believed in modernist formality and truth to materials. His paintings have clearly defined designs and colours. Atyeo left Australia for Paris in 1936 where he painted in the major studios like Colarossi’s; he saw and was unimpressed by the Surrealists and exhibited his abstract and cubistic paintings. In Vence in 1950 he designed and built a Provencal-style stone house with a top-floor studio. He began to paint again, in the 1960s producing large abstract canvases with few bright colours. He repainted themes and scenes of Melbourne, in this instance a close view of old buildings in Little Lonsdale Street where he and other artists once had studios. He has washed and scraped colour over the background using a surrealist technique and has drawn architectural details of doors and windows in black, watery paint. A clear red heart sits over a door. Is this a memory of his studio, famous for its parties and love affairs?

Jennifer Phipps