Alison Rehfisch was born in Woollahra, Sydney, Australia in 1900, studying at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School and the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, where she met her lifelong partner, artist George Bernard Duncan. In 1933 Rehfisch left for England, where she remained for six years, studying at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and exhibiting widely, including at the 'Six Colonial Artists' exhibition at the Cooling Galleries, London, with the Society of Women Artists, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the British Empire Society.
Painter Alison Rehfisch was born Alison Baily Green in Woollahra, Sydney, Australia in 1900. Her mother, Annie, was an accomplished painter, woodcarver and musician, who believed in women's emancipation and encouraged her daughter's interest in the arts. As a boarder at Redlands School in Cremorne in New South Wales, she studied applied arts and design under landscape painter Albert Collins, subsequently, enrolling at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School. She also attended Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo's painting classes at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, where she met fellow artist George Bernard Duncan, whom she later married.
In 1933 Rehfisch left Australia for London to study at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art under Iain Macnab. In 1939 she wrote that London was 'that great, cultural, mellowed centre of the world's activities … that great artistic Mecca, where opportunity for development and knowledge is unparalleled'. For Rehfisch, as for other white colonial women in these decades, London represented artistic, cultural, educational, and professional opportunities beyond those available in Australia at that time. At the Grosvenor School Rehfisch developed highly stylised compositions, reflecting Macnab's influence, and she also experimented with linocuts such as Park Bench (1934, National Gallery of Australia). In 1934 Rehfisch, Duncan and another friend, Gerald Lewers, were represented in the Six Colonial Artists exhibition at the Cooling Galleries, New Bond Street. She also showed with the Society of Women Artists, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the British Empire Society in England. Together with other Australian artists, she helped create a huge felt mural, designed by Arthur Murch, for the Australian wool pavilion at the 1938 Empire Exhibition, Glasgow. She wrote various articles including Australian Artists in London for Art and Australia in 1939, in which she mentioned, among others, the work of Cornwall-based sculptor Barbara Tribe. Captivated by Europe, Rehfisch embraced the culture and languages of Spain, France and Germany, spending several months in Seville studying the Spanish masters, and staying in a converted studio in an old Moorish castle on the Mediterranean at Malaga.
On her return to Sydney in 1939, she became an active member of the Contemporary Art Society and was heavily involved in the Contemporary Group, which provided momentum to the modernist movement in the city and across Australia. Her oeuvre included still lives, landscapes and some figurative work, but she was known chiefly for her flower paintings – a genre then considered low within the hierarchy of art. This, and the modernity of her work, made it out of step with the 'establishment'. Nevertheless, she continued to uphold her faith in the principles she had learnt in Europe, of which she stated, 'simplicity is my aim. The basis of all modern art is design'. In 1946 she was included in the exhibition Australian Women Painters, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1947 the studio she shared with Duncan was destroyed by fire and Rehfisch lost approximately 200 paintings. Although she continued to exhibit until 1969, following her husband's death and suffering from failing eyesight, she took poison while in a state of severe mental depression and died in 1975 in Pymble, Australia.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Alison Rehfisch]
Publications related to [Alison Rehfisch] in the Ben Uri Library