William Robert "Jim" Allen MNZM (22 July 1922 – 9 June 2023) was a New Zealand visual artist. In 2015, he was named an Arts Foundation Icon by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, an honour limited to 20 living people. Allen turned 100 years old in July 2022, and the occasion was marked by the Auckland Art Gallery with an exhibition of his works.

Early life and education

Allen was born in Wellington on 22 July 1922.^[1][2] From 1940 to 1945, he served with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in North Africa and Italy as a truck driver, motorcycle rider, and machine gunner.^[3][4] After the end of the war, Allen studied at the University of Perugia and at the Instituto d' Arte Florence in Italy in 1945. In 1948, he received a Diploma of Fine Arts from Canterbury University College in Christchurch,^[5] and he became an Associate of the Royal College of Art, London in 1951.^[3]

Career

Between 1953 and 1959, Allen was employed by the New Zealand Department of Education, first as a field officer to the Northern Māori Experimental Art Project, and then as a liaison organiser to secondary schools.^[3] In 1960, he moved to the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, where he was a lecturer and later senior lecturer until 1976.^[3][6] Between 1977 and 1987, Allen was the inaugural head of the School of Art at the University of Sydney.^[3]

Select works

In 1959, Allen collaborated with architect John Scott, designing the stained glass windows for Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Havelock North.^[7]

Allen and Scott collaborated again on the creation of Futuna Chapel in Wellington, which opened in 1961. Allen designed the chapel's coloured perspex windows, its 14 Stations of the Cross, and the wooden crucifix wall-mounted above the altar. He also designed the "light modulators", made of rimu, glass and yellow perspex, that are installed above the entranceway to reduce afternoon sunlight entering the chapel.^[6] Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki curator Ron Brownson called Allen's 2.5-metre-high (8.2 ft) pan-cultural Christ one of the most significant wood carvings produced in New Zealand during that period.^[6] This mahogany statue of Christ was stolen from the chapel in 1999 or 2000, and recovered in 2012.^[8] It was returned to the chapel in 2013 after a restoration process.^[9][10] The Stations underwent conservation work in 2021.^[6]

In 1962, Allen designed the concrete, stained glass and leaded light baldachin for St John's Church in Te Awamutu.^[7]

After the Futuna Chapel, Allen's work moved further away from traditional approaches and concepts. One piece, made in 1965, was a seven-metre-long (23 ft) work commissioned for the Wellington offices of chemical company ICI. It involved, according to Allen, "a sculptured concrete panel inspired by the micro-structure of naturally occurring copper crystals".^[6] The office building was badly damaged in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, but the mural survived the earthquake and the process of demolishing the building.^[11]

Other works by Allen from the 1960s include Wairaka (1965), a bronze statue and kinetic water sculpture in Whakatāne, and Conversation piece (1967), a public sculpture in the Auckland suburb of Pakuranga.^[12][13] As the 1960s progressed, Allen increasingly focused on performative and non-object art.^[6]

Later life, death and legacy

In the 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours, Allen was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to education and the arts.^[14] In October 2007, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Auckland University of Technology,^[15] and in 2015 he was named an Arts Foundation Icon, limited to 20 living people, by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.^[16] Allen turned 100 in July 2022,^[17][18] which was celebrated by the Auckland Art Gallery in an exhibition of his works from 19 July to 28 November 2022.^[19]

Allen died in Auckland on 9 June 2023, at the age of 100.^[1][20] Work by Allen is held in the collection of New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa.^[21]