Sam Atyeo was born in Brunswick, Melbourne, the son of a chauffeur Alfred Atyeo and his wife Olivia (nee Cohen). He was a sickly child who enjoyed drawing. This led him to first study architecture at the Working Men’s College and then to study painting at the National Gallery School. His time there was distinguished by a lack of respect for authority as his (unsuccessful) 1930 entry for the travelling scholarship lampooned the head of the school, Bernard Hall.
In the early 1930s he came to know Cynthia Reed, who had a Collins Street shop where she sold modern furniture, including decorative designs, and some painting. He began to supply her with his work and through her met and befriended Cynthia Reed’s brother John Reed and his wife Sunday. His work for Cynthia Reed brought him to the notice of the modernist Edward Dyason,the economic adviser to the Federal Government, who commissioned him to design a new facade and shop with a steel frame, chromium plating and black Carrara marble. Robin Boyd later called this Melbourne’s first modern building.
Dyason also introduced him to Dr H.V. Evatt who became a life-long friend.
The Reeds’ circle was self consciously radical and they encouraged modern art. Atyeo was one of the dominant figures in the group of artists and writers who gathered at their farm, Heide Park at Templestowe. In 1934 he painted the intensely sparse Organised Line to Yellow, now in the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1936 he left Australia for Paris. As well as continuing to paint, he also made posters to support the Republicans as people fled from Franco’s Spain. In 1939 he bought a farm in Vence, in the Alpes-Maritimes. He moved there with the Australian artist Moya Dyring after the German invasion. They soon left France for the Bahamas and then to Dominica. They married in 1941 but the marriage did not survive. In the Bahamas he met again with Dr Evatt and was soon ensconced in Washington as his personal assistant as Evatt headed the Australian procurement office in Washington for the duration of the war. At the end of the War he was based in Paris, but was dismissed from the diplomatic corps in 1950 after Menzies won the 1949 election. Atyeo was not prepared to follow the directives of a conservative government. He returned to his farm in Vence with his second wife Anne Lecoultre, who he married in 1950. After some years he returned to painting and exhibited these works on occasional visits to Australia. In 1983 Heide Park, the art museum that had been the home of his friends John and Sunday Reed, held a retrospective survey of his work. He died at his farm in Vence on 26 May 1990.
- Writers:
-
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 2012
- Last updated:
- 2012
