Colette Allendy (born Colette Nel-Dumouchel)

From 1946 until her death in 1960, Colette Allendy ran a gallery in Paris that supported emerging artists who experimented with abstraction, offering them a platform to establish their reputation in Paris. Together with other women gallerists such as Denise René, Lydia Conti, Florence Bank, Allendy became a key figure in the promotion of nonfigurative art in France in the postwar period.

Born into an artistic family of painters and playwrights, Allendy became a visual artist herself and studied with the Cubist artist Juan Gris. Her passion for drawing and her friendships with artists such as Albert Gleizes and Marie Raymond prompted her to start a gallery. After the Second World War and following the death of her husband, the renowned French psychoanalyst René Allendy, she opened Galerie Colette Allendy, which she supported with posthumous copyright fees from René’s publications.

Galerie Colette Allendy was located at 67 rue de l’Assomption in the sixteenth arrondissement—a rather unusual place for a business of that kind, detached from the main gallery hubs on the Right and Left Banks. A “house gallery” that was integrated into Allendy’s home, including her backyard where sculptural works were exhibited, it was run solely by Allendy with no additional staff. She initially exhibited the work of her friends who were well-established artists associated with Cubism or post-Cubist styles, including Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Henri Bernand Goetz, Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Raymond. However, she soon began to provide exhibition opportunities to emerging artists who broadly engaged with abstraction.

The gallery’s diverse exhibition program featured nearly two hundred artists, reflecting the main artistic innovations of the time such as Abstraction Lyrique and Nouveau Réalisme. Each exhibition emerged from a collaboration between Allendy and the artist, who shared organizing duties and expenses. Allendy presented numerous group exhibitions showcasing the postwar Art Informel movement, such as HWPSMTB (featuring Hans Hartung, Wols, Picabia, François Stahly, Georges Mathieu, Michel Tapié, and Camille Bryen) in 1948 and the CoBrA group (featuring Karel Appel, Constant, and Corneille) in 1949. She energetically promoted the work of women artists through group shows such as De l’expressionnisme à l’abstrait (1948), which included Christine Boumeester, Berthe Morisot, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Tapisseries et broderies abstraites, presenting abstract textiles realized by Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, and Hélène Oettingen. She also offered solo shows to Fahrelnissa Zeid (1949), Jeanne Coppel (1950), Roberta González (1951), Semiramis Zorlu (1955), and Sedje Hémon (1956), among others.

Though Galerie Colette Allendy sold some works and kept a percentage, it was primarily an exhibition space and functioned as a springboard for young artists such as Aurélie Nemours, Yves Klein, and François Morellet, all of whom made their debut at the gallery. After nurturing artists early in their careers, Allendy often encouraged them to seek the representation of more established houses. In addition to its cross-generational exhibition program, Galerie Colette Allendy also became a center for avant-garde performance and new forms of mid-century artmaking. Some of the best-known postwar artistic experiments were presented at the gallery, including Raymond Hains’s Photographies hypnagogiques in 1948, Frank Malina’s Electro-peintures in 1955, Klein’s Propositions monochromes in 1956, Hains and Jacques Villeglé’s lacerated posters in 1957, and Morellet’s optical paintings in 1958. The gallery dissolved following Allendy’s death in 1960.