We are honoured to offer the collection of the late photographer and graphic designer Steve Allison in our forthcoming MODERN MADE: Modern, Post-War & Contemporary Art, Design, Craft and Studio Ceramics sale, spread over both the evening & day sessions. This rich and varied collection encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking and ceramics, and proves the maxim ‘always buy what you love’.
MODERN MADE
The Steve Allison Collection
17 April 2024
Philip Smith
The photographer and graphic designer Steve Allison was born in Birmingham in 1948, although he spent his working life in Cardiff, where he’d pitched up in 1967 as an archaeology student. After graduation, he scratched a living as a concert promoter (putting on a 12-hour gig in Cardiff in 1970, headlined by Pink Floyd), stage manager, occasional bookbinder and jobbing lithographer, until one day in 1973, walking across a road in Manchester, he decided to become a graphic designer.
He started The Steve Allison Studio in 1974, in the midst of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, balancing typography work with his own photographic practice, until deciding to focus on design full-time in 1980. The studio ran successfully for the next 30 years, mainly working within Cardiff’s theatre, dance and music scene – all of which were enduring personal passions of Allison (in a private memoir, written in 2014, he recalled owning nearly a thousand vinyl albums, although he’d removed all their covers, as he didn’t like their design). For fifteen years, Allison produced almost all the visual communication for the Welsh National Opera (WNO) – with some of the work he produced there having since been acquired by the V&A. Whilst at WNO, he worked with the writer Antony Peattie, the partner of the painter Howard Hodgkin – although, in typically diffident and cool style, Allison never once mentioned to Peattie that he collected Hodgkin’s work, until well after the painter’s death.
As Allison’s children recall, Steve’s connection with the world was
“a visual and aesthetic one. Design was his life and he felt things viscerally when he looked at art and objects. The works he collected spoke to him deeply and we think tell us something about who he was and how he saw the world. He displayed some of his collection at home, especially the ceramics, but the extent of it wasn’t really clear until we were clearing the house and stumbled upon more than we were expecting! We suppose that his collecting really took off after we had left home and he had closed his business. Like much of his life, his collection was very personal, done on his own terms and not for the approval of others, although during lockdown he was a bit more openly active, buying a lot through the Artist Support Pledge. We remember there were always interesting pieces on the walls growing up, a Hodgkin here, a Kapoor there, mixed in with some of Dad’s own photographs, which showed his unique perspective on the world - he had a sharp and sometimes dark sense of humour which he managed to capture in photographs. He loved visual wit and we’re sure that’s what drew him to Gaetano Pesce’s work – on the more experimental, ‘out-there’ end of things – but also to Howard Hodgkin, who is perhaps more subtle and sophisticated, but still joyful and witty – like music.”
The Steve Allison Collection is offered in both sessions of the sale – lots 44-51 in the Evening Session (Paintings and Prints); lots 52-110 (Prints & Studio Ceramics; 325-331 (Ewen Henderson); 402-460 (Gaetano Pesce) in the Day Session.
Highlights from The Steve Allison Collection
Contact Us | London
0207 930 9115 | london@lyonandturnbull.com
HEADS OF SALE:
PHILIP SMITH: 07741 247 225 | philip.smith@lyonandturnbull.com
SIMON HUCKER: 07442 575 266 | simon.hucker@lyonandturnbull.com
