Australian Dictionary of Biography

The Red Hat, 1937, by William Frater.

National Gallery of Victoria, courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Lina Bryans (1909–2000), artist and benefactor, was born on 26 August 1909 at Hamburg, Germany, second of three children of Australian-born parents Edward Seligman Hallenstein, industrialist, and his wife Nina, née Blaine. Her mother’s grandfather was Sir Benjamin Benjamin, an Anglo-Jewish merchant and former mayor of Melbourne (1887–89). Born while her parents were touring Europe, Lina was from a wealthy and cultured background of Jewish heritage, although she had no religious affiliation. Educated at St Catherine’s School, Toorak, from 1920, she attended finishing schools in England and France from 1924 to 1926.

Displaying early independence, Hallenstein worked in 1930 at the Pickwick Book Club, Sydney, and as a laboratory assistant for the Baker Medical Research Institute in Melbourne in 1931. On 4 November that year at the registry office, Collins Street, she married Baynham Bryans (d. 1969), a salesman from a wealthy Toorak family. Their son Edward was born the next year. The couple separated in 1935 and Lina lived with Edward at South Yarra, until he was old enough to attend boarding school.

In 1937 Bryans decided to become an artist, encouraged by William ‘Jock’ Frater, a pioneer of the modern movement in Melbourne. She was the subject of Frater’s portrait The Red Hat (1937). Cosmopolitan and unconventional, she lived in a city studio, resisting the disapproval of her family. She was an intuitive artist and painted in her own spontaneous, colouristic style, indebted to modern French art. With Frater as her mentor, Alan Sumner, and Adrian Lawlor, she worked on landscapes around Warrandyte and also portraits, cityscapes, and still life. Active in fund-raising during World War II, in 1940 she devised the ‘flagometer’ outside Melbourne Town Hall, which measured coin donations to the Comforts Fund. Her own modest private means were augmented by inheritance following the deaths of her parents in 1940 and 1946.

Unaligned with the art factions of the period, Bryans exhibited with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters from 1940 and with the Contemporary Art Society from 1941. Noticed early, she contributed a painting to an exhibition of Australian art which toured the United States of America and Canada in 1941. Her landscape Snow in Autumn, Harrietville (1943), was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1944. She was an active member of the MSWP for more than twenty-five years with her friends Dora Serle, Sybil Craig, and Ola Cohn.

Having joined the early modernist painter Ada May Plante in 1940 at the former hotel Darebin Bridge House, Ivanhoe, Bryans purchased and renovated the property in 1942. It became known as the ‘Painters’ Pub,’ where she welcomed free spirits, among them the artists Ambrose Hallen and Ian Fairweather, the writers Vance and Nettie Palmer, and others associated with the Meanjin literary journal. Single-minded but unpredictable, she sold Darebin Bridge House in 1948 and moved to Harkaway. She briefly attended George Bell’s studio, and sought lessons from the modernist Mary Cockburn Mercer. During an overseas study tour to the United States and Europe in 1953, she stayed at Cassis, France, at the invitation of Cockburn Mercer.

Statuesque with raven hair, Bryans was known as the Gertrude Stein of Melbourne for her patronage, intellect, and wit. International in outlook, she helped redefine a national cultural identity, befriending both European émigrés and Australian writers, musicians, and actors. Many became the subjects of her more than seventy portraits, including Nina Christesen, Harald Vike, and Alan Marshall. The Babe Is Wise (1940), of Jean Campbell, a modernist writer of the émigré experience, was her best-known portrait. Of her approach to portraiture she later recalled: ‘I caught the essence of the person. Everyone has an aura and the colours of the aura would go into the colour of the background’ (Bryans 1992–94).

In 1955 Bryans was artistic director of the inaugural Moomba Book Fair, held in the Melbourne Town Hall. By this time she had met her life partner, Alex Jelinek, a visionary Czech émigré architect and sculptor, fifteen years her junior, with whom she lived in Richmond from 1957. Generous in her family’s tradition of public service and philanthropy, she continued to arrange exhibitions and purchase works for galleries from artists she admired. Expeditions with Jelinek to central Australia in the 1960s led her landscape style towards a lyrical abstraction. She lived in Alice Springs between 1973 and 1975, seeking a warmer climate for her health, before retiring to Kew, Melbourne.

Bryans held solo exhibitions at Georges Gallery in 1948 and again in 1966 when she was described as ‘the most dazzling colorist of them all’ (McCaughey 1966, 19). That year she also won the George Crouch prize of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. In 1982 the National Gallery of Victoria mounted a retrospective exhibition of her paintings and drawings at the Banyule Gallery, Heidelberg, with the exhibition also touring to regional galleries in Ballarat and Geelong. Her portraits were exhibited at the Ian Potter Gallery, University of Melbourne, in 1995.

Honoured as artist emeritus of the Australia Council in 1989 and awarded the OAM in 1994, Bryans is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, and State and regional galleries. Survived by Jelinek, her son, two grandsons, and two great-granddaughters, she died on 30 September 2000 at Kew and was cremated.