Brummels Gallery

Brummels Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne, Australia, was a commercial gallery established by David Yencken in the mid-1950s to exhibit contemporary Modernist Australian painting, sculpture and prints, but after a period of dormancy became best known in the 1970s, under the directorship of Rennie Ellis, as the first in Australia to specialise in photography at a time when the medium was being revived as an art form.

David Yencken (born 1931) Chairman and Joint Managing Director Merchant Builders Pty Ltd., and later to be University of Melbourne Elisabeth Murdoch Chair of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning 1988–1997, established Brummels on the top floor of 95 Toorak Rd., South Yarra, above Brummelsespresso bar whose proprietor Pat Collins, joined in the venture. It was the second gallery in Melbourne to exclusively show Australian art. (the first was Australian Galleries in Collingwood, which opened 5 months earlier).

The gallery opened on Monday 8 October 1956 at 5.50pm by Sir Daryl Lindsay then about to retire as Director of the NGV and who was easing its resistance to Moderism. The show presented of artists from both Sydney and Melbourne and included Jewish migrants Sali Herman, whose Two Soldiers Sleeping on a Train was bought by a Melbourne family, and Judy Cassab (a future Archibald Prize winner); alongside George Bell; Elaine Haxton, who showed works made on a visit to Communist China with an Australian cultural delegation; with a landscape by Charles Bush, and a wood carving by sculptor Clifford Last.

Brummels Gallery continued to promote significant Australian artists, many of whom had sought refuge in the country after World War II, including a one-man exhibition by Sali Herman; abstract paintings, drawings and sketches for ceramic murals by John Howley, Donald Laycock and Lawrence Daws with pottery by Tom Sanders (10–15 December 1956) opened by architect Peter McIntyre; Anita Aarons, Ola Cohn, Vincas Jolantas, Inge King, Julius Kane, Clifford Last, Clement Meadmore, Andor Meszaros, Lenton Parr, Günther Stein, Tina Wentcher, Teisutis Zikaras in Twelve Melbourne Sculptors (1957), opened by Neil Clerehan (who himself held a sculpture show there that year, as did Vincas Jolantas); watercolours by Guy Grey-Smith (also 1957), drawings by Teisutis Zikaras (also 1957); silversmithing and jewellery by Matcham Skipper (1958); drawings by Jon Molvig (mid-1958), sketches, costumes, and designs for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust by Barry Kay, April 20 – May 2, 1959; Antonio Rodrigues wooden sculpture (1959). Exhibitions were held by Desiderius Orban, John Brack, Clifton Pugh, Dorothy Baker and others.

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