Allan Mitelman was brought to Australia from Poland as a child in 1953. He and photographer Jacqueline Mitelman (née MacGreggor) were briefly married.[1][2]
Mitelman contributed to the arts through his teaching. He lectured at the National Gallery of Victoria School in 1972 and the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne where he was head of a separate department of printmaking, but in the merger of Prahran College with the VCA in 1992, he was replaced by John Scurry, Head of Printmaking at Prahran in a new and expanded department.[5] Both had been students at Prahran together and they enjoyed an amicable friendship.[6] He has been the subject of portraits by former students for the Archibald Prize, most notably Lewis Miller whose portrait of the artist won the Prize in 1998.
Mitelman's paintings are non-figurative and minimalist,[7] inspired by children's early mark-making[8] and musical scores, with an interest rhythms and harmonies of hue and texture through layering and manipulation of paint with a palette knife. Alan Krell and Suzanne Davis compare his work to that of the American artist Cy Twombly and the English artist Roger Hilton respectively. McCulloch describes his paintings as like the prints in having "a sensuous refinement of surface enlivened with accents, their quality often being complemented by evocative titles."[9]
Mitelman held annual solo exhibitions from 1969 including in Melbourne at Crossley St, Powell St, Pinacotheca, 312 Lennox St, Deutscher Brunswick St.; in Sydney at Macquarie, Garry Anderson, Ray Hughes; and in Perth at Galerie Düsseldorf.[16] In 2004 the National Gallery of Victoria held a major survey of Mitelman's works on paper, curated by Elizabeth Cross, which also toured to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.[9][1]
^ abcCross, Elizabeth; Maloon, Terence; National Gallery of Victoria (2004), Allan Mitelman : works on paper 1967-2004, National Gallery of Victoria, ISBN978-0-7241-0250-1
^Pascoe, Joseph; Victorian College of the Arts (2000). Creating : the Victorian College of the Arts. Victoria: Macmillan. ISBN9780958574389. OCLC54057837.
^Buckrich, Judith Raphael; Prahran Mechanics' Institute (2007), Design for living: a history of 'Prahran Tech', Prahran Mechanics' Institute Press, pp. 96–99, ISBN978-0-9756000-8-5
^Maloon, Terence; Selwood, Paul (2011). Abstraction : Michael Buzacott Virginia Coventry Paul Hopmeier Roy Jackson Jan King Allan Mitelman John Peart James Rogers Paul Selwood & Aida Tomeson. Catalogue of an exhibition held at ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 18 August-25 September 2011. Canberra: Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery. ISBN9780980804447.
^ abcdMcCulloch, Alan; McCulloch, Susan; McCulloch Childs, Emily (2006). The new McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art (4th ed.). Fitzroy: AUS Art Editions ; The Miegunyah Press. pp. 688–9. ISBN9780522853179. OCLC80568976.