Between 1937 and 1974 Lina Bryans OAM painted more than 70 portraits of her artistic and literary contemporaries, providing a visual chronicle of the Melbourne cultural scene. She met architect and designer Alex Jelinek (1925–2007) in 1954 and they fell into an intense and rewarding relationship that lasted until Bryans’ passing in 2000. Jelinek graduated from the technical building school of Hradec Králové, near Prague, during the Second World War. In 1946 he became attached to the architectural school of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, but fled communist Czechoslovakia to live as a displaced person in West Germany. In 1950 he emigrated to Australia on a labour contract, laying track and then working on the Eucumbene Dam site before meeting Bryans. Jelinek drew brilliant designs for far more structures than were ever realised. For Bryans’ second cousin, Canberra academic Bruce Benjamin, he carried out the spiral ‘Round House’ in Gawler Crescent, Deakin, which was named Australian House of the Year in 1957 and is now heritage-listed. This uncompromisingly minimal portrait held pride of place for decades in the couple’s homes in East Melbourne, Richmond and Kew.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of Paul and James Bryans 2015. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Estate of Lina Bryans
Yellow Portrait (Portrait of Alex Jelinek), is a portrait of a Czech-born architect who is best known for his contribution to experimental modernism in Australia in the 1950’s.
The work is 184cm high and 123 cm wide with a thin aluminium frame. Alex Jelinek is shown engrossed in his work, wearing his trademark thick, dark framed glasses (that he designed himself). Jelinek and the whole canvas, are enveloped in a rich mustard-yellow.
He sits at an angle, left shoulder turned to us. Although Jelinek has been painted centrally in the large work, he is an outline, rising out of the yellow from a collection of carefully chosen brushstrokes and smudges in dark brown, dark-red and a small amount of white.
Jelinek’s thick, side-parted, dark-brown hair accentuates his high forehead, his medium – length hair is tousled at the crown and cropped to reveal the shell of his left ear, though there is no anatomical detail within it. Jelinek’s glasses rest on the bridge of his nose, his eyes are downcast towards his work. His eyebrows are thick and straight beneath the frames of his glasses.
He has a sharp, unremarkable nose and a robust, brown moustache. Beneath his moustache smudges of red. A shadow rests under the clean line of his jaw. His head is dipped towards the focus of his gaze.
Grey brushstrokes fill in the breadth of his left shoulder. Jelinek’s shirt collar is an assured, mountainous squiggle. At his nape, below his neatly rendered chin, a dark brown, shallow “v” marks Jelinek’s open-necked shirt. A brown line descends down his chest surrounded by smudged white in place of a seam with buttons, and tapers off abruptly. A few vertical dark brown, wavy lines and a confident horizontal line illustrate a tucked in, loose-fitting shirt at his waist.
Jelinek is slim with a youthful build. Dark, confident brushstrokes form a dark hip in high waisted trousers. A fading horizontal line at his waist disappears into the pervasive mustard- yellow, A wonky rectangle of rolled up, rumpled shirtsleeve and light lines indicate his bent elbow and forearm.
Jelinek’s design bench onto which he is ardently focused is a greenish grey line that starts on the left halfway down the portrait, cutting through the yellow-gold and descending on an angle towards the bottom right, where it veers back in a long, gentle, freehand arch, before stopping abruptly in the middle at the bottom of the work.
The artist Lina Bryans has signed her name in the lower right corner as just ‘Lina’ in large, light cursive letters.
Audio description written by Emma McManus and voiced by Emma Bedford
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Roger Benjamin explores the intriguing union of Lina Bryans and Alex Jelinek.
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Drawn from the National Portrait Gallery collection, this salon-style hang references the lavish 18th- and 19th-century European salons where paintings were hung floor-to-ceiling.
