Alison Baily Rehfisch (1900–1975) was born Alison Green in Woollahra, New South Wales, to parents who 'were very interested in painting – in all the arts: music, literature, everything'. Her mother, a painter, woodcarver and accomplished musician, was a staunch supporter of women's rights and encouraged her daughter's interest in art. Rehfisch stated in 1965 that she began making art in earnest around the age of five in the wake of the death of her younger sister, her sole playmate. 'Life seemed so cruel without her, [so] I started to draw, pictures of God and heaven and angels and things … and the world to which I imagined she'd gone', Rehfisch said. Following the family's move to Mosman, she attended SCEGGS Redlands and after she finished school it was agreed that she should study art seriously. With her parents' full support, she studied under Julian Ashton at his Sydney art school for a time but left at the age of nineteen to marry Rodney Rehfisch, a warehouse manager. Their daughter was born in 1920. With her painting curtailed by wifehood and motherhood, it was several years before Rehfisch was able to resume her practice. When she did, she took classes with Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, where she met artist George Duncan. 'It was then that I really started to work', Rehfisch said, 'and from that day to now I’ve never ceased to work.'
In 1929, alongside her friend Dora Jarret, Rehfisch held her first exhibition at Farmer's Blaxland Gallery and she began exhibiting with the Society of Artists in 1931. By this time, she and her husband had separated and she was living in a studio apartment in Bridge Street in the city. Rah Fizelle, Dorrit Black, Thea Proctor and Adelaide Perry had digs in the same building. Heading to Europe in 1933, she studied at London's Grosvenor School of Modern Art under Iain MacNab, and became influenced by artists including Marc Chagall, El Greco, and Georges Braque – the latter for what she called his 'feeling of design, his reality. Reality has always appealed to me. I've always hated frills and that sort of thing, in life and in painting too', she said. With Duncan, Elaine Haxton and sculptor Gerald Lewers, Rehfisch held a show at Cooling Galleries in London in 1934; and in 1938, she was one of the cash-strapped expats, including William Dobell, who contributed to the gigantic felt mural designed by Arthur Murch for the Australian Wool pavilion at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. During her time abroad, Rehfisch also exhibited with the Society of Women Artists, the British Empire Society, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and at the Societé des Beaux Arts, Paris.
Following the death of her estranged husband, and having travelled and painted in Spain, France and Germany, Rehfisch returned to Sydney in late 1938. She and Duncan married there in December 1942. Duncan worked as a camouflage artist during the war, and he and Rehfisch exhibited jointly at Macquarie Galleries, and in group shows with the Contemporary Group and the Contemporary Art Society. A fire in their studio in 1947 – in which some 200 of Rehfisch’s paintings were destroyed – prompted a move away from the city, and for the next several years they lived in the Southern Highlands. From 1939 until 1969, Rehfisch exhibited regularly in solo and group shows at Macquarie Galleries, the David Jones Art Gallery (of which Duncan was director from 1953 to 1964), the Blaxland Gallery and other venues in Sydney and interstate. She was known for her landscapes, still lifes and particularly her flowerpieces, often executed on hessian and always in a consistently post-impressionist style that employed rhythmic, structured composition, simple forms and a bold yet harmonious use of colour. As a result, Rehfisch was occasionally disparaged by critics who, in thrall to the vigorous, expressionist styles that came to prevail in the post-WW2 period, saw a lack of development or relevance in her work and that of some of her peers. 'These are contemporary painters in the sense that they are still living rather than in the sense that their work is executed in a contemporary idiom', James Gleeson wrote in 1951 of the Contemporary Group's annual exhibition. In 1950, Gleeson described Rehfisch's flowerpieces as being possessed of 'an ability to enthral us with a kind of magic nostalgia.' From the 1960s onwards, she and Duncan lived in Pymble, where Rehfisch painted and taught. Experiencing failing eyesight as well as bouts of severe depression following Duncan's death in 1974, Rehfisch took her own life in March 1975. Like many women artists of her generation, Rehfisch is now recognised as one of the foremost exponents of modernism in Australia, and her work has been included in landmark exhibitions such as Janine Burke's Australian Women Artists: 100 Years 1840–1940 (University of Melbourne, 1975) and The National Women's Art Exhibition, which consisted of more than 140 exhibitions presented simultaneously at galleries and museum around Australia in 1995. In 2002, the Beagle Press published the monograph Alison Rehfisch: A life for art, and the first ever retrospective of Rehfisch's work was presented at the National Trust SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney.
