Rudy Komon (1908-1982) was an art dealer and gallery director. After working as a journalist in Czechoslovakia, where he served with the Czech resistance during the war, he emigrated to Sydney and opened an antique store. In 1958 he converted a former wine shop in Woollahra into an art gallery. His instinct for European marketing techniques was a revelation and a gift to Australian artists. Through promoting their work, he significantly influenced the careers of several generations of painters, including John Brack, Jon Molvig, John Olsen, Fred Williams, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Brett Whiteley. A generous benefactor to art institutions, Komon was also a legendary entertainer, and a serious connoisseur of Australian wines. The Rudy Komon Memorial Perpetual Trophy is awarded annually at the Sydney Royal Wine Show.
Leonard French OBE (1928-2017) left school at fourteen to become an apprentice signwriter in his native Melbourne. He later studied part-time at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. After the war, he visited Europe, studying the Byzantine art whose influence would later become evident in his work. On his return to Australia, he taught at various Melbourne technical schools until the late 1950s. In 1956 he completed the seven-panel Legend of Sinbad the Sailor which hung in the ultra-modern Legend café in Melbourne. Henceforth, he became one of the country's most successful and sought-after artists (although he worked as the National Gallery of Victoria's Exhibitions Officer between 1956 and 1960). His enormous dalle de verre (concrete and slab glass) ceiling in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria was commissioned in 1963, and completed in 1968; other monumental glass projects of the sixties and seventies were the windows for the new National Library in Canberra, the Alpha and Omega window in Monash University's Blackwood Hall and the mural Regeneration in the Great Hall of University House, ANU.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of the artist 2001. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
The series 'David Moore: From Face to Face' was acquired as a gift of the artist and with financial assistance from Timothy Fairfax AC and L Gordon Darling AC CMG 2001.
© Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore
http://davidmoorephotography.com.au/
David Moore (age 40 in 1967)
Rudy Komon (age 59 in 1967)
Leonard French (age 39 in 1967)
David Moore (79 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Michael Desmond discusses Fred Williams' portraits of friends, artist Clifton Pugh, David Aspden and writer Stephen Murray-Smith, and the stylistic connections between his portraits and landscapes.
The acquisition of David Moore's archive of portrait photographs for the National Portrait Gallery's collection.
