Allen attended the Summit public schools, and from 1914 to 1917, the Kingsley Preparatory School in Essex Fells, New Jersey. At Kingsley he studied art with Arthur W. Woelfle who became a life-long friend and supporter. Graduating from high school just as America was entering World War I, Allen enlisted; upon he return from service in the Signal Corp, he entered Cornell University, but dropped out almost immediately. He returned to New York and in 1919, went to work as a studio manager with the American Desatype Company, a subsidiary of the Niagara Lithograph Company. Allen renewed his interest in art in 1921, studying for a year at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. He studied at the School of the National Academy from 1922 to 1924, under Ivan Olinsky, George Maynard, Charles Hawthorne, and Francis Coates Jones. He spent several summers in Provincetown studying landscape painting with Woelfe in, and later with George Elmer Browne.
Allen's subject interests were varied: portraiture, landscape, city scenes; so was his choice of locales: urban New York and New Jersey; the coastal communities favored by artists for their picturesqueness, Provincetown and Gloucester in Massachusetts, Rockport, Maine, and Cape May, New Jersey. However, his special focus was the industrial urban waterfront.
Allen was active in a number of artists organizations, including the Artists Professional League and the Salmagundi Club, which he served as president from 1957 to 1959. In 1945 he was elected to his first three-year term on the NAD Council; from 1952 to 1955, he was a vice president of the Academy. He was again elected to the Council in 1959, and at the end of that term was elected assistant corresponding secretary, which extended his Council service into the year of his death.
He received the Academy's Hallgarten Prize in the Annual Exhibition of 1933. Allen taught at the Academy School, at the Wayman Adams School in Elizabethtown, New York, and privately.
