JOHN OLSEN Australian, B. 1928

Private collection, U.S.A.

When Olsen returned to Australia in February 1960, he joined in the lively debate between Sydney and Melbourne artists over painting styles and philosophies, which had intensified the year before with the publication of the ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ in Melbourne.  Written by Bernard Smith with Melbourne’s leading figurative painters (Arthur and David Boyd, Tucker, Dickerson et al.), this was a spirited defence of the image in contemporary Australian art, contrasting strongly with the 'sense of urgency of the individual adventure-to-form' which was manifest in the work of Olsen and Sydney contemporaries including Stanislaus Rapotec and Clement Meadmore.

Olsen had originally studied in Sydney at the Datillo Rubbo Art School and, importantly, at the Julian Ashton School, under John Passmore. One of his most important early works, The Bicycle Boys Rejoice, 1955 (private collection), already demonstrates the 'linear emphasis, the emotional sensibility and the sense of irrationality’, heralding the distinctive means of expression for which he would become best known.¹ In 1958 he had travelled to Spain, a visit that would ignite his life-long passion for the country. He saw the work of Antoni Tàpies and other tachistes from Barcelona and Madrid. He began deliberately to restrict his own palette, ‘first to darker earth tones, and later to dramatic contrasts, in an attempt to arrive at a feeling for the landscape, as well as the “emotive colouration” of Spain: that of Goya and Zurbarán, Picasso and the poetry of Lorca’. ² The present work combines the dramatic tonal contrasts Olsen had learned in Europe with the raw essence of the Australian landscape in which he immersed himself on his return. As Deborah Hart observes, ‘The fluid boundaries between figuration and an abstract conception were perhaps nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in John Olsen’s art and teaching in the early 1960s'. ³

1. Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 2000, p. 16.
2. Op. cit., p. 44.
3. Op. cit., p. 61.