JOHN OLSEN Australian, B. 1928

A gift from the artist to the first owner, a close friend, after its exhibition in Sydney in 1960; thence to her daughter

Private collection, Sydney  

John Olsen, Terry Clune Gallery, Sydney, 6-15 October 1960, cat. 3

John Olsen Retrospective, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1 November - 2 February 1992 (label on the reverse)

Virginia Spate, John Olsen, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1963, p. 4, illus.

Deborah Hart, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991 and rev. edn 2000, pp. 45, 55, 251, illus. pl. 25

John Olsen is arguably Australia’s greatest living landscape painter. Born in Sydney, he exhibited successfully there and in Melbourne during the 1950s and, in the words of leading art critic Alan McCulloch, in 1961 introduced ‘to the vocabulary of Australian art a new title, You Beaut Country’. Subsequent experience in Europe gave his work an unprecedented sophistication and panache. In his paintings a highly original artistic vision is fused with both good humour and a deep understanding of the Australian landscape.

Painted not long after Olsen’s return from three years in Europe, People who live in Victoria Street embodies the sheer joy of street life under a summer sun. As he wrote at the time:

It’s morning in Victoria Street… I stop, walk back two paces for the sun is making the most gorgeous green through the plane trees and I find myself rolling with the sky – I am a little stunned by this and walk a little crooked on the footpath, a mongrel dog barks at me and my route becomes curved and quicker.

I meet a friend – stop, pace back and forwards… shaking hands I must hurry, I want to cross the street- taxis float past and one stops and conks me on the mousetrap. Where I had in mind to walk a straight line I must walk round the cab in an angular fashion. ¹

People who live in Victoria Street is like a map in which an array of images – seen, heard and felt by the artist – are fused into a totality of experience. Its high key recalls Arthur Streeton’s comment that nature’s ‘scheme of colour’ in Australia is gold and blue. Infused with sunlight, this urban tangle of spidery, crisscrossing lines shares the directness of children’s art, ‘employed with an adult’s awareness, understanding and experience’. As his biographer Deborah Hart explains, Olsen, like his contemporaries Sidney Nolan and John Perceval, was very interested in the art of children and untutored naïve painters – ‘an interest that flowed through the work of many twentieth-century artists, originating in part with Klee and Kandinsky. Such work represented a directness of vision unimpeded by the laws of rationality; an ability to automatically arrive at the essence of the subject… In the early 1960s John Olsen was largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in irrational imagery in Sydney painting’. ²

The painting was included in Olsen’s acclaimed one-person exhibition in October 1960, from which the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased the great three-panel Spanish Encounter. The impact of this exhibition was revolutionary. Olsen’s wit, originality and assured technique now confirmed his reputation as ‘the most powerful and penetrating of the young painters in this country, amply fulfilling the promise that had been apparent since his earliest work’. ³

1. Quoted in Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 2000, p. 54.
2. Op. cit., p. 55.
3. James Gleeson in The Sun (Sydney), 6 October 1960, quoted by Hart, op. cit., p. 49.