JOHN OLSEN

Avant Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above circa 1980

John Olsen, Clune Galleries, Sydney, from 22 April 1965, cat. 8

The early sixties were vintage years for John Olsen, of paintings pulsating with a Baroque exuberance in their joy of life. His You Beaut series of 1961 had already captured the national imagination, and in 1963 he added the Georges Prize to his prestigious list of achievements, documented in Virginia Spate's book published by Georgian House that same year. Successful solo shows at Clune Galleries, Sydney, and (his first) at the Australian Galleries in Melbourne included the brilliantly expressive Half Past Six at the Fitzroy (gift of Daniel Thomas to the Art Gallery of South Australia), and McElhone Steps, spontaneous celebrations of Sydney's urban life, from pub to the teeming atmosphere of Woolloomooloo and Kings Cross. These magnificently impulsive responses were touched with the phantasmagorical, his painterly, calligraphic wanderings taking the eye on a wanton chase through voluptuous topographical views. They reached new heights in Entrance to the Seaport of Desire, 1964, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The Bridge was painted during this richly productive time, the totality of the visual experience intuitively blending the figurative with the fantastic in an organic whole. A sense of uninhibited joy comes through the tangled chaos of the paint, as art critic James Gleeson once remarked, Olsen 'drinks everything in through all his senses'.¹ The Bridge was exhibited in 1965 at the Clune Galleries with Olsen's  first tapestry, Joie de Vivre, and the ceiling paintings, Le Soleil and La Primavera. Art critic Wallace Thornton described the show as revealing 'a new height of achievement for Olsen'. ²

1. The Sun-Herald, Sydney, 25 April 1965, p. 76.
2. The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 April 1965, p. 15.