SIDNEY NOLAN

The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan

Nolan '37 - '47, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, May 1962, cat. 26

Bears some studio scuff marks and has board creasing on lower right and lower left sides against the rebate.
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For Sidney Nolan, the Melbourne bayside suburb of St Kilda was an invaluable and recurrent source of inspiration.  From his childhood and through his marriage to his first wife, Elizabeth Paterson, much of Sidney Nolan's early life was spent in and around St Kilda, and it was the raffish, beach and fairground landscape of pleasure that fuelled his first major group of paintings. As the artist was later to recall: '... when I came to recollect my feelings about St Kilda and growing up there, I turned to Luna Park as the framework of all my boyhood memories and I painted a lot of paintings of it.'¹

The present work is illustrative of what Richard Haese has called the 'symbolist-expressionist-surrealist' strand of Australian modernism.²  Here, the geometric engineering structure of the Big Dipper becomes a pictorial structure for Nolan's exploration and development of an abstract language of painting.  Nolan himself has said of his Luna Park works: 'Some of them were half abstract; it's essentially a kind of grid, a curved grid that I use, and I've used it since as a variety of means.'³ 

Nolan's invention of a genuine modernist icon in the 1946 Ned Kelly paintings and their many later reiterations can obscure the fundamental importance of the precedent series: the Wimmera landscapes, and before them, the St Kilda pictures.⁴ Paintings such as Luna Park (1941, Art Gallery of New South Wales), Luna Park in the Moonlight (1945, National Gallery of Victoria) and the present work are central to Nolan's early development, and are a key focus for his integration of abstraction, expressionism and surrealism.

1. Brian Adams, Nolan at Sixty, release script, ABC Australia-RM productions, Munich, 1977
2. Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors: the revolutionary years of Australian art, Allen Lane, Melbourne, 1981, p. 185
3. Brian Adams, director, Nolan at Sixty, film, 1977, Script by Elwyn Lynn
4. Tom Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p. 29