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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Nov 2016 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  12
• Lot Description:
  Sidney Nolan
  (1917-1992)
  Luna Park, 1945
  Ripolin on board
  64 x 75.5 cm
  titled, dated and initialled lower right: Luna Park / June 9th 45 / N; inscribed, titled and dated: CA NO. 27 / Luna Park / 1945
  § - Resale Royalty of 5% will be applied to the hammer price of this work.
• Provenance:
  The artist's collection; Private collection, London (gifted from the above); Australian and European Paintings, Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 9 April 1997, lot no. 147; Niagara Galleries, Melbourne; The Australian Art Collection of Sandra Powell & Andrew King, Mossgreen Auctions, Melbourne, 19 March 2014, lot no. 11; The Eric & Jacquie Selwood Collection, Sydney
• Exhibited:
  (possibly) Nolan '37-47', Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 15 May - 9 June 1962, cat. no. 27; Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, December 1998 - March 1999
• References:
  Stephanie Holt, Julia Murray & Murray White, Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 14, 48; (possibly) Nolan '37-47', Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 15 May - 9 June 1962, cat. no. 27(as Painting)
• Notes:
  For the art of Sidney Nolan, the years framing the Second World War signaled a quiet yet bold revolution, in both content and character. The early childlike abstractions included in his Contemporary Art Society's exhibition of 1940 in Melbourne gave way to the artist's disposition for figurative, landscape and narrative subjects. Where his works were once informed by the formal abstract qualities of Paul Klee and Joan Mir—, Nolan now looked towards the technical ideas of Paul CŽzanne, and the colours and dreamscapes of Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky when working on subjects close to his native Melbourne1. Nolan grew up in the beachside suburb of St Kilda. Throughout his life, he carried with him his vivid childhood memories of the area's vivid blue sea, jetting pier, meandering esplanade and its iconic, psychedelic, Luna Park: 'I remember as a kid going to sleep feeling the ratchet sound of the Big Dipper going "click, click, click" and the screams of the girls and I'd go to sleep and think, well, I just wish I was up there with them. And later on when I came to recollect my feelings about St Kilda and growing up there, I turned to Luna Park as the framework of all the boyhood memories.'2 Luna Park 1945, is one of the artist's final depictions of the amusement park and is related, by theme and vintage, to a small number of paintings including Luna Park (1941, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), Luna Park in the Moonlight (1945, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and Robe Street, St Kilda (1945, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart).3 In the present work, Nolan continues to push the limits of picture plane flatness, resulting in a cut-out collage assemblage, placed against the monochromatic ultramarine ground of the sea and sky. The clichŽd opened mouth face of the Park is absent, but St Kilda's iconography is more or less complete: under the rounded profile of the Big Dipper Nolan captures, in a CŽzannesque perspective and using the Frenchman's geometrics of 'treating nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the coneÉ'4, slanting palm trees, golden sand, Moorish-style architecture and the curved city bound tram tracks - the whole, bathed in the evening's flaming sunset glow. Executed in the same year as the artist's first Ned Kelly paintings, Luna Park 1945 is one of the last autobiographical works from this period. Soon afterwards, there is a change in emphasis in his art. Although many stylistic and technical aspects would endure, the emphasis would soon shift from the artist's childhood experiences to collective, national memories. After this work, rarely does Nolan express his personal recollections in such apparent simplicity and distinct clarity of vision. Petrit Abazi 1 Although Nolan had not travelled to Europe at this stage, he did visit the 'Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art' at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1939. This first-hand encounter with European Modernism left a lasting impression on the young Nolan. 2 Brian Adams, Nolan at Sixty, release script, ABC Australia-RM Productions, Munich, 1977 3 Nolan began painting Luna Park and its attractions in 1940 and would revisit the subject continuously until 1945 4 Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet's CŽzanne: a Memoir with Conversations, Thames and Hudson, London, 1991, p. 163
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 40,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.