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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Australian Art Collection of Sandra Powell & Andrew King
• Sale Date:
  19 Mar 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  11
• Lot Description:
  Sir Sidney Robert Nolan
  (1917-1992)
  Luna Park, 1945
  ripolin on board
  62.5 x 74.5cm
  inscribed 'Luna Park', 'ICA 27' and dated 1945 on reverse
• Provenance:
  The Artist's collection; Gift to private collection, London; Leonard Joel, Australian and European Paintings, Melbourne, 9 April 1997, lot 147 (illustrated); Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
• 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, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, 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, p. 14, 48 (possibly) Nolan '37-'47, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 15 May - 9 June 1962, cat. no. 27 (titled Painting)
• Notes:
  For the art of Sidney Nolan the war years signaled a quiet yet bold revolution, both in content and execution. The early childlike abstractions included in the 1940 Contemporary Art Society exhibition in Melbourne gave way to the artist's disposition for figurative, landscape and narrative subject matter. Where his works were once informed by the formal abstract qualities of Paul Klee and Joan Mir—, Nolan now looked towards the technical school of Paul CŽzanne, and the colours and dreamscapes of Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandisky when working on subjects close to his heart and home1. Nolan grew up in the beachside suburb of St Kilda and carried with him the vivid childhood memories of its surrounding vivid blue sea, jetting pier, meandering esplanade and its famous icon, 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 funfair and is related in theme and vintage to a modest 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 current work, Nolan continues to push the limits of picture plane flatness, resulting in a cut-out collage effect against the monochromatic ultramarine blue 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 he captures, in a CŽzannesque perspective and using the Frenchman's theory of 'treating nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the coneÉ'4, slanting palm trees, golden sand, Moorish style buildings 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 signals a change in emphasis in the art of Sidney Nolan. Although many stylistic and technical aspects would endure, (the current composition is later reworked in Ned Kelly at Glenrowan (1947, Westpac Corporate Art Collection), the emphasis would quickly shift from the artist's personal and familial recollections to a more collective, historical, national and folkloric memory. 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 modern European art would leave 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 - 50,000
• 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.