Luna Park 1945

SIDNEY NOLAN (1917-1972)

Luna Park 1945

Ripolin on board
61.0 x 72.5 cm; 82.0 x 94.0 cm (framed)
signed with initial, dated and inscribed lower centre: Luna Park/ 6.7.45 N.
dated and inscribed verso: 1945/ Luna Park/ KA No 28
sketch of pine trees and roller coaster verso

Provenance:
Private collection
Christie's, Melbourne, 2 May 2002, lot 69A
Private collection, Melbourne

Estimate: $90000 - 120000

In the midst of this world of black marketeers, struggling reffos, and stolid citizenry were the garish beauties of Luna Park, the desolate child at the end of a lane and the burst and spatter of Saturday night lights and laughter. It was peculiarly and secretly Nolan’s very own world, and I was the tourist. It was not difficult to discover what Nolan found down at St Kilda. It was of course himself.1

 Luna Park has long been a source of fascination for artists. Clarice Beckett’s famous 1919 painting, from the Art Gallery of South Australia collection, is one of the earliest depictions of the one in Melbourne. This soft-focus portrayal of the scenic railway and adjacent Moor-inspired towers was rendered in a gentle, pastel tonalism. In stark contrast is the generation of artists who emerged in Melbourne during the 1940s and early 50s, artists such as Joy Hester (1920-1960), Charles Blackman (1928-2018) and Sidney Nolan who re-imagined Luna Park and its surrounds as the source of engaging ideas and powerful emotions. They experimented with the idea of the St Kilda fun fair as the encapsulation of childhood memories, a release from the drudgery of wartime and post-war Melbourne, and as a potent symbol of contemporary urban life.

The first Luna Park in Australia opened in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1912.  A 1924 makeover introduced a new and improved roller-coaster ride, the hair-raising Big Dipper. Two years later, the first Dodgem car ride in Australia was introduced to Melbourne. Sidney Nolan was ten years of age at that time, living nearby and attending the local primary school. Luna Park figured largely in his daily life. As Nolan later recalled:

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

In 1942, Sidney Nolan was conscripted into the army. He spent most of his time guarding stores in Dimboola, a town in the Wimmera region of north-western Victoria. When the heat, dust and isolation from family and friends proved too much, Nolan applied for a month’s leave. Once it expired, he did not return. Absconding from the army in August 1944, Nolan lived and worked under an assumed name, Robin Murray, until his eventual discharge in 1949.

Nolan/Murray initially stayed with a psychiatrist friend at Parkville, close to where he had been born in Carlton. He also continued to visit art patrons John and Sunday Reed at Heide, where he had formerly resided. It was a relatively short cross-city excursion from these places to his boyhood haunt in St Kilda. Nolan used the time to reflect on the world of his childhood and to develop his unique modernist/primitivist style. The ensuing tranche of paintings from 1944-46 included about 40 works that were specifically produced in response to Luna Park and St Kilda. Almost half of these later featured in Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium, an important exhibition held at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 1998.

Luna Park 1945 is an intriguing double-sided work that was created during a personally difficult but also incredibly productive period. Unlike most of the earlier works by Nolan that focused on the abstract qualities of the tangles of steelwork underpinning the Great Scenic Railway and the Big Dipper rides (continued on the verso side of this painting), this mid-1940s picture shows the development of a more Expressionist-Symbolist style and outlook.

Like many of his contemporaries, Nolan was strongly influenced by Viktor Lowenfeld’s The Nature of Creative Activity published in 1939. Lowenfeld, a professor of art education in the United States, believed that art expression provided tangible evidence of people’s mental and emotional health. More specifically, he suggested that in the art of unsophisticated artists and children lay a direct (i.e. less visually rational, and hence more emotionally honest) response to the world. As art historian Richard Haese succinctly put it: ‘Haptic space was subjective, and temporally distinct events could be brought together in the one visual context.’3

These ideas concerning the visual and the haptic find a range of inflections in Luna Park. Different motifs, time frames and narrative threads are all played out in the one picture. The most important element is the woman portrayed in the centre foreground. Her childlike features and expressive demeanour animate the scene and lead the viewer’s eye into the picture. Her gaping mouth, outstretched arms and hair standing on end suggest something out of the ordinary, a momentary exhilaration, most likely to do with the Big Dipper. This ride is represented by a single carriage with its capacity eight-person load being propelled towards her from underneath the platform.

The white painted forms interspersed across the painting surface also have their basis in direct observations and conflated memories. These forms recall the swan carousel, love boats and even the ubiquitous presence of festive blue, white and red striped flags that are often encountered in Nolan’s paintings of St Kilda. To this mix can be added the inexplicable presence of strange, mountain-like peaks that visually dominate the background. These peaks may reference a local landmark – the You Yangs, a series of granite hills often visible across Port Phillip Bay. Nolan has enlarged them to reflect the haptic experience. Art imitates life and in this respect the indomitable You Yangs frequently spring up and frame one’s movement around the Bay.

By titling and dating the work ‘Luna Park/ 6.7.45’ Nolan introduces an equally intriguing point of reference. The Melbourne daily newspapers had reported a New Zealand volcano eruption three days earlier on 3 July. The eruption at Mt Ruapehu was noteworthy for the ‘columns of flame and intense, black smoke’ and two climbers who had been blown clear of the crater.4 Another Luna Park painting by Nolan,5 also dated July 1945, shows smoke billowing from the tip of a single white volcano, placed to the rear of Luna Park’s Great Scenic Railway. Is Nolan comparing the thrilling experience of Luna Park to a seismic event in these two paintings?

In his acclaimed depictions of Luna Park and St Kilda, Sidney Nolan tried, in his own words, ‘to see things again to re-experience them’.6 Not seen in public for over twenty years, Luna Park is a fine example of Nolan’s wartime series and his desire to re-present the innocence of childhood. This work uses a disjunctive form of storytelling to challenge conventional ideas regarding how we humans perceive and experience the world.

Footnotes:

1. Max Harris, quoted in Sidney Nolan and St Kilda: Memory and Modernism, Canberra Museum & Art Gallery, Canberra, 2020, accessed October 2024: https://www.cmag.com.au/exhibitions/sidney-nolan-and-st-kilda-memory-and-modernism

2. Sidney Nolan, quoted in Brian Adams, Nolan at Sixty [release script], ABC Australia-RM Productions, Münich, 1977

3. Haese, R., Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian art, Allen Lane, Melbourne, 1982, p.189

4. ‘Volcano blasts men from crater mouth’, Sun News-Pictorial, Melbourne, 3 July 1945, p.3

5. Luna Park 1945, enamel on board, 64 x 75.5 cm; sold Bonhams, Important Early Works from the Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan; Important Australian Art, Melbourne, 20 August 2013, lot 34

6. Nolan, S., quoted in Lynn, E., Sidney Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Sydney, 1979, p.48

Rodney James

Rodney James is an independent art consultant who specialises in valuations, collection management, exhibitions, research and writing, and strategic planning for art galleries and museums.

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