Provenance:
Private collection London

Sidney Nolan’s family moved to the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda when he was very young. He described living there as a boy as his ‘kitsch heaven’.

Its various attractions including St Kilda beach were to have an appeal for him in later years, particularly the iconic Big Dipper rides of Luna Park in which his almost Constructivist vision of steel curves and arcs are reminiscent of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International 1920.

As Rosenthal explains, “The Luna Park paintings may also be a response to the circus subjects of Picasso, Leger and Klee from the 1920s and 1930s with flat planes of colour separated by thick black lines.”1

This early Luna Park painting, whilst clearly based on the metal structure of the fun fair’s famous roller-coaster, is also akin to earlier, more abstracted works. The radical nature of Nolan’s early compositions, including Luna Park 1941, was rapidly acknowledged by critics at the time.
RM

1 Rosenthal. T.G., Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, pp.26–27.