Provenance: The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan
Exhibited: Sidney Nolan Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007

Nolan’s childhood was spent growing up in the Melbourne seaside suburb of St Kilda. In Woman on a Beach 1940, the reclining sun-worshippers of St Kilda beach become the foundation for Nolan’s innovative image-making. Nolan’s interest in abstraction may have stemmed from viewing the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, with Woman on Beach 1940 and related paintings of this period perhaps taking as their reference, Picasso’s voluptuous beach goddesses. The Herald exhibition “had a deep effect on Nolan, confirming what he had learned after many years of looking at reproductions.”1

In addition, in 1938, ‘mixed’ bathing of both sexes, legal since 1927, was restricted to weekends and only in the ladies’ section. During World War II (1939-45), relaxed moral standards allowed nude sunbathing which provided Nolan with many subject opportunities.

By contrast to the faux naif ‘Bathers’ series of 1945, Woman on a Beach 1940 as well as paintings of the same year, Untitled (abstract in red and black I) (cat. no.3) and Untitled (abstract in red and black II) (cat. no.4) have a linear complexity and a sophisticated abstraction which exemplifies the best works of this period.
RM

1 Adams. B., Sidney Nolan: Such is Life, Hutchinson, London, 1987, p.45.