Australian painting

This essay shows the provenance for one of Arthur Streeton’s greatest paintings, The Grand Canal (1908) which has not been featured in major Streeton publications of the late nineteenth century, or twentieth century, because it has been out of public circulation for up to 84 years. This paper is the longer version of the three published articles.

Reginald Wilfred Whiting (Bill) Rowed (28 August 1916 - 10 June 1990) was an official Australian Second World War artist and printed textiles lecturer who taught at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) from 1948 to 1976. He was also a well-known painter of the Australian high country, especially as a watercolourist, an avid skier and raconteur.

A study of Drysdale's The Gatekeeper's Wife that analyses changes from early sketches in terms of Australian immigration policy and the replacement of Aboriginal figures with references to British taste for Giorgione and Piero della Francesca's early Renaissance fresco of the Madonna del Parto.

A shared centenary, mutual admiration and a friendship spanning the final quarter-century of their lives are the ostensible justifications for the present joint exhibition of Sidney Nolan and Elwyn Lynn at Charles Nodrum Gallery, Richmond. Their friendship also extends to provenance. Fifteen years ago Nodrum showed a suite of over two-dozen drawings that Nolan made over the course of a single afternoon, in 1984, on Lynn's veranda at Moncur Street, Woollahra, as the two men talked and drank (tea and coffee, we are assured, not grog). A further eight works from that series are shown here for the first time, providing a logical hinge for the joint exhibition. Yet, as the show reveals, Nolan and Lynn shared much more than simply friendship. Ideas, concerns and passions spark from one work to the next, while doubts about the nature of mark making, figuration and representation trouble the undercurrents of many of their works. Among the most self-evident of correspondences is the surrealist delight in unlikely juxtapositions of objects and forms. Nolan's Seated Figure with Faces presents a headless female torso with not one but four faces superimposed variously over her breast and hand and jauntily tucked under an arm. Four illustrations to Robert Lowell's poems, dating 1966-67, evince a similarly surrealist conjoining and overlaying of male and female figures—their economy of line and limb resulting in barbaric biomorphs in various states of ecstatic union. They sit well alongside three suites of Nolan's lithographs inspired by Dante's Inferno, in which predominantly armless men and women tumble awkwardly down or across the page like so many bound cadavers, bodily parts intermingling and—in some cases—covered in weeping red and blue stigmata. This is a relatively well-known version of Nolan, though it is worth underscoring the surrealist intent that persists throughout his mature work. Sidney Nolan, Artist Drawing a Nude, 1984, pastel on paper, 57.00 x 76.50. Lynn's collages draw together scraps of newspaper headlines, banner-heads and articles with photographed pages from a herbarium and other incunabula, postage stamps, wax seals, a playing card, postcards of Japanese woodblock prints, a magazine photograph of one of Monet's snow scenes, a reproduction Confederate banknote, strings, packaging from some ready-made French vegetable soup and several utilitarian hardware items, including a paintbrush and a rather cruelly-shaped hawkbill knife, which is traditionally used for cutting rope (appositely, given Lynn's predilection for tying his work up with a multitude of different types of rope, string and twine). Sometimes his collages pivot on a theme. For instance, Pont Neuf, 1992, assembles antique and contemporary postcards of the eponymous bridge with packaging from Boursin cheese (beloved by generations of Australian travellers and expatriates) and an airline bottle of Glendronach whiskey, as well as a postcard of what appears to be a Robert Ryman all-white canvas and a crescent-shaped piece of card marked with cartographic contours, all pasted over an arched bridge-shaped form torn from brown packaging paper. Made during Lynn's three-month Cité Internationale des Arts residency, Pont Neuf conveys a sense of foreign-ness—the sense of an outsider meditating on French history, on the significance of rivers for trade and transport, and on the intersection of art and the quotidian in a city steeped in cultural capital. Elwyn Lynn, Pont Neuf, 1992, acrylic and collage on paper, 50.00 x 68.00. I suspect it was this sort of sophisticated visual erudition on the part of Lynn that attracted Nolan—just as much as Lynn's highly evocative writing, particularly as it applied to Nolan's own work. Both men were inveterately inquisitive about the world; Europhiles who nevertheless extended their curiosity to temporally and geographically distant cultures. We see this in a striking large spray-painting of

A shared centenary, mutual admiration and a friendship spanning the final quarter-century of their lives are the ostensible justifications for the present joint exhibition of Sidney Nolan and Elwyn Lynn at Charles Nodrum Gallery, Richmond. Their friendship also extends to provenance. Fifteen years ago Nodrum showed a suite of over two-dozen drawings that Nolan made over the course of a single afternoon, in 1984, on Lynn's veranda at Moncur Street, Woollahra, as the two men talked and drank (tea and coffee, we are assured, not grog). A further eight works from that series are shown here for the first time, providing a logical hinge for the joint exhibition. Yet, as the show reveals, Nolan and Lynn shared much more than simply friendship. Ideas, concerns and passions spark from one work to the next, while doubts about the nature of mark making, figuration and representation trouble the undercurrents of many of their works. Among the most self-evident of correspondences is the surrealist delight in unlikely juxtapositions of objects and forms. Nolan's Seated Figure with Faces presents a headless female torso with not one but four faces superimposed variously over her breast and hand and jauntily tucked under an arm. Four illustrations to Robert Lowell's poems, dating 1966-67, evince a similarly surrealist conjoining and overlaying of male and female figures—their economy of line and limb resulting in barbaric biomorphs in various states of ecstatic union. They sit well alongside three suites of Nolan's lithographs inspired by Dante's Inferno, in which predominantly armless men and women tumble awkwardly down or across the page like so many bound cadavers, bodily parts intermingling and—in some cases—covered in weeping red and blue stigmata. This is a relatively well-known version of Nolan, though it is worth underscoring the surrealist intent that persists throughout his mature work. Sidney Nolan, Artist Drawing a Nude, 1984, pastel on paper, 57.00 x 76.50. Lynn's collages draw together scraps of newspaper headlines, banner-heads and articles with photographed pages from a herbarium and other incunabula, postage stamps, wax seals, a playing card, postcards of Japanese woodblock prints, a magazine photograph of one of Monet's snow scenes, a reproduction Confederate banknote, strings, packaging from some ready-made French vegetable soup and several utilitarian hardware items, including a paintbrush and a rather cruelly-shaped hawkbill knife, which is traditionally used for cutting rope (appositely, given Lynn's predilection for tying his work up with a multitude of different types of rope, string and twine). Sometimes his collages pivot on a theme. For instance, Pont Neuf, 1992, assembles antique and contemporary postcards of the eponymous bridge with packaging from Boursin cheese (beloved by generations of Australian travellers and expatriates) and an airline bottle of Glendronach whiskey, as well as a postcard of what appears to be a Robert Ryman all-white canvas and a crescent-shaped piece of card marked with cartographic contours, all pasted over an arched bridge-shaped form torn from brown packaging paper. Made during Lynn's three-month Cité Internationale des Arts residency, Pont Neuf conveys a sense of foreign-ness—the sense of an outsider meditating on French history, on the significance of rivers for trade and transport, and on the intersection of art and the quotidian in a city steeped in cultural capital. Elwyn Lynn, Pont Neuf, 1992, acrylic and collage on paper, 50.00 x 68.00. I suspect it was this sort of sophisticated visual erudition on the part of Lynn that attracted Nolan—just as much as Lynn's highly evocative writing, particularly as it applied to Nolan's own work. Both men were inveterately inquisitive about the world; Europhiles who nevertheless extended their curiosity to temporally and geographically distant cultures. We see this in a striking large spray-painting of