Luna Park

Sidney Nolan began his career in Melbourne in 1938 at the age of 21, a largely self-taught, consciously determined innovator. Work by Picasso, Cézanne, Rousseau, Matisse and van Gogh that he saw in the 1939 Herald exhibition of French and British contemporary art at the Melbourne Town Hall profoundly affected his visual imagination.

From the outset, Nolan drew on elements in the everyday world around him that lent themselves to abstraction. In 'Luna Park', inspired by the linear ironwork grid of the Big Dipper at St Kilda’s celebrated fun fair, Nolan transforms the structure into a pattern of graceful arabesques and rectangles set against the vivid colours of the fair and sky beyond.