John OLSEN

Australian 1928–2023
worked throughout Europe 1956–60

John Olsen made these paintings on two separate visits to the Mediterranean—to Spain in late 1950s and Portugal in 1966. When Olsen returned from Europe in early 1960, and especially following his sojourn in Spain, he brought back semi-abstract paintings that were the preliminary to his new view of Australia. They are the preparation for his celebration of the Australian landscape, which he called the You beaut country series. Exhibited in Sydney that year, the Spanish pictures were an immediate success. The critic and artist James Gleeson described Olsen as powerful, penetrating and fulfilling the promise of his early work. Granada, 1959, originally called Lorca’s country after the Spanish poet, is heavily textured in a sombre palette, a style used by the leading modern Spanish artists. Olsen was prepared to let his paintings grow like the slow, unexpected growth in nature. In her monograph on John Olsen Deborah Hart quotes from the artist’s 1959 journal:

Perhaps we are getting closer to nature when we begin working in this manner, putting something here and there, black, heavy—strange thing with a meaning I can’t exactly say what … and much to my surprise figuration is there like the Zen monks say, ‘like a flash of lightning’ without me even knowing.1

The accomplished techniques, the sustained attention to texture and marks together with the wild energy in Granada exploded on Australia artists lulled by the experience of a glib and superficial local abstract expression- ism.

1 D. Hart, John Olsen, Sydney, 1991, p. 47.

Jennifer Phipps

In 1966 Olsen and his family spent more than four months in Portugal, living in a small village near Portalegre, where the Fini tapestry atelier was weaving his You beaut tapestries. Both painting and title are puns on the idea of man contemplating nature in the Romantic tradition, man as an animistic being from tribal legend, and the Earth as all-embracing mother.

In the You beaut series Olsen went on to create a new way of seeing the Australian landscape, part aerial view, part x-ray, in his outrageously scrambled style. In 1966 Olsen and his family spent over four months in Portugal, living in a small village near Portalegre where the Fini tapestry atelier was weaving Olsen’s You beaut tapestries. Is the brilliant red in his painting Man absorbed in landscape, 1966, from red skeins of wool in the tapestry studio? Both painting and title are puns on the idea of man contemplating nature in the Romantic tradition, man as an animistic being from tribal legend and the Earth as the all-embracing mother.

Jennifer Phipps