Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, 1980s; thence by descent, c. 1989; Private collection, Melbourne; Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne; Private collection, Sydney.

Elijah Moshinsky, until 2007

Christopher Kingzett Fine Art, London UK

Private collection, Sydney

AGNEWS Fine Art Dealers, 43 Old Bond Street, London, 2011

From the late 1930s onwards, Nolan had been involved in stage design and this remained an important part of his work. In the 1980s he forged a highly productive relationship with the opera director, Elijah Moshinsky, also an Australian. The first results of this collaboration were the sets and costumes for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden for Moshinsky’s production of Samson et Dalila by Saint-Saëns in 1981, which are generally considered to be his most important achievement in the field of stage design and are still in use today. Nolan produced designs for everything from backdrops and gauzes to the costumes of the principal singers.

Nolan wrote of these, ‘I was allowed to make my own costumes, so I brought silk back from China and I draped it around the girls and put in pins …… Then I followed Elijah’s instructions fairly closely. I tried to provide a kind of cross between an oriental and an Australian setting …… a sort of lush desert. I’d been going to China a lot at that time and with my Australian background I felt it was my job, and Elijah felt it was, to feed in some sensuous kind of visual reality to a work which was maybe a little bit stilted in some way. It was actually very beautiful but it needed something. What I did in conjunction with Elijah and with Nick Chelton was to load the whole thing with images and, in a sense, almost subliminal images’. ¹

A further commission for a production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Sydney Opera House followed in 1983 and for Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1987. The present designs remained in the collection of the producer, Elijah Moshinsky, until 2007.

¹ Nolan lecture, ‘Painting and the Stage’, Royal Academy, London, 1988

Malaluba Gumana’s cross-hatched water lily design is created through her use of the marwat – a ‘hair brush’ that can create the finest of lines painted in natural ochres and pigments. A recipient of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for bark painting in 2013, Malaluba Gumana mainly paints her mother’s Gålpu clan designs of dhatam (waterlilly), djari (rainbow), djayku (filesnake) and wititj (olive python). Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales as well as prominent private collections.

Malaluba Gumana’s cross-hatched water lily design is created through her use of the marwat – a ‘hair brush’ that can create the finest of lines painted in natural ochres and pigments. A recipient of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for bark painting in 2013, Malaluba Gumana mainly paints her mother’s Gålpu clan designs of dhatam (waterlilly), djari (rainbow), djayku (filesnake) and wititj (olive python). Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales as well as prominent private collections.

Malaluba Gumana’s cross-hatched water lily design is created through her use of the marwat – a ‘hair brush’ that can create the finest of lines painted in natural ochres and pigments. A recipient of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for bark painting in 2013, Malaluba Gumana mainly paints her mother’s Gålpu clan designs of dhatam (waterlilly), djari (rainbow), djayku (filesnake) and wititj (olive python). Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales as well as prominent private collections.

The artist;

Marlborough galleries;

Private collection, Sydney