‘A public farewell to the nation’: Why the art of John Olsen will endure

Next month’s lighting of the Sydney Opera House sails with the artwork of John Olsen will become a tribute to the late artist; one he viewed as a fitting farewell.

Planning had been underway for Olsen’s Life Enlivened to appear at the Vivid Festival – but the display has taken on greater significance following the artist’s death on Tuesday.

As it will appear: Life Enlivened on the Sydney Opera House sails. Credit: Destination NSW

Olsen himself regarded it as a pinnacle of personal contentment, his children revealed in a short statement issued on Wednesday.

“I can watch my work on the Opera House sails in my own private light show in a beautiful hotel room with my family all around me before going to bed and quietly drifting off forever,” Olsen told daughter Louise and son Tim only weeks ago when they suggested he watch the spectacle with them from a nearby hotel suite.

“What better way to say goodbye?”

Tributes poured in across the land following Olsen’s death, including from the prime minister. They honoured the celebrated painter who helped transform the way Australians saw themselves and their country.

Funeral details are yet to be finalised and publicly shared.

“Painting was our father’s life, and he was painting right up to the last in his studio, with friends calling in to see him, which he always loved,” Olsen’s children Tim and Louise said.

“Given Dad’s age, however, and the fact his strength has been failing recently, we feared this day was coming. But nothing can truly prepare you for the loss of a beloved parent, and Dad was that to us and many others. Beloved.”

Chief executive of the Sydney Opera House, Louise Herron, said Olsen had watched a trial of the illumination shortly before his death, and been thrilled by it.

“I can see no more fitting tribute to the impact of John Olsen on the Australian artistic scene than the fact the sails will be lit with his work for three weeks during the upcoming Vivid festival opening May 26,” she said. “He will always have such an important place in the Opera House given his Salute to Five Bells work. The Opera House is so deeply associated with one of his finest works.”

Olsen’s death in his home in NSW Southern Highlands closes the door on a generation of Australia’s great 20th-century landscape painters who straddled commercial sensibilities and fine art. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged the nation’s loss, saying Olsen was a poet of the brush, “a truly great explorer and interpreter of the Australian landscape”.

Steven Alderton, director of Olsen’s alma mater, the National Art School, said the artist was a “poet of the Australian landscape, an author of our harbour, a storyteller of our country, and a lyricist of humanity”. “Forever and eternally an artist who shaped our stories,” he said.

”John was a believer, a true believer. He believed in you and I, and the peaks and troughs of the human condition. He said extraordinary art was made in the exalted highs – but also in the depths and fathoms of the unknown.

“He lived life and experienced all the highs and lows of it, imprinting his mark on the landscape like no other non-Indigenous artist has ever done, or ever will.”

Not only was Olsen a worthy successor to the likes of Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Arthur Boyd, but he encouraged a new generation of painters including Luke Sciberras and Ben Quilty. NSW Arts minister John Graham acknowledged Olsen’s significant contribution to the arts as a teacher and mentor. “A prodigious work ethic meant he painted until his tenth decade, his energy and creativity undimmed by age,” he said.

Olsen’s legacy includes eight paintings that hang in the State Theatre foyers of the Arts Centre Melbourne, all based on famous operas.

To create these artworks, commissioned as the Theatres Building was being built, its chief executive, Karen Quinlan said Olsen had retreated into his studio with operatic recordings, listening to them over and over, totally absorbing himself in music and stories which he brought to life on canvas.

Commercial gallerist Michael Reid said the artist was one of Australia’s greatest art master bridge builders.

Olsen’s art “straddled the fine art divide between pure abstraction on one bank, and the traditional shore that is landscape and the figure on the other side”.

“As a rule of thumb, Australian modern and contemporary fine art collectors have tended to steer clear of purely abstract artworks, preferring to a large degree that paintings contain at least some figurative or landscape content,” Reid said.

“Through a combination of vibrant colour, free-flowing organic composition, and humorous depictions of the natural world the near-abstract art of John Olsen has for many collectors bridged the collecting gap.

“Olsen appeals to a broad art market, from those collectors who purchase pure abstraction to those collectors who purchase modern and contemporary figurative/landscape work.”

Barry Pearce, Emeritus Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, said Olsen’s importance to the story of modern Australian art was monumental.

“What most people do not know is that Olsen was the most voracious reader of literature – poetry, novels, plays, biographies, histories – from Virgil, Shakespeare to Eliot, Joyce, Auden and Seamus Heaney and so on,” he said. “You name them, he read them.

“And his extraordinary power of retention, this essential love of reading, helped imbue his vision of the Australian landscape across an entire continent with a kind of mystical sense of immersion, a sense of belonging to the whole world beyond our own boundaries.

Vale John OlsenCredit: Matt Golding

”As part of that, he had a generous appreciation of the collective Australian visual genius that preceded him, indigenous, non-indigenous – Streeton, Roberts, Rees, Nolan, Boyd, and many others – and became a sympathetic custodian of their legacies to which he added his own.”

Alderton curated John’s last exhibition, Goya’s Dog, with John and Tim Olsen, and said it was a joyful time. “He was telling stories of Australian art, writing art history as he spoke. Making new art as he spoke because that was an extension of his being.

“Ever a believer, he told me he was so happy with the National Art School and the future of art for artists who train there,” he said. “Life, art, laughter, poetry, Tim and Louise and their families, friends, good food, and an investment in the art of tomorrow. That was John.”

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