Towards East Melbourne (Dusk, Night and the City Series, No. 10) 1959

Summary

Born in East Brunswick just after the Great War, Charles Bush (1919–89), the son of a sign writer, acquired his first formal art training as a 14-year-old at the National Gallery art school, to which he would return in the early 1950s as a teacher. He also studied under Bernard Meninsky in London, thanks to a British Council grant in 1949, following his time as an official war artist for Australia during World War II. A consummate artist with both pen and brush, Bush favoured cityscapes, landscapes and figures as subjects, for which he won several awards during his career. Painted in 1959, his ‘Towards East Melbourne’ is a very particular nocturnal view of postwar Melbourne, illustrating a burgeoning architectural modernity in which high-rises begin to puncture the city’s low skyline. Comprising part of Bush’s ‘Night, Dusk and the City’ series, this oil composition might be seen as metaphorically depicting the twilight of the city’s past. Equally, however, the rich colours and dark zones suggest lived and embedded stories and secrets, a past that the glare of modernity cannot extinguish. ‘Towards East Melbourne’ came into the collection through a private donation in 2008.