Paradise Garden. Paintings, Drawings and Poems. With Introduction by Robert Melville
London, R. Alistair McAlpine Publishing Ltd, 1971.
Large quarto, 111 pages with 49 full-page colour plates, each with a colour-decorated semi-transparent overlay.
Gilt-blocked green cloth; text block dropped within the binding, but firm (possibly a design or production flaw, as we have identified this problem with other copies we have handled); an excellent copy with the pictorial dustwrapper (lettered on the spine) price-clipped and slightly torn near the foot of the hinge of the front flap, with the decorated semi-transparent secondary dustwrapper completing the front cover illustration (and lettered on the front panel) slightly chipped, marked and crinkled.
One of 2890 copies of the standard edition, with a felicitous presentation inscription on the half-title: 'Max & Yvonne | Love from | Sid'. The recipients are none other than Max Harris and his wife Yvonne. The association between the artist and the poet dates back to the early 1940s, the days of 'Angry Penguins' and the Reed & Harris imprint. In 1943, Reed & Harris released its second publication, 'The Vegetative Eye'. It was the first (and only) novel by Max Harris, and the first book cover illustrated by Sidney Nolan. A curious and lavish production, 'Paradise Garden' marries Nolan's artistic work with his poetry. The poems are set opposite plates from his monumental 'Paradise Garden' series of 1320 flower paintings, and are overlaid with semi-transparent sheets illustrated after his crayon drawings. The poems themselves are a bitter response to his ménage à trois with John and Sunday Reed at Heide, and the book's publication, thirty years after that relationship dissolved, was not welcomed by them. Of the poems, Nolan wrote to his daughter: 'You remember walking by that little bridge below the Esplanade [Catani Arch at St Kilda] and we talked about writing some poetry. Well I have done some and published them with illustrations of "Paradise Garden". But the poems are the opposite of the paintings. They refer to the rather night-mare period of my life at Heidelberg and are quite savage in a way that never happens in a painting. I hope to one day write a book in which the poetry celebrates rather than castigates, and is more like what I thought about at eighteen standing by that bridge'. The publisher, Alistair McAlpine, wrote: 'Despite the fact that "Paradise Garden" was a beautiful book in every respect - no expense had been spared in its production - I was only able to sell a small number of copies'. It was, he believed, 'the most original and impressive book that I have ever published'. The book was accompanied by a film of the same name produced by Stuart Cooper, and with narration and recitation by Orson Welles.
Item #122474
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