It's a blockbuster but without the razzmatazz - and the prices - which the bigger galleries would employ if they held the show. Any gallery in Australia would jump at the chance.

The big appeal of the 35 paintings is that they are varied, from different stages of Nolan's career. It gives a rounded look at the themes Nolan used and returned to throughout his career.

There are some Ned Kelly paintings, of course, but a lot more than that. There are also Nolan's visions from his trips to Antarctica, to Africa and to the great red centre of Australia.

So the gallery has managed a coup: it's brought together some of Nolan's best work in one place so the viewer can compare and contrast and reflect on his genius. The exhibition has come from the Heide gallery but with additions and subtractions.

It combines much of the best from the Heide Gallery in Melbourne with the Canberra gallery's Nolans plus some of the best from elsewhere, particularly Brisbane.

"There are some stellar pictures here," Canberra Museum and Art Gallery visual art senior curator Virginia Rigney says.

If you want to work out what all the fuss was about Nolan, the show will give you an idea. To his fans, he remains a great artist - a genius - and the evidence is in front of our eyes.

He was one of the "few people I've worked with who I would call a genius", as the opera producer Elijah Moshinsky put it.

Or at least nearly a genius.

"I have known artists whose work was uneven," the art critic Robert Hughes once said, "but I have seldom known one whose output had such highs and lows as Nolan's, such extremes of crap and lyrical near-genius."

What you get in the Canberra gallery exhibition is walls of the "lyrical near-genius" and not much, if any, of the "crap", to use grumpy Robert Hughes' word.

Take Rosa Mutabilis which he painted in 1945 when he was staying at Heide, now a gallery but then the farm owned by the affluent art patrons John Reed and his wife Sunday Reed (with whom the young Nolan started an affair, perhaps with both of them).

At first look, the picture is a field of white roses surrounding the face of Sunday Reed.

But look closer and its mood is darker than it seems at first sight.

The flowers are fading. It has a funereal air: "When Sidney Nolan painted Rosa Mutabilis, he was in an intense affair - actually a ménage a trois - with Sunday Reed," Rigney says.

"And he's pictured her surrounded by a halo of roses but these are roses which are actually tinged with decay. Sunday was a mercurial woman, extraordinarily generous and loving towards Nolan, but also capricious and demanding and this is a painting that expresses those tensions."

And tensions there were. In 1938, Nolan had sought the patronage of Sir Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert) to fund travel to Europe, and through him met John Reed. John and Sunday Reed encouraged talented artists to treat Heide as a place of freedom of thought (and action) where their talents could bloom.

It would, of course, end in tears. Nolan's life there did start as an idyll: the freedom to paint, funded by two rich people on a rural property outside Melbourne in what was then open land (but which today is just another part of suburbia).

He was a young working-class man from Carlton in Melbourne (the son of a tram driver). His milieu included St Kilda's funfair, Luna Park, with its raffish seaside atmosphere (and there are depictions of all that in the exhibition in Canberra).

The idyll and freedom of Heide appealed - until it didn't. The Reeds were manipulative. Emotional and sexual entanglements heightened the drama. The Reeds wanted control - and Nolan was not to be controlled.

Before the idyll turned sour, Nolan painted the famous Ned Kelly series on the dining table, and left the paintings as a parting gift (in 1977, Sunday Reed donated 25 of them to the National Gallery in Canberra).

They are not in the exhibition at the Canberra city gallery but a selection of other paintings from that time in the 1940s are, including the array of paintings deriving from St Kilda, and the paintings which prompted the exhibition's title, Search for Paradise.

One of the two paintings at the start of the exhibition, Woman and Tree (Garden of Eden), depicts the biblical scene, complete with a woman (the temptress, Eve), the tree, the apple and the snake. Next to it hangs Garden of Eden in which an angel casts Adam and Eve out after Adam has succumbed to the apple offered to him by Eve.

Every show, no doubt, needs a theory, and this one's is that the vision of paradise which Heide had seemed stayed with him. After he left, it remained as some sort of mythical arcadia for which he continued to search.

That's the theory.

"He saw Heide as a form of Eden, then of course became very angry about it because it was also the site where he lost his innocence," according to Heide head curator Kendrah Morgan. "When he finally left, it would haunt him forever."

Well, maybe. Was his travel to London and the expeditions to Africa, the Australian interior, to Auschwitz, to Antarctica, really some sort of search to regain some sort of vision of arcadia?

Or were they just the journeyings of a very curious mind?

As Nolan's biography in the Australian Dictionary of Biography puts it more prosaically: "Travel became Nolan's weapon against creative and personal depression."

He himself said later: "The thing you come to realise is that nothing is fixed - that everything keeps being transformed - and you have to sense where paradise is in the process."

Maybe - but Nolan could be deliberately, mischievously mysterious in the way he spoke. Maybe we shouldn't make too much of his words.

He said that the Kelly series was "an inner history of my own emotions, but I am not going to tell you about them". (Mischievous Nolan enjoyed weaving a mystery around himself.)

Better to let the pictures do the talking. Muse about the theory but don't over-analyse. Just feel the paintings' power.

One of the Kelly pictures, in particular, is stunning in its power. Kelly and Armour is not one of the early, stylised Ned Kelly paintings. Rather, it depicts a naked bushranger with his armour cast to the ground. The man looks utterly vulnerable.

It hangs next to Mrs Fraser and Convict, painted at the same time. The men - Kelly in one and the convict who rescued and betrayed a shipwrecked woman on Fraser Island in 1842 - are one and the same. They are pictures about lost souls, isolated men struggling and losing.

The juxtapositions in the exhibition are neat. There's good opportunity to compare and contrast.

"Tensions are something that you see throughout the exhibition," Rigney says. "When Nolan goes to Africa in search of a kind of paradise, we see beautiful antelope. But then there's another painting next to it, the dying gorilla."

He contrasts the awesome landscapes of Antarctica with the icy-blue, harrowed face of an explorer, all hollowed eyes and bone.

Nolan left for London in 1953 and moved in the most fashionable artistic circles, designing sets for the Royal Opera and Ballet, becoming Sir Sidney Nolan and honoured by the Queen with an Order of Merit.

But in one way, he never left Australia (and Australia certainly never left him). He returned frequently and explored it with a restless mind.

Either way, the exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery has all those images, a snapshot of a lifetime of Nolan's work which took him to Antarctica and to the red interior of Australia. There is a stunning picture of a gazelle but also his depictions of drought-destroyed cattle.

But the joy of the exhibition is the sheer variety. It makes you think - exactly what an exhibition is meant to do.

It contains some of Nolan's best works, from the big galleries in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.

It may convince you that Sidney Nolan really was a genius.

There is one further juxtaposition.

Dean Cross, an artist of Worimi descent, has produced a video installation which is a reflection on Sidney Nolan.

He used to be a dancer and the videos on two screens next to each other depict him dancing in Gundaroo Memorial Hall with a brown paper bag on his head on which there is a Sidney Nolan self-portrait. His hands are red.

The music is The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky. In 1961, Nolan designed the set and costumes for a production of that ballet in Covent Garden opera house in London.

Dean Cross admires Sidney Nolan and his work even as he says the artist was racist.

"Nolan's powerfully striking designs for the production appropriated First Nations cultures, combining First Peoples' iconography with his own to create mythic, dream-like environments charged with a brooding intensity," the catalogue accompanying the video installation says.

"While Nolan's cultural appropriation resulted in a stunning stage spectacle, it also demonstrated the era's typically limited sensitivity towards the traditions and cultural practices of Australia's First Peoples."

But it has to be said, the relation between Nolan's pictures and the video installation is not clear, not even after talking to Cross. He has no views on what he hopes people will make of his work.

Of course, meaning from art is rarely clear. It's not a slogan on a banner. The eight-minute video installation on a loop is interesting but it's hard to say why - perhaps there isn't a clear-cut underlying "meaning".

"It can be easy to forget that these artists weren't flawless," Cross says.

"I wanted to address that, and try to grapple with a deep love affair I have with Nolan and his painting."