Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (22 April 191728 November 1992) was one of the leading Australian artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of media, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art. He is best known for his series of paintings on legends from Australian history, most famously that of Ned Kelly, the bushranger and outlaw. Nolan's stylised depiction of Kelly's armour has become an icon of Australian art.
Biography
Early life Sidney Nolan was born in Carlton, at that time an inner working-class suburb of Melbourne, on 22 April 1917. He was the eldest of four children. His parents, Sidney (a tram driver) and Dora, were both fifth generation Australians of Irish descent. Nolan later moved with his family to the bayside suburb of St Kilda. He attended the Brighton Road State School and then Brighton Technical School and left school aged 14. He enrolled at the Prahran Technical College (now part of Swinburne University of Technology), Department of Design and Crafts, in a course which he had already begun part-time by correspondence. In 1933, at the age of 16, he began working for Fayrefield Hats, Abbotsford, producing advertising and display stands with spray paints and dyes for six years. In 1934, he attended night classes sporadically at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School.
Years at Heide (1941–1947)
Nolan was a close friend of the arts patrons John and Sunday Reed, and is regarded as one of the leading figures of the so-called "Heide Circle" that also included Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd and John Perceval. Boyd and Perceval were members of the Boyd artistic family who were centred at "Open Country", Murrumbeena.
In 1938, he met and married his first wife, graphic designer Elizabeth Paterson, with whom he had a daughter, but his marriage soon broke up because of his increasing involvement with the Reeds. He joined the Angry Penguins in the 1940s, after deserting from the army during World War II; he was an editor of the Angry Penguins magazine and painted the cover for the Ern Malley edition published in June 1944. The Ern Malley hoax poems were seen by Nolan and Sunday Reed as being uncannily prescient in touching on their own personal circumstances.Rainey, David. Ern Malley: The Hoax and Beyond. Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2009. , pp. 58-63. Nolan later recalled how he and Sunday felt they 'had a very intimate relationship with the poems', observing that Petit Testament 'was very much to do with our own lives. . . the poetry was tragic. . . and as it turned out our own lives did have a tragic outcome. ..’ The Malley poems remained a real presence to him throughout his life. He painted and drew hundreds of Malley-themed works and in 1975 said it inspired him to paint his first Ned Kelly series: "It made me take the risk of putting against the Australian bush an utterly strange object."Pearce, Barry. Sidney Nolan. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007. , pp. 96–97
He lived for some time at the Reeds' home, "Heide" outside Melbourne (now the Heide Museum of Modern Art). Here he painted the first of his famous, iconic "Ned Kelly" series, reportedly with input from Sunday Reed. Nolan also conducted an open affair with Sunday Reed but subsequently married John Reed's sister, Cynthia in 1948 after Sunday refused to leave her husband. He had lived in a ménage à trois with the Reeds for several years and after his marriage, he continued to see them and visited Heide at least once during their lifetimes. The years there together have been seen as a dominating factor in the subsequent lives of them all.
In November 1976, Cynthia Nolan ended her life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in a London hotel.Patrick White, Letters, ed, David Marr, p. 487, footnote 52 In 1978, Nolan married Mary Boyd (1926–2016),Dewi Cooke, "Lady Mary Nolan, widow of painter Sidney Nolan, dies in Wales", The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2016 youngest daughter within the Boyd family and previously married to John Perceval, who was the last surviving member of the Angry Penguins at the time of his death in October 2000.
Career
Nolan painted a wide range of personal interpretations of historical and legendary figures, including explorers Burke and Wills, and Eliza Fraser. With time his paintings of Mrs Fraser came to be associated with his growing animus towards Sunday Reed. However, when first painted he was still on good terms with the Reeds and sent them photos of the works for their approval. Indeed, he gave one Fraser Island painting to Sunday Reed as a Christmas gift that year.
Probably his most famous work is a series of stylised descriptions of the bushranger Ned Kelly in the Australian bush. Nolan left the famous 1946–47 series of 27 Ned Kellys at "Heide", when he left it in emotionally charged circumstances. Although he once wrote to Sunday Reed to tell her to take what she wanted, he subsequently demanded all his works back. Sunday Reed returned 284 other paintings and drawings to Nolan, but she refused to give up the 25 remaining Kellys, partly because she saw the works as fundamental to the proposed Heide Museum of Modern Art and also, possibly, because she collaborated with Nolan on the paintings. Eventually, she gave them to the National Gallery of Australia in 1977 and this resolved the dispute. Nolan's Ned Kelly series follows the main sequence of the Kelly story. However, Nolan did not intend the series to be an authentic depiction of these events. Rather, these episodes/series became the setting for the artist's meditations upon universal themes of injustice, love and betrayal. The Kelly saga was also a way for Nolan to paint the Australian landscape in new ways, with the story giving meaning to the place.
Although the Depression and World War II occurred during that period, Nolan decided to concentrate on something other than people struggling in life. Nolan wanted to create and define episodes in Australian nationalism, to retell the story of a hero, who now has become a metaphor for humankind, the fighter, the victim, and the hero, resisting tyranny with a passion for freedom. Nolan recognised that the conceptual image of the black square (Kelly's helmet and armour) had been part of modern art since World War I. He just placed a pair of eyes in Kelly's helmet, which animates its formal shape. In most of the series, Kelly's steel head-guard dominates the composition. Nolan also concentrates on the Australian outback and shows a different landscape in nearly every painting. The paintings give the audience an insight into the history of Australia but also show others from the world how beautiful Australia is. The intensity of the colours of the land and bush, along with its overall smooth texture, help create harmony between legend, symbol and visual impact. Kelly is in the centre of the painting but the colours around him help make him stand out. It's a very simplistic composition, but highlights that Ned Kelly is an Australian icon.
Nolan never relied upon one style or technique, but rather experimented throughout his lifetime with many different methods of application, and also devised some of his own. Nolan was inspired by children's art and modernist painting of the early 20th century. During this time many younger artists were veering towards abstraction, but Nolan remained committed to the figurative potential of painting. In terms of art history, Nolan rediscovered the Australian landscape (Australia has not been an easy country to paint). His love of literature is seen as visually evident in his work. Other key influences were the modernist artists such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau. Locally, the arrival of the Russian artist Danila Vassilieff in Melbourne in the mid-1930s, with his simple and direct art, was significant for Nolan.
In his series, Kelly is a metaphor for Nolan himself. Nolan, like the bushranger, was a fugitive from the law. In July 1944, facing the possibility that he would be sent to Papua New Guinea on front-line duty, Nolan went absent without leave from the army. He adopted the alias Robin Murray, a name suggested by Sunday Reed, whose affectionate nickname for him was "Robin Redbreast". So when he created the Kelly series, he viewed himself as the misunderstood hero/artist, like the protagonist, Kelly. "Nolan like this Kelly figure has also been a hero, a victim, a man who armoured himself against Australia and who faced it, conquered it, lost it…. ambiguity personified."The Bulletin magazine, 29 December 1962.
Nolan's Ned Kelly series is one of the greatest sequences of Australian paintings of the 20th century. His simplified depiction of Kelly in his armour has become an iconic Australian image. In 1949, when the series was exhibited at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the museum's director Jean Cassou called the works "a striking contribution to modern art" and that Nolan "creates in us a wonder of something new being born".Turnbull, Clive. "Paris likes Ned Kelly paintings". The Argus (Melbourne). 15 December 1949. p. 7. Retrieved 22 March 2016. Works from Nolan's second Kelly series (ca. mid-1950s) were acquired by major international galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New YorkAfter Glenrowan Siege (Second Ned Kelly series), MoMA. Retrieved 10 November 2012. and the Tate Modern in London.'Glenrowan', Tate. Retrieved 10 November 2012.Douglas, Tim (7 November 2012). "Sidney Nolan daughter puts Ned Kelly's head on the block", The Australian. Retrieved 10 November 2012. English critic Robert Melville wrote in 1963 that Nolan's Kelly belonged to "the company of twentieth-century personages which includes Picasso's minotaur, Chirico's mannequins, Ernst's birdmen, Bacon's popes and Giacometti's walking man".
Paintings of Dimboola landscapes by Sidney Nolan, who was stationed in the area while on army duty in World War II, can be found in the National Gallery of Victoria.
In 1951, Nolan moved to London, England.The Sidney Nolan Trust. The Rodd, Presteigne, Herefordshire, England. (Leaflet) www.sidneynolantrust.org He travelled in Europe, spending a year in 1956 painting themes based on Greek Mythology while in Greece. In Paris, he studied engraving and lithography with S. W. Hayter at Studio 17t two years there. He became friends with the poet Robert Lowell and produced illustrations for some of his books. Nolan was a prolific book cover illustrator, his images enhancing the dust jackets of over 70 publications. During this period, Nolan's first London solo exhibition occurred at the Whitechapel Gallery between June and July 1957.
In 1961, Nolan painted a significant series of over 250 Auschwitz works, only recently re-discovered, researched and documented by Nolan scholar Andrew Turley. The paintings were Nolan's response to the 1960 capture, and subsequent trial, of Nazi Adolf Eichmann when worldwide media attention reignited awareness of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during WWII. Nolan subsequently travelled behind the Iron Curtain to Auschwitz on 29 January 1962, at the invitation of Jewish journalist Al Alvarez and Britain’s The Observer newspaper. He intended to illustrate an article on the concentration camps by Alvarez but was so overwhelmed by the experience he declined to fulfil the commission on his return. The August 2021 exhibition of Holocaust paintings at the Sidney Nolan Trust in Presteigne (United Kingdom), was the first time Nolan's long-hidden Auschwitz work was publicly exhibited, and the first time their dramatic story was told in its entirety.