Sidney Nolan

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), Department of Design and Crafts, in a course which he had already begun part-time by correspondence. From 1933, at the age of 16, he began almost six years of work for Fayrefield Hats, Abbotsford, producing advertising and display stands with spray paints and dyes. From 1934 he attended night classes sporadically at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School.[1]

Heide I, where Nolan painted the majority of his early Ned Kelly works

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 centered at "Open Country", Murrumbeena.

In 1938, he met and married his first wife, graphic designer Elizabeth Paterson,[2] 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;[3][4] indeed 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.[5][6] The Malley poems remained a real presence to him throughout his life.[7] He painted and drew literally 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."[8]

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.[9]

In November 1976, Cynthia Nolan ended her life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in a London hotel.[10] In 1978, Nolan married Mary née Boyd (1926-2016),[11] youngest daughter within the Boyd family and previously married to John Perceval.[12]

The Trial, held at the National Gallery of Australia, is one of 27 paintings comprising Nolan's 1946–47 Ned Kelly series.

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 on Fraser Island in 1947 after he had left Heide, he remained on friendly 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.[13]

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[14] and also, possibly, because she collaborated with Nolan on the paintings.[12] Eventually, she gave them to the National Gallery of Australia in 1977 and this resolved the dispute. Nolan's Ned Kelly series follow 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 happened during this 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. A hero which 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. Nolan just placed a pair of eyes into Kelly's helmet which animates its formal shape. As 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. Nolan's 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 picture but highlights that Ned Kelly is an Australian icon.

In 1952, Nolan documented the effects of drought in outback Queensland. His photographs of desiccated animals were a catalyst for his later drought paintings.[15]

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, 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, 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. He adopted the alias Robin Murray, a name suggested by Sunday Reed, whose affectionate nickname for him was "Robin Redbreast".[16] So when he created this 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."[17]

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".[18] Works from Nolan's second Kelly series (ca. mid-1950s) were acquired by major international galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York[19] and the Tate Modern in London.[20][21] 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.[22] 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.[23] During this period, Nolan's first London solo exhibition occurred at the Whitechapel Gallery between June and July 1957.[24]

In 1965, Nolan completed a large mural (20 m by 3.6 m) depicting the 1854 Eureka Stockade, rendered in enamelled jewellery on 1.5 tonnes of heavy gauge copper. Nolan employed the "finger-and-thumb" drawing technique of Indigenous Australian sandpainters to create the panoramic scene. Commissioned by economist H. C. Coombs, the mural is located at the entrance to the Reserve Bank of Australia's Melbourne office on Collins Street.[25]

During the period of 1968–1970, Nolan embarked on the creation of a monumental mural entitled Paradise Garden. This project consisted of 1,320 floral designs split into three subsections that were created using crayon and dyes. The intent of the subsections was to show the lifecycles of the plants, starting with the primeval plants emerging from the mud, transitioning to their full burst of colour in springtime, and the completion of the life cycle with the withering plants returning to the earth.[26]

In England, Nolan attended the Aldeburgh Festival and become influenced by the organiser and composer Benjamin Britten, exhibiting paintings at the festivals. He continued to travel widely in Europe, Africa, China, Australia, and even Antarctica.

Nolan died in London on 28 November 1992 at the age of 75, he was survived by his wife and two children. He was buried in the Eastern part of Highgate Cemetery, London.

Nolan's lifelong engagement with the theatre began in 1939 when he was commissioned to create décor for French ballet dancer Serge Lifar's revised version of Icare. Lifar, then on tour in Australia with the Original Ballet Russe, offered Nolan the job after a chance encounter with his abstract work. Icare premiered on 16 February 1940 at the Theatre Royal in Sydney.

In 1964, Robert Helpmann enlisted Nolan to design the set and costumes for his ballet The Display. Set at a bush picnic, the piece relates the mating rituals of the lyrebird to the masculine posturing of Australian males. Nolan created a series of green-blue gauze panels to evoke the filtered light of the forest. One contemporary critic remarked that Nolan's décor "not merely recreates the haunt of the lyrebird. It is the deep, rich mysterious gloom of a sunlight shafted Australian rainforest with the pillars of its ghostly white gums rising through its depths."[27]