Sidney Nolan
1917–1992 · Australian figurative painter of versatile output, mid-20th century
Sidney Nolan (Melbourne, 1917 - London, 1992) was a versatile Australian painter, regarded by some historians as the most significant Australian artist of the 20th century. His work, often inspired by the history and traditions of his country, was largely produced outside Australia, mainly in Britain, where he spent much of his adult life. His importance lies in sustaining figurative painting at a time when abstraction dominated the artistic debate.
He studied in Melbourne in the mid-1930s and, through reproductions, became acquainted with the work of Dada and Surrealist artists. In 1938 he co-founded the Contemporary Art Society with John Reed. His first solo exhibition, held in Melbourne in 1940, greatly raised his reputation, and in 1951 he showed in London for the first time, city where he settled from then on.
In 1955 he travelled to Greece with his wife Cynthia, at the invitation of the writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, and settled on the island of Hydra. A visit planned for a few weeks stretched to almost five months. There he began his so-called Greek series, combining episodes from classical myth, such as the Trojan War, Theseus, the Minotaur or Icarus, with scenes of everyday island life. After a phase of purely abstract forms, he developed a bright, colourful and deliberately naive figurative style.
His Australian subjects included the arid outback, as in Carron Plains (1948), and the bushranger Ned Kelly. In that series the stylised armour of the outlaw became an icon of Australian art, and Kelly works as a metaphor for injustice and for the painter's own situation. Nolan also worked in prints, drawings and theatre design.
His legacy lives on chiefly in the Ned Kelly series, held in international collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London.
Works (1)
Curiosities
An alias chosen by a friend
In July 1944, facing the possibility of front-line duty in Papua New Guinea, Nolan went absent without leave from the army. He then adopted the alias Robin Murray, a name suggested by Sunday Reed, who affectionately called him Robin Redbreast. Nolan later saw himself in Ned Kelly, a fugitive hunted by the law, and that parallel shaped the series he painted.
Painting a literary hoax
Nolan painted the cover of the June 1944 edition of the Ern Malley poems, a literary hoax in which the verses were attributed to a nonexistent poet. In 1975 he said that this experience had inspired his first Ned Kelly series. He went on to paint and draw hundreds of works linked to Malley, which stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Compared with Picasso's figures
In 1963, the English critic Robert Melville placed Nolan's Kelly alongside a group of twentieth-century figures: Picasso's minotaur, Chirico's mannequins, Ernst's birdmen, Bacon's popes and Giacometti's walking man. The comparison underlines how far Nolan made his figure recognisable as an image of its century.