Sidney NOLAN

Australian 1917–92
worked in England 1953–92

Sidney Nolan was one of Australia’s most inventive and influential artists who achieved an international reputation for his distinct iconography. Nolan’s significance was not due to the fact that his images were uniquely Australian, but rather it was the manner in which his art transformed the Australian experience into something more universal.

Many of Nolan’s early images, painted with fluid and fast-drying enamels, were evocative scenes of contemporary suburban life that reflected his own experiences of living in the bayside suburb of St Kilda. Nolan recorded the baths, Luna Park, Catani Gardens and, in St Kilda, c. 1942, the foreshore, which included such signifiers as unusu- al markers and bridges. Although these formative, faux-naif, figurative paintings reveal Nolan’s careful and delib- erate search for distinctly Australian imagery, by the late 1940s the artist was increasingly attracted to Australia’s rich history of convicts, explorers and bushrangers that lay beyond the coastal fringes.

Geoffrey Smith

From 1949 to 1953 Nolan created extraordinary images of inland Australia. These included aerial views of desert and mountain ranges, drought-stricken landscapes with carcasses, powerful narratives of the Burke and Wills expedition and images of religion in an Australian context. Nolan’s unique vision, which had an overwhelming impact on Australian audiences, launched his international career and supplanted the pastoral imagery that had dominated Australian landscape painting since the nineteenth century.

Seeing inland Australia from the air provided Nolan with an entirely new spatial challenge. Travelling at an altitude of 3000 metres (as opposed to contemporary commercial air travel, which takes place at around 11,000 metres), Nolan thought of both Paul Klee and Indigenous Australian artists in relation to the abstracted landscape that appeared as random patterns on the Earth’s surface. Unnamed ridge, Central Australia, completed on 17 November 1949, was the first work from the series publicly exhibited; it was included in the 1949 Wynne Prize for Landscape Painting and purchased by the eminent collector and Felton Bequest Adviser A. J. L. McDonnell. Like a cubist painting or collage, these landscapes create their own reality, with constantly shifting patterns in which images, predominantly mountain ranges, appear and disappear. Many present multiple, simultaneous views of the landscape that deliberately play on notions of reality and illusion:

I wanted to deal ironically with the cliché of the ‘dead heart’; I wanted to know the true nature if the ‘otherness’ I had been born into. It was not a European thing. I wanted to paint the great purity and implacability if the landscape. I wanted a visual form of the ‘otherness’ of the thing not seen.1

1 Sidney Nolan, quoted in E. Lynn & S. Nolan, Sidney Nolan—Australia, Sydney, 1979, p. 13.

Geoffrey Smith

From 1953 Nolan lived abroad. Based in London he made several excursions to Italy between 1954 and 1956 and completed numerous small sketches and drawings of classical and Christian iconography and architecture. Crucifix, southern Italy, 1955, is one of a small series of larger-scale landscapes that Nolan completed in his London studio—several of which formed a significant component of his second solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London, in May 1955.

Nolan’s particular fascination with the rugged and mountainous landscape of southern Italy stemmed from his memories of the extensive journeys he undertook of inland Australia and reveals his continued enthusiasm for viewing the landscape from an aerial perspective. In images such as Crucifix, southern Italy, Nolan merged his Australian and European experiences, blending the past with the present and the real with the imagined:

Now he brings … his new eyes to the old Europe, which has nourished artists for so many centuries. He is fascinated by similarities in light and structure which he detects in the landscapes of Southern Italy and Australia. In Italy he feels at home. After absorbing and digesting it, pondering on its structure and its symbolism he has come back to paint it in London … They are paintings of love. It is apparent that he find the desolate harmonies of the Calabrian countryside to his taste; he understands its magic instinctively. The architecture nourishes his passion for symbols.1

1 A. Zander, ‘Sidney Nolan’, Studio, London, September 1955, pp. 84–5.

Geoffrey Smith