[BITList] Sir Sidney Robert Nolan at 100

[John Feltham]

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Nolan, Sir  Sidney Robert  (1917-1992), artist, was born on 22 April 1917 in Carlton, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, the eldest of four children of Sidney Henry Nolan, a fifth-generation Irish-Australian who worked as a tram driver and part-time publican and bookmaker, and his wife, Dora Irene, nee Sutherland. The ethos of the family was typical of the Australian working class of that period, with little emphasis on education but great passion for sport. Nolan devoted much of his energy to physical activity as a swimmer, a daring diver, and a racing cyclist, and until his death maintained a spare, muscular frame. Much of his swimming and diving took place at the beachfront Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, to which the family moved soon after his birth, and which figured largely in his early paintings.

Apprenticeship and early career

Nolan attended Brighton Road state school and Brighton Technical School, Melbourne, until 1932, when he went to Prahran Technical College, Melbourne, to study design and crafts. He began there to use some of the diverse media that were to be exploited by him for the rest of his life, including the making of commercial illuminated signs with such materials as tin foil, glass, and transparent enamels. In 1933 he went to work for Fayrefield Hats at Abbotsford, Victoria, where he stayed for over five years. While working on display stands, he became acquainted with spray paints, another medium which was to fascinate him for life and to which he returned in his final years. He designed posters featuring page-boys in the company's hats which, as a handsome young man, he occasionally modelled himself.

In 1934 Nolan became a not very diligent attender of evening classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, studying intermittently under Charles Wheeler and William Beckwith McInnes. He spent more hours at the nearby public library, read voraciously, and became particularly fascinated by the books of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, and Dostoyevsky. During his heroic cycling activities (200 miles a day was not uncommon) he met a fellow art student who suggested that he should take his studies more seriously. In 1936 he left the family home to move into a ramshackle condemned building where he used as painting surfaces any material that came to hand, including loosened slates from the building's roof. It was in this derelict building that he held his first exhibition. At this time he also began to write poetry. Thereafter he wrote poetry intermittently-and with considerable skill-throughout his life.

During his apprentice years Nolan led the classic life of the impoverished student. He stowed away (abortively) on a Europe-bound ship, worked on a hamburger stand, and spent his wages on eating oysters. In 1938 he showed his portfolio to Sir Keith Murdoch, the press magnate and an influential trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria, who passed him on to the art critic of The Herald (Melbourne), Basil Burdett, who did not much like what he saw but recommended him to an art-obsessed solicitor, John Reed. Nolan's meeting with Reed was one of the two catalytic encounters of his life. In that same year, at Reed's bidding, he joined the new Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in Melbourne. He also married Elizabeth Paterson, granddaughter of the 'Heidelberg school' painter John Ford Paterson. They moved to Ocean Grove, by the sea, and Nolan laboured in asparagus fields as well as, with his wife, taking on a pie shop.

In 1939 Nolan exhibited at the CAS inaugural exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria a painting entitled Head of Rimbaud (Rimbaud being a writer he obsessively admired for his entire adult life). The painting was largely abstract and met with some ridicule. A fellow painter, Adrian Lawlor, asked him, 'What exactly is a rimbaud? A French cheese?' In 1940 Serge Lifar commissioned him to do the decor for his ballet Icare in Sydney. Nolan also held his first exhibition at his studio. It was opened by John Reed who, with his wife, Sunday, had taken up Nolan as their major protege. Nolan's daughter, his only child, was born in that year, after he and Elizabeth had already separated, partly because she resented the influence of the Reeds and the amount of time Nolan spent at the Reeds' house, Heide.

During this period Nolan produced his first important sequence of paintings, brightly coloured pictures of the beach at St Kilda, with vigorous studies, tinged by his early love of abstraction, of divers, swimmers, sun-bathers, and so on. These paintings were much influenced by his early enthusiasm for the work of the Douanier Rousseau, although they were far from being naive. He also produced inventive visions of the permanent St Kilda fun fair, Luna Park. He continued to paint St Kilda pictures until about 1946 but, from 1942 onwards, simultaneously worked on a series of largely landscape paintings of the Wimmera, the partly desolate, partly beautiful, wheat growing area in western Victoria.

Nolan had been conscripted into the army in 1942 and, after initial basic training, was posted to the Wimmera, spending his time guarding stores against the risks of Japanese invasion. He was promoted to corporal. His military duties were not sufficiently onerous to prevent a prolific output of paintings for which the Reeds provided the essential art supplies. He suffered the loss of two finger joints in an accident but their absence did not affect his capacities as a painter. At this time he embarked on a relationship with Sunday Reed. Nolan and the Reeds, apart from his absence in barracks, maintained a menage a trois which lasted until 1947 and survived the complexities of his desertion from the army in 1944.

Nolan worked closely with John Reed and the writer Max Harris on an intellectual monthly magazine called Angry Penguins, which in 1944 published, illustrated by Nolan, a group of poems by Ern Malley. This constituted Australia's most significant literary scandal, since Ern Malley did not exist, having been invented by two soldier poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, to prove that 'modern poetry' was a sham. The hoax was rapidly exposed but, not least because Malley's verse was never less than interesting, Nolan's involvement did him no harm and sparked off several interesting paintings.

Ned Kelly and other Australian legends

At the end of 1945 Nolan became interested in the life and times of the notorious, but in Australia much worshipped, nineteenth-century bushranger Ned Kelly. Nolan's paternal grandfather had been one of the Victoria policemen who had pursued Kelly. Nolan and Harris toured Kelly's territory, around Ballarat and Glenrowan, and spoke to Kelly's surviving relatives before Nolan settled down at Heide to paint the first Ned Kelly series, on which his lasting public fame was based.

Nolan once said that 'Kelly is the millstone round my neck'  (personal knowledge). By this he meant many things: that Kelly was associated with him often to the overshadowing of and even to the exclusion of other meritorious work; that Kelly was, after the initial exhibition at the Velazquez Gallery in Melbourne in 1948, a kind of incubus he could not shake off; that Kelly images by themselves, or intruding into paintings on totally different subjects, were painted not just for a few years but were a lifetime's work. Through his paintings Nolan immortalized the square black Kelly mask and armour, which in fact owed more to an abstract black rectangle by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich than the contemporary engravings and penny-dreadful illustrations of Kelly. (Nolan used to say that 'the black square is the most powerful device in twentieth-century painting'; personal knowledge.) Nolan's Kelly became as Australian an icon as Ayer's Rock (Uluru) and the Sydney Opera House and, partly at least because of those unmistakable images, Ned Kelly himself became, alongside Sir Donald Bradman and the racehorse Phar Lap, an archetypal Australian hero.

In 1947 Nolan left Heide and went to Queensland, spending time in Brisbane and on Fraser Island, the scene of his next major series, about the shipwrecked Mrs Fraser and the convict Bracefell. Nolan, so many of whose paintings were inspired by books, proved in the Mrs Fraser paintings to be the inspirer of Patrick White's novel A Fringe of Leaves (1976). In 1948 he moved to Sydney and married, on 25 March, Cynthia Hansen, nee Reed (d. 1976), John Reed's sister. After this the close relationship between Nolan and John and Sunday Reed came to an end.

The next few years were intensely productive. The year 1948 saw Nolan's first engagement with the paintings of disused mines and his reconstruction of that central episode of Australian history, the gold rush of the 1850s and the battle of the Eureka Stockade-a subject which formed the basis of one of his major public commissions, the gigantic enamel mural in 1965 for the Reserve Bank of Australia in Melbourne. He had his first critical and commercial success with his paintings of the central Australian desert in 1950. These were followed by his remarkable paintings of the outback and his exploration of the calamitous drought areas in Queensland in 1952. After Kelly and Mrs Fraser, his next major series was devoted to the explorers Burke and Wills, whose epic, tragic, and fatal south to north crossing of the continent to find the Gulf of Carpentaria was one of the several heroic failures of Australian life that so engaged his sympathies. Burke and Wills, like Kelly, remained fixed in Nolan's mind and he continued to paint them for nearly three decades in different styles. Once he got an idea for a series into his head he rarely let it go.

Wider horizons

Early in 1949 the second catalytic encounter of Nolan's artistic life occurred. Sir Kenneth Clark, visiting Sydney, was struck by a Nolan painting in an otherwise humdrum exhibition, and sought him out. A firm friendship and intellectual rapport ensued, so that once Nolan settled in London, Clark was able to open every important door for him, whether socially, artistically, or commercially. Clark's patronage through the 1950s and 1960s was crucial, as was the support of the director of the influential Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, Bryan Robertson, who gave Nolan a major retrospective exhibition there in June 1957. Before that, however, Nolan had gone to England with his wife, Cynthia, and her daughter Jinx (whom Nolan later adopted). They spent 1951 in Cambridge but already his restless need for travel was manifesting itself. His Australian travelling never ceased, but he also moved around extensively in Europe, producing notable work particularly in Italy in 1952.

In 1955 Nolan, with Cynthia and Jinx, rented a small flat near Paddington Station in London, and had a substantial one-man show at the Redfern Gallery. In 1956 he moved to the Greek island of Hydra, where he and his wife formed a close relationship with the Australian novelist George Johnston and his wife, the writer Charmian Clift. Johnston incorporated Nolan, as Tom Kiernan, into his novel Clean Straw for Nothing (1969). He also introduced him to the work of his fellow Australian Alan Moorehead, notably his book on Gallipoli. Nolan became obsessed with Troy and Gallipoli more or less simultaneously, but first painted the sequence he called Leda and the Swan, influenced by the work of Robert Graves and by W. B. Yeats's sonnet. He saw the Leda paintings as a kind of dry run for the Gallipoli series, not least because it was Leda who had given birth to Helen of Troy. He was particularly fascinated by the idea that Troy (with its epic, Homeric deeds) should be the site of the First World War debacle of Gallipoli, which took so many Australian lives and left such a permanent scar on-and created such an enduring myth in-the Australian national character. The Gallipoli paintings, the best of which were done on Hydra and in Nolan's riverside studio in Putney, London, to which he moved in 1957, were notable not only for their quality but for their fusion of ancient and contemporary mythology. Nolan later, in 1978, presented hundreds of his Gallipoli paintings and drawings to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, in memory of his brother Raymond John Nolan, who had died in a drowning accident in 1945.

In 1958 Nolan was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Harkness fellowship to travel, study, and work in the United States. By 1960 he had established close personal and intellectual friendships with the writers Patrick White and C. P. Snow, and subsequently did most of their book jacket paintings. While never slowing the relentless pace of his studio work, he accepted commissions for magazines, travel paintings, and drawings, and for stage designs which ranged from straight plays to ballet and opera sets for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, and the Australian Opera in Melbourne. He also formed a close collaboration with the American poet Robert Lowell and illustrated several books for him, including, notably, his very free translation of Baudelaire's The Voyage (1968). He also illustrated books of verse by the Australian writers Randolph Stow and Charles Obsorne.

In the 1963 new year's honours list Nolan was created CBE. The following year he travelled to the Antarctic with Alan Moorehead (whom he had inspired with his Burke and Wills paintings to write his magisterial account of the explorers' disastrous journey, in Cooper's Creek, 1963). The Antarctic journey-a US Navy expedition to McMurdo Sound-produced some singularly successful paintings which he soon followed up with a series of illustrations of Shakespeare's sonnets shown in several English venues, including the Aldeburgh Festival. He had already developed a fruitful relationship with the creators of the Aldeburgh Festival, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, was a frequent festival visitor and exhibitor, and did some fine paintings inspired by Britten's works, such as his settings of Thomas Hardy's Winter Words and Bertolt Brecht's Children's Crusade.

In 1965 Nolan took up a creative arts fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra and in 1966 moved temporarily to New York, where he rented a penthouse and a ground floor studio at the Chelsea Hotel. It was during this period that he collaborated particularly closely with Robert Lowell, doing some powerful paintings based on his translation of Prometheus Bound (1969). He also did several rather undistinguished covers for Time magazine. He then embarked on a series of massive polyptyches such as Desert Storm (Australian landscape), Inferno (based on Dante and Lowell), and Riverbend I, Riverbend II, and Glenrowan, all based on Ned Kelly but emphasizing the landscape rather than the human figures.

Nolan also travelled widely in Africa, producing some fine animal paintings, particularly of zebras, gorillas, and gazelles. He became much enamoured of China, first gaining entry, via Pakistan, in 1965, and returning in 1972, 1978, and 1983. He produced probably his most significant Chinese painting in 1984, in the form of the fourteen large canvases commissioned for the lobbies of the headquarters buildings of Hong Kong Land in Hong Kong.

Among the most copious of Nolan's works were a series of small mixed media on paper paintings, each about 30 cm high by about 24 cm wide. He painted literally thousands of these in the late 1960s and early 1970s and enclosed them in a series of glass-framed panels in groups of six or eight or nine, always with a grand design in mind. One sequence, the Wildflowers, was presented to the Reid Library of the University of Western Australia in Perth. The remaining three sequences were Shark, housed in the lobby of the Studio Theatre at the Sydney Opera House, Paradise Garden, comprising over 1000 individual paintings, in the lobby of the State Theatre of Victoria in Melbourne, and Snake, the largest of them (some 20 feet high and 150 feet wide), with some 1620 separate paintings displaying the undulating body of a giant snake in a mosaic created out of the individual paintings, which at the time of his death was still held in store. These three were known collectively as Oceania, and together they were an extraordinary tribute to the flora and wildlife of Australia and New Guinea. Taken all together they display not only Nolan's astonishing fecundity but also his breathtaking confidence in his architectonic vision. At the other end of the scale, he also experimented with sculpture, producing, in collaboration with the goldsmithing foundry of Jean-Francois Victor Hugo in the south of France, some beautiful gold sculptures only a few inches high but immensely strong in their sculptural impact.

Later life

In 1971 Nolan took part in the Adelaide Festival and travelled in Australia with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. In June 1973 he had a major retrospective exhibition at the Royal Dublin Society in Eire, the most important show since the Whitechapel one in 1957 and before the National Gallery of Victoria one in 1987. It cemented his long and deep love of Ireland and its culture. (He long contemplated the acquisition of some land in co. Clare, from which his ancestors had migrated to Australia.) In 1974 he joined in a cultural exchange exhibition in Beijing (Peking) and Nanjing (Nanking) under the aegis of the Australian department of foreign affairs. In 1975 he produced his sequence of Oedipus paintings, involving Oedipus, the Sphinx, and a monstrous chicken.

On 23 November 1976 Cynthia Nolan committed suicide in London. Nolan was given great support at this time by Mary Elizabeth a Beckett Perceval, painter, daughter of (William) Merric Boyd, potter, sister of Nolan's great friend and rival Arthur Boyd, and former wife of the painter John Perceval. Nolan had known her as a close friend for all their adult lives. They married in London on 20 January 1978. They then lived for the next seven years at The Ruthland in Herefordshire. Nolan's remarriage provoked an intemperate attack from Patrick White in his memoir Flaws in the Glass (1981), thus ending one of Nolan's (and White's) most enduring and intellectually productive friendships. Nolan responded to White's attack by producing a large, scatological painting called Nightmare, containing a devastating caricature of White.

In March 1980 Nolan went to Canberra for the opening of the Nolan Gallery at Lanyon, to which he presented several major works, including some classics from the Kelly and Burke and Wills series. In 1981 he exhibited at Lanyon a magnificent series of large crayon drawings based on Marcus Clarke's great nineteenth-century novel of Australian convict life, For the Term of his Natural Life. He was knighted in the queen's birthday honours list the same year, and received many other honours, including life membership of the National Gallery of Victoria and honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1983 the queen appointed him a member of the Order of Merit. He was elected an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1987, a full Royal Academician in 1991, and a senior academician in 1992. In 1987 the National Gallery of Victoria staged a massive seventieth birthday retrospective exhibition, which travelled on to Sydney, Perth, and Adelaide.

In 1983, while maintaining a flat in Whitehall Court in London, with a studio with a view over the Thames and the Royal Festival Hall, Nolan and his wife, Mary, bought a beautiful house, The Rodd, Presteigne, Radnorshire, on the border with Herefordshire. It was built mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and there they established both a herd of Welsh black cattle and the Sidney Nolan Trust (to benefit the arts and artists), and staged many successful concerts and exhibitions. It was in his last years at The Rodd that Nolan came full circle with his early years in the hat factory. He returned to the abstract art that had always fascinated him, but which he had never previously fully practised. He developed a highly sophisticated technique of painting with cans of spray paint. He rightly resented the accusation that he was merely imitating American painters of the New York school, such as Frank Stella, pointing out that he had first used this technique in the 1930s and 1940s. One of his last works was a spray-painted, entirely representational self-portrait, with his face encased in a Kelly mask.

Nolan's standing as one of two dominant figures in Australian art of the second half of the twentieth century, always in amicable contention with his close friend and eventual brother-in-law, Arthur Boyd, is assured. He also enjoyed a considerable reputation in Britain, the United States, and Europe. Even in old age he retained his athletic figure and bearing, and possessed, like other autodidacts before him, a formidably wide reading and knowledge of literature, art, and philosophy. He made friends easily but was cruelly misled by those who looked after his financial affairs. He was, despite this, a notably generous benefactor, giving substantial quantities of valuable paintings to state and national galleries and other public institutions. He was, above all, a cultivated, elegant man, with a dry, occasionally sharp wit, and a brilliant conversationalist, who had considerable charm.

Nolan died at the Westminster Hospital, London, on 27 November 1992, of heart failure and pneumonia. He was survived by his wife, Mary. A memorial service was held at the National Gallery of Australia in 1993, at which the prime minister of Australia, Paul Keating, was among the speakers.

T. G. Rosenthal 

Sources  K. Clark, C. McInnes, and B. Robertson, Sidney Nolan (1961) + J. Clark, Sidney Nolan: landscapes and legends (1987) + T. G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan (2002) + WWW, 1991-5 + personal knowledge (2004) + private information (2004) + m. cert. [Mary Perceval] + d. cert.
Archives  FILM BFINA, 'Sidney Nolan: such is love', Channel 4, 19 April 1987 + BFINA, 'Jancis Robinson meets Sir Sidney Nolan', ITV, 15 Dec 1987 SOUND BL NSA, performance recordings
Likenesses  I. Kar, photograph, 1958, NPG [see illus.] · photographs, repro. in Clark, McInnes, and Robertson, Sidney Nolan
Wealth at death  £2,324,118: probate, 20 July 1993, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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