![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/2026b655-feb8-48d4-87e0-c8ad8f264c35_193x.jpeg\"\/)
Nolan from the Ned Kelly series<\/p>\nnorman lebrecht<\/p>\n
April 22, 2026<\/p>\n
Sir Sidney Robert Nolan was one of the leading Australian artists of the 20th century. Born 109 years ago today, on 22 April 1917, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s stylised depiction of Kelly\u2019s armour has become an icon of Australian art.<\/p>\n
Conscripted into the Army in 1942, during World War II, and stationed in the Wimmera, he went absent without leave in July 1944. After deserting from the army he joined the Angry Penguins, a group of artists and poets who sought to introduce avant-garde ideas into Australian art and literature, and position Australia within a broader international modernism.
\u200b
Nolan 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 Australia\u2019s most famous literary hoax. They were seen by Nolan as being uncannily prescient in touching on his own personal circumstances. The Malley poems remained a real presence to him throughout his life. He painted and drew hundreds of Malley-themed works.<\/p>\n
Nolan from the Ned Kelly series<\/p>\n
Nolan painted a wide range of personal interpretations of historical and legendary figures, including explorers Burke and Wills, and Eliza Fraser. Nolan\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s helmet and armour) had been part of modern art since World War I. He just placed a pair of eyes in Kelly\u2019s helmet, which animates its formal shape. In most of the series, Kelly\u2019s steel head-guard dominates the composition. Nolan also concentrates on the Australian outback and shows a different landscape in nearly every painting.
\u200b
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.<\/p>\n