{"id":921113,"date":"2026-10-08T22:14:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T22:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/921113\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T22:14:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T22:14:21","slug":"sidney-nolans-art-and-formative-years-on-show-in-nolan-origins-at-the-art-gallery-of-nsw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/921113\/","title":{"rendered":"Sidney Nolan\u2019s art and formative years on show in Nolan: Origins at the Art Gallery of NSW"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cHe seems to hover on that thread between terrible and great painting,\u201d Richard Lewer, winner of the 2026 Archibald Prize, says of artist Sidney Nolan. \u201cBetween mystery and naivety. And there is a humour within the figuration. It\u2019s not overly conscious, but there is a playfulness there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think his approach to Australian history and identity still gives us a lot to unpack,\u201d says Archibald and Sulman finalist Tom Polo. \u201cHe continually pushed his subjects into something more ambiguous and psychologically charged. The work doesn\u2019t give you everything at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"NedNed Kelly (1946) by Sidney Nolan, copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.National Gallery of Australia, Canberra<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething I\u2019ve thought about a lot in my own work is how you can paint a landscape that is recognisably Australian, but make it operate psychologically, rather than descriptively,\u201d says artist Fiona Lowry. \u201cI think Nolan opened up that possibility for a lot of Australian artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked separately for three words to describe Nolan\u2019s work<\/a>, Polo offers psychological, restless and layered. Lowry suggests psychological, restless and strange. Denise Mimmocchi, curator of Nolan: Origins, a chronological sweep of more than 150 works from the artist\u2019s formative years at the Art Gallery of NSW, describes Nolan\u2019s paintings as \u201cnebulous landscapes of his own psyche\u201d.<\/p>\n

And you thought they were about Ned Kelly.<\/p>\n

\"DogDog and Duck Hotel (1948) by Sidney Nolan. Copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.Jesse Hunniford, MONA <\/p>\n

\u201cIf Sidney Nolan were still alive and working, his new work would be worth nothing,\u201d MONA\u2019s David Walsh, the country\u2019s most enthusiastic private collector of Nolan\u2019s work, has said. \u201cI say that because, essentially, the earlier in his career a piece comes from, the more valuable it is. Since I own some later work, that annoys me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walsh, who built his entire Hobart museum around Nolan\u2019s multi-panel, early 1970s artwork Snake, also owns some of the artist\u2019s old stuff. Four of Walsh\u2019s works, including Robe Street, St Kilda (1945), and Dog and Duck Hotel (1948), are on loan to the AGNSW exhibition. They are among the more than 30,000 artworks Nolan is thought to have made in his lifetime.<\/p>\n

The Kelly is about me\"SidneySidney Nolan painting \u2018Unnamed ridge, Central Australia\u2019 in Wahroonga in 1949.AL Frazer<\/p>\n

By the time Nolan began the first charcoal sketches of what would in time become his best known series of paintings, the tram driver\u2019s son from St Kilda had left school at 14, worked as an illustrator for a hat factory, married fellow art student Elizabeth Paterson, dropped out of art school, discovered the poetry of Rimbaud and Rilke, the paintings of Picasso, Matisse and Malevich, and held his first solo exhibition of weirdly abstract pictures, in which he sold nothing and had several works splattered with green paint by an unknown assailant.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d also abandoned Paterson (and their infant daughter), moved in with his much older lover, muse and patron Sunday Reed (and her husband), ridden his pushbike from Melbourne to Sydney (and back), stowed away on a ship bound for Europe, been kicked off it before it left Australian waters, lost his soldier brother in a drowning accident, been conscripted into the army, stationed in the Wimmera, deserted, gone on the run, hidden in an inner-Melbourne loft and turned 28.<\/p>\n

\"AnAn installation view of Nolan: Origins at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. All artworks copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.Diana Panuccio, Art Gallery of New South Wales.<\/p>\n

Bristling with artistic ambition, trapped in Australia by World War II and under siege from his early forays into adulthood, it\u2019s perhaps unsurprising that the figure that began to take shape on the canvas resembled an armour-clad outlaw whose violent and deadly stand-off at Glenrowan in 1880 was, by 1946, the stuff of legend.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the Ned Kelly paintings, Nolan\u2019s personal life and art came together,\u201d curator Lesley Harding writes in the catalogue to Nolan: Origins. \u201c[Nolan\u2019s] feelings of entrapment and status as a fugitive played out in his striking images of the popular folktale and its hero \u2026 within Ned Kelly\u2019s story lay universal themes of betrayal, power, injustice, love, loss and innocence \u2013 themes that resonated deeply with the artist\u2019s own life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, as Nolan would later put it, \u201cthe Kelly is really about me\u201d.<\/p>\n

A bizarre creature from the planet wherever\"First-classFirst-class marksman (1946) by Sidney Nolan. Copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.Art Gallery of New South Wales<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, the works themselves remain really arresting and alluring and enigmatic,\u201d Mimmocchi says in response to why Nolan and why now. \u201cOne of the beauties of Nolan is that sometimes we don\u2019t totally know what he\u2019s on about. Sometimes it\u2019s a vibe, but it\u2019s an interesting vibe, and that\u2019s the sort of thing that makes you re-look at things. That multi-levelled, complex meaning can continue to resonate in the present day.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019re looking at the idea of an artist painting around questions of Australia, its landscapes, its Country, these are questions that need to be rethought and reconsidered. Nolan is a way of looking at that. These questions are ongoing. It\u2019s not resolved. What Australia is, is a story that continues.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike most Australians, I knew Nolan through the Kelly paintings when I was a teenager,\u201d says Lowry, who included late-career spray paintings by Nolan in Searchers, an exhibition she curated at the National Art School this year. In that show, works by Nolan appeared alongside contemporary artists such as Khaled Sabsabi<\/a>, Shaun Gladwell, Joan Ross and Reko Rennie, but also street artists, including TAVEN, one of Sydney\u2019s best-known graffiti artists.<\/p>\n

\u201cKelly is the great mythologised Australian outlaw, while TAVEN comes out of an actual contemporary outlaw culture where painting can involve trespass, risk, speed and getting away with it, or not,\u201d Lowry says. \u201cThey\u2019re obviously not equivalent. But putting them together opened up questions about permission, legitimacy and who or what gets absorbed into official culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view of the exhibition Searchers, at the National Art School, which included work by Sidney Nolan, left.Zan Wimberley<\/p>\n

Lowry, whose portrait of Penelope Seidler won the 2014 Archibald Prize<\/a>, describes Nolan as \u201ca much stranger artist than his familiarity allows us to see. The Kelly paintings are a good example. We\u2019ve seen that black helmet so many times it has almost become a logo. But it\u2019s an extraordinarily weird pictorial invention. There\u2019s this beautifully articulated landscape and then a black geometric void where a human being should be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere on earth does something like this even come from?\u201d asked Pulitzer Prize-winning New York art critic Jerry Saltz, gesturing wildly on Instagram in front of Nolan\u2019s First-class marksman (1946), when he was in Sydney to appear at Vivid in June. \u201cYou walk around a museum and you see abstraction, representation, geometry and then suddenly this bizarre creature from the planet wherever \u2026 from the 45th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

A painter making paintings\"SelfSelf portrait (1943) by Sidney Nolan. Copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.Jenni Carter, Art Gallery of New South Wales\"AA video still from Sometimes I Miss the Applause by Dean Cross. Christian Capurro<\/p>\n

Anyone standing in front of Nolan\u2019s Boy and the moon (c.1939-40), in1940s Australia, might have had a similar reaction. That painting, also included in Nolan: Origins, has since been compared to a toilet seat, a mushroom cloud and the Japanese flag. For First Nations artist Dean Cross, Boy and the moon is also a reminder that he was a painter first and foremost, despite the stories often found underpinning Nolan\u2019s work, from Kelly to doomed explorers Burke and Wills or shipwreck survivor Eliza Frazer (what Mimmocchi dubs the \u201cAustralian Gothic\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile Nolan\u2019s story has all these reverberations, it\u2019s also a story of a painter making paintings. Look at Boy and the moon. There\u2019s no form. It\u2019s a big yellow circle with this midnight blue background. It\u2019s a colour field painting before the term colour field existed. It\u2019s an abstract painting ahead of its game. His primary driver was being an artist motivated to make work, and he just pushed and pushed that his whole career,\u201d Cross says.<\/p>\n

\"BoyBoy and the moon by Sidney Nolan (c.1939-40). Copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.National Gallery of Australia, Canberra<\/p>\n

Cross suggests: \u201cNolan\u2019s one of those modernists people also love to hate. Why do we need another Nolan show? It\u2019s the same reason we still need Picasso shows, or Matisse shows. You need to keep that canon visible, so artists like me can keep interrogating them and pushing up against them. But also because people like him. It\u2019s art not just for people who love art.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Two Heads, his current exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, Cross took Nolan\u2019s 1964 collaboration with Sir Robert Helpmann on The Display for the Australian Ballet as a starting point. For that production, as he had done for the Royal Ballet\u2019s production of The Rite of Spring in 1962, Nolan appropriated First Nations imagery in his designs \u201cin a way no non-Indigenous artist could get away with today\u201d, Cross says.<\/p>\n

\"LunaLuna Park (1941) by Sidney Nolan. Copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.Jenni Carter, Art Gallery of New South Wales<\/p>\n

For Sometimes I Miss the Applause, a work commissioned by the Heide Museum in 2022, Cross performed a rehearsal, of sorts, of a key solo from The Rite of Spring, wearing an adidas tracksuit, a Nolan mask and a brown paper bag that echoed Kelly\u2019s helmet.<\/p>\n

Cross hangs his own work alongside Nolan\u2019s in Two Heads, an \u201cimpossible collaboration\u201d across time and cultures which aims to question the collaboration between Nolan and Helpmann.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese two expat Australian dudes who had this idealised dream of what Australia is or could be. But it was a very narrow perspective. That\u2019s what\u2019s pushing my thinking in this weird collaborative show that makes no sense. What kind of fool of a painter, today, me, would put their own paintings up against Nolan\u2019s canonical paintings?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CentralCentral Australia (1950) by Sidney Nolan. Copyright The Sidney Nolan Trust.Diana Panuccio, Art Gallery of New South Wales<\/p>\n

\u201cEr, that does seem brave,\u201d I suggest.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s stupid is what it is. There\u2019s no way my paintings stand up and that\u2019s the joke, nor could the collaboration in The Display stand up. None of it can. It always has to fail. We always have to renew, culturally, forever. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s going to land. But that\u2019s the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

A farewell to Melbourne<\/p>\n

Over the two years Nolan worked on the Kelly series at the Reeds\u2019 kitchen table at Heide, the artist filled the bushranger\u2019s turbulent world with elements from his own surroundings \u2013 the homestead\u2019s floral wallpaper, its floor pattern, a crocheted rug. As his relationship with the Reeds soured, then fractured for good, the paintings also became his \u201cfarewell to Melbourne\u201d.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"Nolan:<\/a><\/p>\n

In a contemporary link to the city, the Kelly series is hung in Nolan: Origins with a soundtrack by Melbourne singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett<\/a>, whose sparse electric guitar lends the 27 paintings, already cinematic in theirscope, a touch of the Hollywood western.<\/p>\n

In 1947, Nolan left Victoria, travelled through Queensland, married John Reed\u2019s sister Cynthia and relocated to Sydney. By 1953, the year Nolan: Origins ends, he had begun to gain international attention and moved to the UK.<\/p>\n

By then he had ceased being the maverick abstractionist who once used boot polish as a medium and painted the walls for his first solo exhibition bright pink. He was now being referred to as Australia\u2019s national painter. In 1981, he was knighted. He died in 1992.<\/p>\n

\"ApproachApproach to Mundi Mundi by Shaun Gladwell, from the series MADDESTMAXIMVS (2007), Copyright Shaun Gladwell.John Raymond, Art Gallery of New South Wales<\/p>\n

In time, his paintings of Ned Kelly became entwined, not only with his own messy personal life, but with Australia\u2019s own identity and complicated sense of self. Artist Shaun Gladwell, whose black-leather-clad motorcyclist in Approach to Mundi Mundi (2007) fuses Mad Max with strange Sid, once observed that in Nolan\u2019s Ned Kelly (1946), the viewer sees through the bushranger\u2019s helmet, inviting us all to \u201cinhabit this empty armour and ask ourselves: do we have it within us to be so wild, so passionate, so revolutionary?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nolan: Origins is at the Art Gallery of NSW until February 7, 2027. Two Heads is at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until June 27, 2027.<\/p>\n

John Saxby is a writer, photographer and former editor of Spectrum, who has worked as an editor at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Gallery of NSW.<\/p>\n

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