'Looking at Australia': Sidney Nolan in six definitive paintings

Australian artist Sidney Nolan was interested in the stories and myths we tell about ourselves, from the life of bushranger Ned Kelly to the trials of saints.

"Sidney Nolan has to be one of our most creative and inventive painters that emerged out of the period of war and the decades following," says Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW).

"He posed questions about place, our identity, and our individual search for meaning within the continent and landscapes of Australia."

Born in 1917, the modernist artist would prove to be one of Australia's most influential and prolific, initially as part of the infamous Heide Circle alongside Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and Joy Hester. He would go on to be acquired by the likes of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.

Curated by Mimmocchi, AGNSW's new exhibition Nolan: Origins charts the artist's career from 1939 until he moved to London in 1953. It features places like St Kilda and central Australia — environments that would continue to spark his imagination throughout his life.

"I wanted to look at what inspired him," Mimmocchi says. "And what we're looking at really is Australia."

Kiata

In 1943, during WWII, Nolan — who had been conscripted in 1942 — was stationed at Nhill, guarding Australia's food reserves.

The job left him with a lot of time to paint. One work he made during this period is this landscape of the nearby town Kiata, in western Victoria.

"Kiata is really a breakthrough moment," Mimmocchi says. "This is when the abstract artist also becomes a landscape painter."

As he figured out how to capture the vastness he encountered, Nolan came to appreciate an earlier generation of Australian artists, the Impressionists, like Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Charles Conder, who would often paint outdoors.

"He looks to and echoes in his own way the idea of painting the Australian light and landscape, but he does it through his own modern sensibility," Mimmocchi says.

A year later, in 1944, when he found out he was going to be sent to fight in Papua New Guinea, Nolan deserted the army.

In 1948, he received an amnesty for deserters and was formally discharged.

Fire, Palais de Danse, St Kilda

When Nolan was nine and growing up in Melbourne's St Kilda, the Palais de Danse burned down. It was an event that became etched in the artist's memory.

He painted the scene 20 years later, in 1945, while living between his studio in Parkville, Melbourne, and Heide on the city's outskirts, in the home of philanthropists Sunday and John Reed.

There, Nolan had an affair with Sunday, before marrying John's sister, Cynthia, a writer, in 1948.

"When he's living in hiding, he starts to paint with greater intensity these memories of his childhood in St Kilda," Mimmocchi says.

"He goes up in scale as well. In that expansion comes this incredible impact of the energy contained within them."

She describes that energy as "frenetic", with the human figures in the painting appearing almost like ants.

"You get this sense of palpitating movement," Mimmocchi explains. "It's wonderful and vibrant but at the same time, for me, a little tense. There's something deeply anxious about them."

Mimmocchi boils that anxiety down to Nolan viewing these moments from his childhood through the lens of the "wartime present".

Ned Kelly

While living at Heide, Nolan spent a year, starting in 1946, creating a series of 27 paintings of bushranger Ned Kelly.

One inspiration for the series came from the stories Nolan's grandfather told him when he was a child, of being part of the search for the Kelly gang. But it also stemmed from his own desertion from the army.

"He's a bit of an outlaw in his mind himself," Mimmocchi says.

"He saw the Kelly figure as a rebel poet. He saw him and his family as the victims of great injustice.

"At the same time, coming out of that experience of war, where he was trained to use the 'utmost violence', the idea of brutality was at the forefront of his mind."

To create the series, Nolan pored over newspaper clippings and the 1881 Royal Commission report into the Victorian police, and visited Glenrowan, the site of Kelly's final shoot-out with police in 1880.

"He's interested in painting the landscape and the stories within it; how history becomes legend becomes mythology," Mimmocchi says.

That's perhaps exemplified by the view through the letterbox-style slit in Kelly's helmet.

"We view the landscape through the Kelly helmet," Mimmocchi says. "It's almost as if Nolan is saying our experiences of place are shaped or framed by these stories, by these figures."

The Ned Kelly series and the now-iconic blocky shape of Kelly's helmet also marked a turning point in Nolan's practice.

"He said he was an abstract painter and then he became a painter of the landscape, and this brought the two together," Mimmocchi says.

Quilting the armour

This 1947 painting from the Ned Kelly series depicts a moment of tenderness between the bushranger and his sister Margaret, where she stitched padding into his helmet.

"It's quite a beautiful and powerful image of this woman creating padding for Kelly in this foreboding landscape, perhaps in anticipation of the violence which is to come," Mimmocchi says.

"It sits so distinctly from a lot of the other paintings, which are about the guns, the violence, the bloodshed.

"It says something about a female notion of creativity or the importance of women in the Ned Kelly story."

Also hidden in the painting is a reference to Nolan's desertion from the army, living under the alias Robin Murray. On a fencepost sits a red robin.

The Ned Kelly series fell flat when it was first exhibited in Melbourne in 1948, but the Reeds were determined the paintings would find an audience, sending them to Paris and Rome.

In Paris in 1949, museum director Jean Cassou described them as "the work of a true poet and true painter".

"It wasn't until they'd had this life overseas that they came back to Australia and started to gain the recognition they deserve," Mimmocchi says.

Central Australia

In 1949, Nolan spent months travelling through central Australia, Arnhem Land and the Kimberley in Western Australia, with his wife, Cynthia, and adopted daughter Jinx.

The artist would join aviator Eddie Connellan as he delivered mail to remote communities. The view from these flights inspired this 1950 painting.

"He was deeply inspired by this vision of a country, which was so vast, so seemingly infinite, but had this vital energy in the movement and passages of the landscape," Mimmocchi says.

"It was painted at a time when city Australians commonly referred to the centre of Australia as its dead heart. Nolan encounters and paints a country that couldn't be more different to that."

The vivid red of the work comes from Nolan's use of Ripolin, a quick-drying enamel paint he first used in the early 40s.

"That gave him a saturated colour and the ability to paint the intense, clarified light of the desert," Mimmocchi says.

In 1950, in a letter to fellow artist Albert Tucker, Nolan wrote that Indigenous peoples "show you that the country is a gentle, dreaming one; the barrenness and harshness is all in our European eyes".

Mimmocchi explains: "First Nations connection to Country shaped his vision."

Temptation of St Anthony

In 1950, Nolan travelled to Europe for the first time, to Italy, Spain, Greece and the UK, where he was inspired by Christian paintings.

When he returned to Sydney, he started taking biblical scenes and imposing them onto the unforgiving Australian landscape.

In Temptation of St Anthony, from 1952, he depicted the story of early Christian monk Anthony the Great's pilgrimage through the Egyptian desert, where he was tormented by demons and faced a series of temptations.

In Nolan's telling, those demons and temptations included a goanna, a giant dragonfly and an angel with horns.

"He was deeply interested in the stories that shape us," Mimmocchi says. "It was the idea of myth. He saw the stories of the Bible as another myth that could be painted in relation to the landscape.

"In these biblical works, he's marrying this sense of the ancientness of the stories of Europe with the ancientness and the vital presence of the Australian landscape."

For the curator, Temptation of St Anthony is "pure Nolan".

"He's able to bring the action of this biblical story into the Australian desert so evocatively," she says.

Nolan: Origins is at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until February 7.