Sidney Nolan centenary

The Sidney Nolan centenary display - in our 20th century Australian galleries on the ground floor - invites visitors to explore the poetics and innovations of Nolan’s art while highlighting his ceaseless experimentation with new materials.

Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) contributed one of the most distinctive and complex artistic visions in Australian 20th-century art.

His propensity for visual invention matched with a strong poetic sensibility resulted in works that redefined perceptions of place and nation in Australia’s cultural imagination.

He became best known for his re-envisaging of the landscape by exploring its histories and mythologies in works that include his now-infamous series on the bushranger Ned Kelly.

2017 marks the centenary of Nolan’s birth. This anniversary provides an occasion for renewed attention on Nolan’s practice with an extended display of highlights from the Gallery’s collection.

While Nolan was a relentless traveller, and based in England and Europe from late 1953, the Australian landscape remained firmly lodged in his creative psyche. It became a reference point in his lifelong search for the metaphysics of place.

This display reveals how Nolan’s investigation of the inner life of the landscapes he inhabited served as an enduring subtext to his art.

In 1947 Nolan travelled through remote parts of outback Queensland. He exhibited a series of works resulting from this trip at a highly successful solo show at David Jones Gallery in 1949 from which he launched his career in Sydney.

The exhibition established Nolan’s reputation as an original painter of Australia’s distant landscapes, subjects that at the time appeared strange and were unfamiliar to urban audiences. Nolan’s faux-naive style - a simplicity that masked a complex artistic vision - added to the surreal atmosphere of his outback vision. Nolan painted unexpected landscape formations, forgotten townships and populations, and eccentric birdlife - all of which contributed to the imaging of a new, modernist mystique of place while referring to the land’s ancient foundation.

Hal Missingham, director of what was then called the National Art Gallery of NSW, purchased Pretty Polly Mine and Carron Plains from the David Jones exhibition. They were the first Nolan works acquired for a public collection.

Nolan’s preference for household and commercial over artist’s paints was exceptional. This was in part due to his experience in the 1930s making signs and display props in workshops where these paints were in common use. Even after the Second World War, when supplies of artist’s paints returned to normal and Nolan gained commercial success as an artist, he continued to use paints in cans.

In January 1943, a collection of English-made oil enamel paint called Ripolin was sent to Nolan’s army base from Sunday Reed. Nolan knew of Pablo Picasso’s similar use of of enamel paint.

In Nolan’s Kelly series 1945–47, his full technical command of fast-flowing paint and his embrace of its inherent flatness was accomplished. Working on the smooth side of Masonite panels and on cardboard, he used both types of Ripolin: matte and gloss.

The two Kelly figures in The camp and First-class marksman have been analytically tested and found to be painted with an alkyd paint, possibly Dulux but not Ripolin. There was one can of Dulux found in Nolan’s Sydney studio and, fittingly, it is black.

After completing his Kelly paintings in July 1947, Nolan set off for a trip to Queensland taking with him a plumber’s bag filled with decanted cans of Ripolin. It is probable that this bag accompanied Nolan throughout outback Queensland and central Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s.