Nolan, Sir Sidney

Nolan, Sir Sidney (1917–1992). The most internationally famous of Australian painters. He was born in Melbourne, and after leaving school at the age of 15 he had various short-term jobs, including work in commercial art. In 1934 he began taking evening classes at the Art School of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, he became a full-time artist in 1938, and he held his first one-man show (at his Melbourne studio) in 1940. The works shown were abstract and too advanced for local taste; few of them sold and an outraged visitor threw a can of paint at one of them. His style changed radically whilst he was serving in the Australian army, 1942–5; stationed in the Wimmera District of Victoria, he painted a series of landscapes that gave the first unmistakable signs of his originality of vision, vividly capturing the heat and emptiness of the bush. In 1946 he began a series of paintings on the notorious 19th-century bushranger Ned Kelly, who had become a legendary figure in Australian folk history, and it was with these works that he made his name. He returned to the Kelly theme throughout his career, and he also drew on other people and events in Australian history, for example the explorers Burke and Wills, who died in 1861 on the first expedition to cross the country from south to north, and the Eureka Stockade, a goldminers' uprising against colonial rule in 1854. In works on such themes he created a distinctive idiom to express this novel Australian iconography and memorably portrayed the hard, dry beauty of the desert landscape. Technically his work is remarkable for the lush fluidity of his brushwork, and he sometimes painted on glass or other smooth materials.

In 1950 Nolan won the Dunlop Prize, which enabled him to visit Europe for the first time. He soon made a name for himself in Britain (he had his first London exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1951) and from 1955 lived mainly in England. (One of his staunchest British supporters was Kenneth Clark, who first saw Nolan's work in 1949 during a visit to Australia and was ‘confident that I had stumbled on a genius … an entirely original artist'.) Nolan also worked in Paris (where he studied printmaking with Hayter in 1957) and in the USA, and he travelled extremely widely (the Australian airline Qantas commissioned him to fly around the world gathering material for a series of paintings to decorate their offices). Among the places he visited, Antarctica and New Guinea in particular inspired him, and he also painted pictures on literary themes such as the legend of Leda and the Swan. Apart from paintings and prints, Nolan occasionally made set and costume designs, for example for a production of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Royal Opera House, London, in 1962. He was knighted in 1981 and received many other awards. His prolific output is represented in many Australian galleries, and there are several works in the Tate Gallery, London. See also ANGRY PENGUINS.