Early life Sidney Nolan was born in
Carlton, at that time an inner
working-class suburb of
Melbourne, on 22 April 1917. He was the eldest of four children. His parents, Sidney (a
tram driver) and Dora, were both fifth generation Australians of Irish descent. Nolan later moved with his family to the bayside suburb of
St Kilda. He attended the Brighton Road State School and then Brighton Technical School and left school aged 14. He enrolled at the
Prahran Technical College (now part of
Swinburne University of Technology), Department of Design and Crafts, in a course which he had already begun part-time by correspondence. In 1933, at the age of 16, he began working for Fayrefield Hats,
Abbotsford, producing advertising and display stands with spray paints and dyes for six years. In 1934, he attended night classes sporadically at the
National Gallery of Victoria Art School.
Years at Heide (1941–1947) Nolan was a close friend of the arts patrons
John and
Sunday Reed, and is regarded as one of the leading figures of the so-called "
Heide Circle" that also included
Albert Tucker,
Joy Hester,
Arthur Boyd and
John Perceval. Boyd and Perceval were members of the
Boyd artistic family who were centred at "Open Country",
Murrumbeena. In 1938, he met and married his first wife, graphic designer Elizabeth Paterson, with whom he had a daughter, but his marriage soon broke up because of his increasing involvement with the Reeds. He joined the
Angry Penguins in the 1940s, after deserting from the army during
World War II; he 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 seen by Nolan and Sunday Reed as being uncannily prescient in touching on their own personal circumstances. The Malley poems remained a real presence to him throughout his life. He painted and drew hundreds of Malley-themed works and in 1975 said it inspired him to paint his first Ned Kelly series: "It made me take the risk of putting against the Australian bush an utterly strange object." He lived for some time at the Reeds' home, "Heide" outside Melbourne (now the
Heide Museum of Modern Art). Here he painted the first of his famous, iconic "Ned Kelly" series, reportedly with input from Sunday Reed. Nolan also conducted an open affair with Sunday Reed but subsequently married John Reed's sister,
Cynthia in 1948 after Sunday refused to leave her husband. He had lived in a ménage à trois with the Reeds for several years and after his marriage, he continued to see them and visited Heide at least once during their lifetimes. The years there together have been seen as a dominating factor in the subsequent lives of them all. In November 1976, Cynthia Nolan ended her life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in a London hotel. In 1978, Nolan married
Mary Boyd (1926–2016), youngest daughter within the
Boyd family and previously married to
John Perceval, who was the last surviving member of the
Angry Penguins at the time of his death in October 2000.
Career '', held at the
National Gallery of Australia, is one of 27 paintings comprising Nolan's 1946–47
Ned Kelly series. Nolan painted a wide range of personal interpretations of historical and legendary figures, including explorers
Burke and Wills, and
Eliza Fraser. With time his paintings of Mrs Fraser came to be associated with his growing animus towards Sunday Reed. However, when first painted he was still on good terms with the Reeds and sent them photos of the works for their approval. Indeed, he gave one Fraser Island painting to Sunday Reed as a Christmas gift that year. Probably his most famous work is a series of stylised descriptions of the
bushranger Ned Kelly in the
Australian bush. Nolan left the famous 1946–47 series of 27 Ned Kellys at "Heide", when he left it in emotionally charged circumstances. Although he once wrote to Sunday Reed to tell her to take what she wanted, he subsequently demanded all his works back. Sunday Reed returned 284 other paintings and drawings to Nolan, but she refused to give up the 25 remaining Kellys, partly because she saw the works as fundamental to the proposed Heide Museum of Modern Art and also, possibly, because she collaborated with Nolan on the paintings. 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. Nolan was inspired by children's art and modernist painting of the early 20th century. During this time many younger artists were veering towards
abstraction, but Nolan remained committed to the figurative potential of painting. In terms of art history, Nolan rediscovered the Australian landscape (Australia has not been an easy country to paint). His love of
literature is seen as visually evident in his work. Other key influences were the
modernist artists such as
Paul Cézanne,
Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse and
Henri Rousseau. Locally, the arrival of the Russian artist
Danila Vassilieff in
Melbourne in the mid-1930s, with his simple and direct art, was significant for Nolan. In his series, Kelly is a metaphor for Nolan himself. Nolan, like the bushranger, was a fugitive from the law. In July 1944, facing the possibility that he would be sent to
Papua New Guinea on front-line duty, Nolan went absent without leave from the army. He adopted the alias Robin Murray, a name suggested by Sunday Reed, whose affectionate nickname for him was "Robin Redbreast". So when he created the Kelly series, he viewed himself as the misunderstood hero/artist, like the protagonist, Kelly. "Nolan like this Kelly figure has also been a hero, a victim, a man who armoured himself against Australia and who faced it, conquered it, lost it…. ambiguity personified." Nolan's Ned Kelly series is one of the greatest sequences of Australian paintings of the 20th century. His simplified depiction of Kelly in his armour has become an iconic Australian image. In 1949, when the series was exhibited at the
Musée National d'Art Moderne in
Paris, the museum's director
Jean Cassou called the works "a striking contribution to modern art" and that Nolan "creates in us a wonder of something new being born". Works from Nolan's second Kelly series (ca. mid-1950s) were acquired by major international galleries, including the
Museum of Modern Art in New York and the
Tate Modern in London. English critic
Robert Melville wrote in 1963 that Nolan's Kelly belonged to "the company of twentieth-century personages which includes
Picasso's minotaur,
Chirico's mannequins,
Ernst's birdmen,
Bacon's popes and
Giacometti's walking man". Paintings of
Dimboola landscapes by Sidney Nolan, who was stationed in the area while on army duty in World War II, can be found in the
National Gallery of Victoria. In 1951, Nolan moved to London, England. He travelled in Europe, spending a year in 1956 painting themes based on
Greek Mythology while in Greece. In Paris, he studied
engraving and
lithography with
S. W. Hayter at Studio 17t two years there. He became friends with the poet
Robert Lowell and produced illustrations for some of his books. Nolan was a prolific book cover illustrator, his images enhancing the dust jackets of over 70 publications. During this period, Nolan's first London solo exhibition occurred at the
Whitechapel Gallery between June and July 1957. In 1961, Nolan painted a significant series of over 250
Auschwitz works, only recently re-discovered, researched and documented by Nolan scholar Andrew Turley. The paintings were Nolan's response to the 1960
capture, and subsequent
trial, of Nazi
Adolf Eichmann when worldwide media attention reignited awareness of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during WWII. Nolan subsequently travelled behind the Iron Curtain to
Auschwitz on 29 January 1962, at the invitation of Jewish journalist
Al Alvarez and Britain’s
The Observer newspaper. He intended to illustrate an article on the concentration camps by Alvarez but was so overwhelmed by the experience he declined to fulfil the commission on his return. The August 2021 exhibition of Holocaust paintings at the Sidney Nolan Trust in Presteigne (United Kingdom), was the first time Nolan's long-hidden Auschwitz work was publicly exhibited, and the first time their dramatic story was told in its entirety. In 1965, Nolan completed a large mural (20
m by 3.6 m) depicting the 1854
Eureka Stockade, rendered in jewellery enamel on 1.5
tonnes of heavy gauge copper. Nolan employed the "finger-and-thumb" drawing technique of Indigenous Australian
sandpainters to create the panoramic scene. Commissioned by economist
H. C. Coombs, the mural is located at the entrance to the
Reserve Bank of Australia's Melbourne office on
Collins Street. During the period of 1968–1970, Nolan embarked on the creation of a monumental mural entitled
Paradise Garden. The project consisted of 1,320 floral designs split into three subsections that were created using crayons and dyes. The intent of the subsections was to show the lifecycles of plants, starting with the primeval plants emerging from the mud, transitioning to their full burst of colour in springtime, and the completion of the life cycle with the withering plants returning to the earth. In England, Nolan attended the
Aldeburgh Festival and was encouraged by the organiser and composer
Benjamin Britten to show paintings at the festivals. He continued to travel widely in Europe, Africa, China and Australia, and even went to
Antarctica.
Death Nolan died in London on 28 November 1992 at the age of 75, survived by his wife and two children. He was buried in the eastern part of
Highgate Cemetery, London. ==Work==