MASK and MEMORY Sidney Nolan

MASK AND MEMORY Sidney Nolan A documentAry produced And directed by cAtHerine Hunter A STUDY GUIDE by Julie MArlow http://www.metromagazine.com.au http://www.theeducationshop.com.au ‘One of the great lives lived in Australian art.’ – Patrick McCaughey, art historian ABOUT THE FILM ask and Memory is a film produced and directed by Catherine Hunter based on Ma retrospective of Sidney Nolan’s work curated by Barry Pearce that opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007, an exhibition that travelled around the major art galleries of Aus- tralia in 2008. It is not meant to be an exhaustive portrait of Nolan’s work; rather a reflection on his life and art based on the paintings exhibited in this important retrospective. ‘A retrospective is much more than paintings on a wall, it’s the mapping of a life.’ – Edmund Capon, Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales Along with Barry Pearce, the curator, and an exten- sive interview with Nolan himself shortly before his a daughter Amelda in 1941. He was a charismatic CURRICULUM RELEVANCE death in 1992, there are other significant interviews character, handsome and athletic. Barry Pearce with Lady Mary Nolan, Nolan’s widow; Jinx No- contends that he could have been a professional The themes and lan, Nolan’s adopted daughter; Edmund Capon, cyclist or athlete, instead, he chose to follow the discussion points arising Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and artistic path. in this study guide will be personal friend; Patrick McCaughey, art historian; relevant to teachers and students from middle to Janine Burke, author of many books about Heide; Nolan, from an early age, was desperate to go senior years of secondary John Olsen, Australian artist; Jean Langley, artist to Europe, and Paris in particular, to pursue his schooling studying these and friend of John and Sunday Reed; Elizabeth interest in art. In the late 1930s, in the search for subjects: Art, Media Harrower, friend of Cynthia Nolan; Jo Bertini, artist; sources of finance to pursue his travel ambitions, Studies, Australian History, Nolan’s daughter Amelda. he meets John and Sunday Reed, educated, Visual Communication and Design, Studio sophisticated and powerful patrons of the arts, Arts, Studies of Society The interviews and images in the film build up a who had created a bohemian salon in their idyllic and Environment / portrait of a complex and compelling artist who de- property Heide, by the Yarra River in Heidelberg, Human Society and its fined the Australian landscape on canvas in a new Victoria. Artists such as Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Environment. and visceral way. In the words of Edmund Capon, John Perceval and Arthur Boyd were welcomed at ‘our view of Australian landscape has been shaped Heide, where they were able to work, read, con- subconsciously by Nolan’. verse and play in equal measure, with their gener- ous benefactors, the Reeds. SIDNEY NOLAN – HIS LIFE COVER: Ned Kelly As a result of his fascination with the Reeds, his 1946, © National Sidney Nolan, born in 1917, was a working class marriage to Elizabeth deteriorated. Nolan be- Gallery of Australia boy brought up in the bayside Melbourne suburb came increasingly close to Sunday Reed and they ABOVE: Self portrait SCREEN EDUCATION of St Kilda. His father was a tram driver who ran an became lovers. Elizabeth and Amelda moved out 1943, © Art Gallery illegal betting shop on the side. and her family forbade any further contact with his of New South Wales child. It was many years before they were recon- & The Trustees of the In 1938, when he was twenty-one, he married a ciled and were able to form a relationship. Sidney Nolan Trust fellow artist, Elizabeth Paterson, with whom he had 2 LEFT: Hare in Trap 1946, © Art Gallery of New South Wales & The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust BELOW: Himalayas 1980s, © Art Gallery of New South Wales & The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust He and Sunday were in love, but she made it clear John Reed’s sister Cynthia (he’d met her briefly … there she would never leave her husband John. She at Heide), and begins a relationship with her that became Nolan’s muse, and made possible some of eventually leads to marriage. She is a writer, an seems to be his best-known works. intelligent strong woman; but at the same time, his no doubt lover’s husband’s sister. A confrontation between Nolan was conscripted into the army in 1942 dur- all of them at Heide leads to a final and painful rift, that the first ing the Second World War and posted to the Wim- which resulted in Nolan never seeing the Reeds mera, a flat, dry area of Victoria, which altered the again. Nolan says ‘it all led to tears in the end’. series of Ned course of his feelings about his art and the Austral- ian landscape. Being in charge of the foodstores at Cynthia assumes the mantle of muse. Nolan, Kelly paint- the Army base left him time to think and paint. In together with Cynthia and her seven-year-old his own words, ‘The Wimmera was a revelation to daughter, Jinx, whom he later adopted, travelled ings came me.’ Australia together, firstly to Queensland, where his out of his mining landscapes, paintings of outback towns and In 1944, Nolan – frustrated with the army and bush characters established him, in Barry Pearce’s relationship his forced absence from Sunday – deserted the words as ‘the iconographer of the continent’. army, fleeing to Heide and adopting a new name with Sunday (Robin Murray). Sunday had visited him regularly in the Wimmera, taking him paint and canvasses. [Reed] … He was reunited with the Reeds, resuming his relationship with Sunday. The books and paintings available in the library at Heide provided him with inspiration, and there seems to be no doubt that the first series of Ned Kelly paintings came out of his relationship with Sunday, painted on the dining room table at Heide. Sunday was a controlling presence in his life, and Nolan’s relationship with the Reeds was complex and dramatic. He was acutely aware that he was being ‘kept’ by them both, and he began to feel suffocated and claustrophobic. Sunday was trying SCREEN EDUCATION to steer his art in certain directions; he felt manipu- lated and eventually his relationship soured. In 1947, he makes a break with the Reeds and Heide, and goes to Sydney, where he seeks out 3 His prodigious artistic output at this time was partly motivated by his new surroundings, and partly in rage at Sunday, who, leading up to their break-up, had dared to suggest to him that without her he would not have ‘the joie de vivre’ to keep on painting. Nolan became obsessed with the story of Eliza Fraser, a survivor of the Stirling Castle shipwreck off the Coral Coast of Queensland in 1836. A series of paintings now widely regarded as misogynistic depictions of this woman, ‘a painting full of hatred and beauty at the same time’ (Barry Pearce). Al- though Eliza Fraser betrayed her eventual rescuer, a runaway convict, Nolan’s depictions seem to owe more to his feelings for Sunday Reed than his view of women in general. Barry Pearce says that ‘he used his paintbrush as one of the great haters’. In 1948, a Government amnesty on deserters lifted bleakest work on the explorers, full of despair at ABOVE: Drought Nolan’s burden of his lawless desertion from the the harsh land and the tragedy of man’s attempt to Skeleton 1953, © Art Army, which freed him to travel extensively across tame it. Gallery of New South Australia recording the land. He went across to Wales & The Trustees the West with Cynthia and Jinx, and many of his In the late 1940s, Kenneth Clark, the influential of the Sidney Nolan paintings of this time were reflections of the land Trust English art critic, saw Nolan’s paintings in Syd- from above, from the mail planes they flew in to BELOW: Burke 1962, ney, met him and promised to help him settle in the Kimberleys and the Top End. Nolan took some © Art Gallery of New Europe, which the Nolans finally did in 1955. He excellent photographs which informed his Western South Wales had wanted to go to Europe for many years, but Australian landscape series. John Olsen, contem- was glad that he hadn’t as a young man – thank- porary and great Australian artist, comments that ful, because he may have ‘got lost in it all’ as he ‘we had to have our own art as Australians’. said himself, and lost his distinctiveness. He says, ‘the desire to go to Europe was a risky and schizo- Nolan developed a fascination with Burke and Wills phrenic attempt, to live in one part of the world and and their doomed journey, and painted some of his try to describe the other part of the world but that’s what I’ve done’. He became an international artist in London. Patrick McCaughey, art historian, comments ‘he never tried to be an Englishman’. He made a great impact on the art world with a show in the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1957; it made his reputa- tion. The Tate Gallery bought several of his paintings, and included him in all their major shows of modern art. In London, Nolan and Cynthia’s relationship gradu- ally deteriorated. Her daughter, Jinx, describes her mother as someone who was always writing, never without a notebook, but Nolan was not always painting.

Load more