Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  His literary and lifelong hero was French poet Arthur Rimbaud and one of his earliest achieved works is the Head of Rimbaud (1939), which some wit compared to a piece of French cheese. But he was also an accomplished landscape painter, as the Woollaston-esque Kiewa Valley (1936) shows. Nolan seems, like Rimbaud, to have come from nowhere, with a hybrid vigour and an habitual insouciance; he thought and painted outside the parameters of convention because he didn’t know or didn’t care what the conventions were. When he learned that newspaper mogul Sir Keith Murdoch, owner of the Herald and Weekly Times and father of Rupert, sometimes offered patronage to young artists he bodgied up a portfolio, concocted a spurious reference from his teacher at the National Gallery School and bluffed his way into Murdoch’s office. Murdoch seemed interested but referred him to the Herald’s art critic, Basil Burdett, who wasn’t impressed. But he did direct the young Nolan to a couple of other individuals he thought might be able to help. One of these was solicitor John Reed. He declined to pay the fifty pounds Nolan wanted for the contents of the portfolio – Nolan said he would have used the money to go to Paris – and invited him to dinner instead.

  John Reed lived with his wife, Sunday, in a house they called Heide outside of the city on the Yarra River at Heidelberg where the Australian impressionists – Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Charles Condor – had practised pleinair painting in the 1880s. Reed, Cambridge educated, was from a wealthy Tasmanian pastoral family; his wife, previously Sunday Baillieu, came from one of Melbourne’s leading business families. They were a sophisticated, worldly, independently wealthy, childless couple who saw themselves as active, innovative patrons of the arts; ultimately they would become major patrons of Nolan himself, who would join a ménage à trois with them. But his initiation into the household wasn’t immediate and anyway he was already involved with, and soon married, a young contemporary art student called Elizabeth Paterson, herself the granddaughter of Scottish-born painter John Ford Paterson who had worked alongside Streeton and the others in the 1880s and ’90s and helped originate the so-called whisky-haze school of bush painting in those decades. Sidney and Elizabeth spent a year living at Ocean Grove out of Melbourne where they had a house rent free; they were both painting but there wasn’t much money; when they moved back to the city, where their daughter was born, they opened a pie shop on Lonsdale Street and lived in the apartment above it.

  It isn’t clear how active the Reeds were in their seduction of Nolan or how willing he was to be seduced. Probably he was always going to gravitate towards the larger artistic world they represented and promoted. That world, in part, came to Melbourne in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II, courtesy of Sir Keith Murdoch. The touring exhibition of French and English modernist painting included works by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Van Gogh, Matisse, Seurat, Dalí, Modigliani, Léger, Gris, Vlaminck, Sickert, Augustus John and Graham Sutherland: a cornucopia and a revelation to those who had previously seen the works only in reproduction. Basil Burdett had gone to Europe to arrange the loans but fell ill with jaundice on the sea voyage back to the antipodes and the management of the exhibition was taken over by a friend of the Reeds, Peter Bellew. Bellew, Sydney based, editor of Art in Australia and art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, took a painting of Nolan’s back to Sydney with him – it was a semi-abstract, not unrelated to the Head of Rimbaud, called Tent (c. 1940), loosely based on a theme from Luna Park. Bellew showed the painting to Serge Lifar, the choreographer and lead dancer of impresario Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe, then touring Australia, and the result was a commission for Nolan to design sets and costumes for a new one-act ballet, Icare, which had its successful première in Sydney on 16 February 1940. This commission initiated Nolan’s lifelong work as a designer for theatre.

  His first one-man show, which he organised and staged himself in his pink-painted studio in a condemned building on Russell Street, opened soon after in June: about 200 pictures, abstract paintings, calligraphic drawings, collages and slate tiles that had fallen from the roof. These tiles were painted using a synthetic enamel paint called Ripolin, which Pablo Picasso had famously said was healthy for painters; it was the paint Nolan used for his Ned Kelly series after the war. The show was sympathetically reviewed in the Melbourne Sun by George Bell: He is striving … at an absolutely pure art – an art in which the representation of objects has no place at all … his line is intriguing and his colour is rich and sometimes rare. Even in these early works there is a dialectic at work between representation and the truly abstract that would be the engine of Nolan’s art for the rest of his life. His abstracts are always figurative and his figures always abstractions. He invariably departs from a real subject, notably, in these early years, the cityscape of St Kilda – the pier, the Catani Gardens, the big dipper at Luna Park, the swimming baths.

  Not long after this first show Nolan saw at St Kilda the full moon rising behind the head of his friend John Sinclair. He painted the image in yellow on a blue ground and felt he had thereby solved a great problem in painting: how to make a two-dimensional object appear three dimensional. He called the result Boy with the Moon (c. 1940), sometimes known as Moonboy. It is an arresting painting, with huge presence despite its disarming simplicity, and was immediately controversial: fellow painter Adrian Lawlor, hitherto a Nolan supporter, said contemptuously that my daughter of six could do better than that. This was of course the point. Nolan is an exemplary antipodean artist precisely because he escapes traditional or metropolitan categories by refusing to admit their existence. Thus he can command in the same frame the artless and the urbane, the abstract and the figurative, in such a way that the two cannot ultimately be distinguished from one another. He would return several times to the Moonboy image in later life, once using it as an enormous background for a stage set; it is also the case that the genesis of his most famous series, the Ned Kelly paintings, is to be found in that prescient yellow head floating enigmatically against the dark blue sky.

  NOLAN’S MARRIAGE CAME to an end, allegedly after a private conversation between John Reed and Elizabeth Nolan, just before he was called up to the army in April 1942. He wanted to become a war artist but was never successful in this ambition, perhaps because his drawing style was so eccentric. Then he said he was not prepared to shoot a rifle and with other unco-operatives was sent to Dimboola as part of a group that guarded army rations stored against the possibility of a Japanese invasion. Just one of the anonymous sheds they protected contained, it was said, a million meals. Dimboola is on the Wimmera Plains, a wheat-growing area, and Nolan was fascinated by the new landscape and by the light that he would later describe as Dantesque. It is also in the Wimmera that Nolan truly began as a painter of Australian landscapes and of the figures that could be found there. His Head of Soldier of 1942 looks forward to the great 1973 portrait of Ern Malley; his Self Portrait the following year, with bands of the three primary colours across the forehead, is an uncompromising statement of intent.

  It was a dreamy kind of war: his only connection to the fighting in the north was the supply trains trundling through. The Reeds at Heide continued to support him, sending paints and canvases; Sunday in particular involved herself to a degree that approaches true collaboration in the making of his work. The Reeds were at that time publishers of the modernist magazine Angry Penguins, edited by a young literary wunderkind, Max Harris. Nolan had written and painted work in early issues, including an essay on Rimbaud. He also assisted with layout and design. When Ern Malley’s sister sent the dead poet’s work in for consideration, the poems were forwarded to Heide and Nolan read them too – at Horsham in the Wimmera. He suspected from the outset, as did the Reeds, that they were a hoax; but all three wanted to publish anyway because they were so good. The notorious issue of the magazine came out with a Nolan painting on the cover. The naked lovers in the branches of the tree are himself and Sunday Reed who, to quote the relevant poem, would never be that verb / Perched on the sole Ar
abian tree.

  Nolan never resiled from his opinion that Malley’s poems were good; the revelation of the hoax made no difference. Later he would remark that without Ern Malley there would have been no Ned Kelly and when, after the war, he travelled up into Kelly country on reconnaissance it was with Max Harris that he went. The Kelly paintings were executed, appropriately, by a man on the run from the law. Nolan had learned that he was to be sent up to the New Guinea front, tried to get an exemption on psychiatric grounds and when that failed, deserted. He took the alias Robin Murray – there are paintings signed this way – and lived between his studio in Parkville and with the Reeds at Heide. He was smart enough to know that he should hang on to his rifle and his uniform and when in 1948 an amnesty was called, he got John Reed to retrieve them from the ceiling of the house at Heide and send them to Sydney. He presented the rusty gun and moth-eaten kit at the Victoria Barracks in Paddington and received a dishonourable discharge.

  The Kelly paintings made Nolan’s reputation and have been seen around the world; they toured New Zealand in the 1950s. Even now, more than sixty years later, they retain an enigmatic force: what are they actually about? Nolan liked to say that there was a personal mythos encoded so deeply in the series that it would never be found out: he is usually thought to have been referring to his relationship with the Reeds, which ended not long after the series was finished (and the paintings became their personal property). But he also pointed out on several occasions the relationship between Kelly’s helmet and Malevich’s black square, as if they have a dimension that relates to the explorations of twentieth-century modernist painting. The landscapes through which Kelly rides are evocatively superb and there is an extraordinary beauty of detail in all of the works, whether in the flames consuming the Glenrowan Hotel, the starry buttons on the policemen’s uniforms or the gorgeous blue satin quilting sewn by Kelly’s mother into the famous helmet. John Reed remarked upon the most sensitive and profound harmony between symbol, legend and visual impact. On the other hand the works also stand as complex illustrations of the main events in that many-times-told tale.

  English poet and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith would later say that the predominant quality in the series was their insolence – the fuck-you response of a wild colonial boy to the powers that be. When in 1949 Kenneth Clark, then Slade Professor at Oxford University, happened to see in the Art Gallery of New South Wales Nolan’s Abandoned Mine (1948) – a failed entrant in that year’s Wynne Prize for landscape painting – he was told it was by nobody. Clark persisted and eventually tracked Nolan down at Wahroonga in Sydney’s north. He was living and painting there with his new wife, Cynthia, John Reed’s sister and an accomplished writer. Clark was confident that I had stumbled upon a genius. He suggested Nolan come to England and promised that he would do everything he could to assist him there. Nolan had already formed the pattern of restless travelling that would characterise the rest of his life; although he had not yet left Australia he had been all over the continent. Clark’s seduction of him into the larger world seems like the episode in the New Testament when the devil takes Christ up the mountain and shows him the world that could be his; with the difference that Nolan, like Oscar Wilde, could resist anything except temptation. He went to England, returned briefly to Australia, then left again for good. Although he would revisit often, he never lived there again.

  Nolan’s subsequent career as a painter was by any measure extraordinary; you could say that he re-colonised the citadels of artistic power in the north without compromising or even questioning his own credentials to do so. As a world artist he never abandoned his local identity, although home criticism of his allegedly un-Australian activities periodically arose. He showed in London and in New York and he travelled everywhere, estimating later in life that he had circumnavigated the earth thirty times. His friends and colleagues included composer Benjamin Britten and poet Robert Lowell and his work was admired by his contemporary Francis Bacon. When Kenneth Clark, by then Lord Clark, died in 1983, Nolan received the select honour of the Order of Merit, limited to twenty-four living recipients at any one time; it was widely believed he had taken Clark’s vacant place among the dignitaries.

  Nolan was as prolific an artist as he was a traveller and there may be as many as 35,000 surviving works. He did not keep accurate records and was inclined to abandon work when he was finished with it, as he did with the Kelly paintings. After a period in the early 1960s painting in a studio behind reception at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, he moved on unexpectedly, leaving behind the Inferno panels that had begun as an illustration of Robert Lowell’s translation of Euripides’ The Trojan Woman. When in 1976 he learned that his wife, Cynthia, had committed suicide in a London hotel (she sent him a telegram saying she was going by stages to the Orkney Islands), Nolan walked out of their house in Putney and never returned.

  None of this would have any significance if the work itself was not strong. While some of Nolan’s world paintings, particularly those of Africa and Antarctica, are compelling, it is his Australian works that carry the greatest charge. He didn’t need to be in Australia to make them, however: with an extraordinary visual memory, the snap, as Cynthia Nolan called it, he could anywhere recreate things he had seen. One of the two remarkable Riverbend series, memories of the Goulburn River of his childhood, was painted in New York. As were some of the Gallipoli paintings. Much of this work is difficult to see: no retrospective can approach totality and the most recent attempt, in 2007, taking a strictly chronological approach, unfortunately made the later work seem random and thin. Nolan was a compulsive talker and writer as well and made hundreds of statements about what he was doing or trying to do. But, as New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg observed after meeting him at a dinner party in 1958: Every word that Sidney says is camouflage. Everything he says goes off on a trail from what he really believes, thinks, intends to do, has done in the past. He is like the bird dragging a wing, leading the hunter away from its nest and the young.

  There are a few consistent threads running through his public statements. One is that I don’t care as long as I get that emotional communication; another that Painting is only worthwhile if you don’t know the outcome … you must never know what the end product is going to be. A third might be that even the kind of high art he practised has its roots among ordinary people and is not in the end distinct from so-called popular art. It isn’t always appreciated that Nolan’s vision was tragic in the ancient sense of evoking pity and terror. The presciently titled Desert Storm (1966) shows the western Australia landscape as a ferocious wilderness; in the Burke and Wills paintings, like the Kelly series a lifelong preoccupation, this wilderness consumes the ridiculously heroic human figures who try to inhabit it; the Miners paintings record the effect of this attempt at habitation in the ruined faces of the men who dig in the Pilbara earth. That Dantesque light shining down on Australian landscapes is always equivocal, it isolates as much as it illumines. Nolan saw his task to unify these objects/subjects as they appeared beneath that pitiless light: an ambition both formal and humanist. Paradise won’t be reached unless we first find our way through inferno and then purgatory. And, clearly, the only paradise we can hope to enter into is secular, human, quotidian: When I read your Landscape into Art, wrote Nolan to Kenneth Clark in 1960, I realized for the first time that even the Australian landscape was already an imaginative construction. Even in the case of the remote desert …

  IF SIDNEY NOLAN painted the world as if it was Australia, his near contemporary, Colin McCahon, took the opposite approach and painted New Zealand as if it was the world. McCahon was born in Timaru in 1919, the son of an accountant, and grew up mostly in Dunedin. His mother’s father, William Ferrier, had been a professional photographer and an amateur water-colourist and McCahon was familiar from a young age with the materials and the material results of artistic practice. The McCahons were Irish and Protestant, with a background in the Wesleyan and Presbyterian churches; a strong strain of
pacifism ran in the family, of anti-British feeling too, and also a mystical current of belief that favoured the revelation of an elect, whether considered as an individual or a community. Colin Ferrier, McCahon’s mother Ethel’s brother, a builder and explorer, was killed at Ypres on 11 November 1914. He was a lieutenant in the British army and, before the war, a builder of bridges. Colin McCahon was named after his uncle and within the family was believed to have inherited his mana.

  In 1927 the family business in Timaru collapsed in the lead up to the Great Depression. Spiritual crisis accompanied the economic: Driving one day with the family over the hills … I first became aware of my own particular God, perhaps an Egyptian God, but standing far from the sun of Egypt in the Otago cold. Big hills stood in front of little hills, which rose up distantly across the plain from the flat land: there was a landscape of splendour, order and peace. Not long after this, McCahon’s son William wrote, the entire McCahon family left their church. He does not say why but hints that it was because of the inability of the established order to concede any relevance to individual revelation outside the Church’s sacraments. This atmosphere of impassioned debate over matters of faith and doubt is the very air of McCahon’s later painting. It intensified during the 1930s when families in the Dunedin pacifist community – Baxters, Brailsfords, Kennedys, McCahons – tried to determine if fascism or war was the greater evil. McCahon, who had joined the Quaker Society of Friends while still a teenager, nevertheless decided fascism was the bigger threat and tried to enlist for military service; he was rejected as medically unfit because of an enlarged heart. He spent some of the war man-powered into essential industries, labouring in the city, orcharding and harvesting in the country.