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NOTES FOR OEDIPUS (with man in bush hat)
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Description
NOTES FOR OEDIPUS (with man in bush hat)
Ripolin enamel on composition board
Signed lower right
121 by 121cm
Painted in 1975
Exhibited
Sidney Nolan, Notes for Oedipus, Marlborough Fine Art, London, November 1975, cat. VII, illus.
'That's a good head isn't it - that
Australian hat!'
'The iconography invented by Sidney Nolan for his series of paintings devoted to Oedipus and the Sphinx transforms the story of their meeting into black comedy... Myth-breaker and myth-maker, Nolan introduces a startlingly irrelevant newcomer into the story. Nevertheless, the intruder is too inquisitive, too intimidating and altogether too pictorially the principal personage to be an irrelevance in the paintings. It is an image of the male of the domestic fowl and invaded Nolan's paintings after a chance encounter on a friend's farm, but the disrupted scale makes it very much larger than life and lends its mundanity a chimeric force. The cock is more monstrous than the Sphinx. Nolan has used the body of the cock as an expressionist playground, an off-limits area for dazzlingly free brushwork' (Robert Melville, introduction to Marlborough Fine Art exhibition catalogue, London, 1975).
Recently, Nicholas Usherwood has written perceptively of the 'Oedipus' series. He believes that these works 'must surely emerge not only as one of the most significant artistic statements of the latter half of Nolan's career but of late 20th century art also' (Nolan's Nolans: A Reputation Reassessed, Agnew's, London, 1997, cat. 80). See also Lot 18.
AU$ 15000-20000
Ripolin enamel on composition board
Signed lower right
121 by 121cm
Painted in 1975
Exhibited
Sidney Nolan, Notes for Oedipus, Marlborough Fine Art, London, November 1975, cat. VII, illus.
'That's a good head isn't it - that
Australian hat!'
'The iconography invented by Sidney Nolan for his series of paintings devoted to Oedipus and the Sphinx transforms the story of their meeting into black comedy... Myth-breaker and myth-maker, Nolan introduces a startlingly irrelevant newcomer into the story. Nevertheless, the intruder is too inquisitive, too intimidating and altogether too pictorially the principal personage to be an irrelevance in the paintings. It is an image of the male of the domestic fowl and invaded Nolan's paintings after a chance encounter on a friend's farm, but the disrupted scale makes it very much larger than life and lends its mundanity a chimeric force. The cock is more monstrous than the Sphinx. Nolan has used the body of the cock as an expressionist playground, an off-limits area for dazzlingly free brushwork' (Robert Melville, introduction to Marlborough Fine Art exhibition catalogue, London, 1975).
Recently, Nicholas Usherwood has written perceptively of the 'Oedipus' series. He believes that these works 'must surely emerge not only as one of the most significant artistic statements of the latter half of Nolan's career but of late 20th century art also' (Nolan's Nolans: A Reputation Reassessed, Agnew's, London, 1997, cat. 80). See also Lot 18.
AU$ 15000-20000