SIR SIDNEY ROBERT NOLAN (1917-1992)

PROVENANCE
Barry Stern Gallery
Fine Australian and International Paintings , Sotheby's, Melbourne, May 2000, lot 78
Private collection, Sydney

CATALOGUE NOTE
In 1944, when Nolan left the army, he was, in his own words, 'more than interested in violence. We had been taught about arms and the use of the utmost violence' (quoted in Clark, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and legends 1937-1987 , ICCA and Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 71). In his quest for a 'reason' for painting the Australian landscape in an entirely new way, 'trying to put something in front of the bush', as he explained, he eventually hit upon his now famous interpretation of the Ned Kelly saga.
Robbing the Bank is one of an important group of paintings Nolan produced during the gestation period of his first and most famous Kelly series. These works meld together the 'inner history' of his own emotions, his deep interest in Australian history at the time and a bold faux-naïf style that owed much to his knowledge of European modernism.
Between about March and November 1945, he painted a number of isolated episodes from the Kelly story and a few other partly narrative works on the bushranging theme (see Reeder, W., The Ned Kelly Paintings, Nolan at Heide 1946-47 , Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 1997). Also from these months come Goldfields depicting the grim death of an unlucky goldminer; and Gippsland Incident (see Clark, op. cit. , p. 70). Interestingly, the motif of the check shirt seen in those 'story' pictures recurrs in Robbing the Bank . Similarly, the delight in patterning seen here in the policeman's stripes and the woman's polka dots carries through into several of the paintings from the 1946-47 Kelly series (e.g. in Steve Hart's disguise, Margaret Kelly's frock and the Kelly family's wallpaper, Aaron Sheritt's longjohns and the policemen's buttons). All are worked in bright coloured flowing Ripolin enamel which is set here against a flat, almost golden ground.
Perhaps this subject is one of the Kelly gang's daring raids. Certainly, as Andrew Sayers explains, their story is 'a convoluted drama, full of sub-plots' and 'Nolan was fascinated by the history of the Kellys in all its true-crime details' (Sayers, in Reeder, op. cit. , pp. 18-19). Robbing the Bank comes from one of the most important and transforming periods of the artist's career.