SIDNEY NOLAN

Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney, 1996
Private collection, United Kingdom; purchased from the above

Ned Kelly the haunted hero stalks Sidney Nolan's world and this painting like the angry ghost in Hamlet, seeking justice. Painted in 1958, the year Nolan left London for New York on a Harkness Fellowship; it is essentially a European Kelly, replacing the brilliance of Australian light in the earlier Kelly paintings for the richer tonalities of the northern climes. Kelly is now put on the world stage, the epic hero to rank with Robin Hood, Nolan adapting his medium to the change.

About this time he began painting in ripolin enamel, seen to brilliant effect in his second Mrs Fraser series and the Leda and the Swan paintings of the late fifties and early sixties. The new medium was perfect for the dankness of tropical forests and swamps, or the fluidity of the waters associated with the eroticism of the myth. The importance of the new medium lay in its flexibility - it could be watered down or thickened. Surfaces could be more readily manipulated, with the tooling and scraping back of the paint revealing figures and forms emerging out of the darkness. When applied to Kelly it had a further metaphoric role - of light shining through the darkness, a kind of deification of the outlaw.

While Kelly's head is squared in the image of the steel helmet, the features of his face are imprinted on it. One can only assume that Nolan was aware of the Western tradition in art that square haloes were used for living people, the concept of haloes stretching back to classical times when even emperors were given this mark to distinguish them from mere mortals. Like a noble knight of old, Kelly is portrayed emerging from the encircling darkness of prejudice and the obscurity of restraint. The paint surface glows in the reflected light, and the liveliness of execution and verticality of line adds to the transcendental mood of this image of the evergreen Ned.