- 4
SIDNEY NOLAN
Description
- Sidney Nolan
- TWO ELEPHANTS
- Signed with initial lower right; signed with initial and dated 11-01-63 on the reverse
- Ripolin enamel on board
- 120.5 by 151.5 cm
Provenance
Condition
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Catalogue Note
In the northern autumn of 1962, Sidney and Cynthia Nolan travelled to Africa. Nolan had been invited to undertake a commission for Kenyan businessman Malin Sorsbie, who arranged for the Nolans to experience the African bush through visits to the Serengeti National Park and to Lake Rudolph, on the Ethiopian border. Although the relationship with Sorsbie proved an unhappy one, Nolan was certainly inspired by the trip, and after a visit to Australia at the end of the year, he returned to London and began work on an extensive series of paintings of African wildlife; 34 works were subsequently shown in the Marlborough Galleries exhibition African Journey, amongst them the present work.
The exhibition's popular success - the Queen bought two paintings - prompted some negative responses: David Storey, for example, described the exhibition as the 'mild and mannered' work of 'a poetic illustrator.' 1 With art-historical hindsight, however, it is possible to locate these works more accurately within the broad trajectory of Anglo-Australian painting, as falling between the figural distortions of Francis Bacon (whose retrospective had been shown at the Tate Gallery the previous year) and Brett Whiteley's pop-expressionist 'Zoo' series of 1965. More particularly, Nolan's African paintings have their own strange anthropomorphic resonance, a kind of animal existentialism. The artist himself said that '...they are beautiful, and marked in the way they are, so that they can look at each other; and for the first time I understood that they must have an aesthetic sense, too, and that in painting them I merely hope to participate in this thing between them. I feel that there's a kind of painting to be done with animals and natural camouflage that would be, in a sense, a no-painting; there would be a total disappearance of the image - but if you stared at the painting long enough, the image would eventually waft up...'2
The present work exemplifies this aesthetic of appearance and disappearance, reality and dream. Against the richly coloured shadows of the foreground - stripes of indigo, olive, orange, red, yellow ochre - it is the grey-green-brown elephants that appear to be made of earth. (Nolan once observed in an interview that 'an elephant's skin looks like raw silk' 3, and his washings and scumblings of oil here create just such an effect.) With similar dream logic, the firsthand, naturalist's observation of entwined trunk elephantine communication is contradicted by the disjunctive scale and perspective of the two beasts (the background elephant's tusks are visible in front of the foreground elephant's trunk). The painting is full of bush ghosts: the right hand elephant sports a pentimento of a cattle egret on its back, while in the background rises the pale fan of a thorn tree, like some huge phantom elephant mask.
1. New Statesman, 31 May, 1963
2. Sidney Nolan, quoted in The Queen, 24 April 1963
3. Sidney Nolan, quoted in Barber, N., Conversations with Painters, Collins, London, 1964