Important Australian Art Including Works from the Qantas Collection

/

Lot 104
  • 104

SIDNEY NOLAN

Estimate
35,000 - 45,000 AUD
Log in to view results
bidding is closed

Description

  • Sidney Nolan
  • LEDA AND THE SWAN
  • Signed with initial lower centre; signed and dated ‘April 28th 1960’ on the reverse; bears artist's name and title on label on the reverse
  • Polyvinyl acetate on composition board
  • 121 by 90 cm

Provenance

Corporate collection, United Kingdom

Exhibited

Sidney Nolan - Leda and the swan and other recent works,  Matthiesen Gallery, London, 16 June - 16 July 1960, cat. 29 (label on the reverse)
Marlborough Fine Art, London (label on the reverse)

Catalogue Note

Nolan's series on the mythological theme of Leda and the Swan not only brought him international fame in 1960 but also, in the words of Alan McCulloch, put Australian art 'on the map'. 1 In the ancient Greek myth, the god Zeus transforms himself into a swan and couples with the Aetolian princess, wife of the King of Sparta. From her eggs hatch Polydeuces and Helen of Troy and thence, of course, the Trojan war. However Nolan was scarcely interested in the narrative details. In 1958, while living in New York, the trigger that fired his imagination was an unpublished verse by a little-known Australian poet, Alwyn Lee, ending: '. . Until black Jupiter with snake-like head, Has taken lubra Leda to his bed, And everything, including tears, are shed'. As Nolan read these lines, the myth came alive and he started to paint. As he once explained, his memory mingled images of swans in London, coloured lights on the Thames, his step-daughter swimming under water, visual data from many times and places. 'One ends up with a landscape one has never seen before', he explained at the time. 2

1. Meanjin, December 1961, p. 465.
2. Nolan in The Studio, London, October 1960, p. 130.