SIDNEY NOLAN

Marlborough Galleries, London
Company Collection, London; purchased from the above

Sidney Nolan Paintings, Marlborough Fine Art, London, December 1972, cat. 1, pp.14, 15 (illus.)
Sidney Nolan: retrospective exhibition, The Royal Dublin Society, Dublin, 19 June – 5 July 1973, cat. 59

Brian Adams, Sidney Nolan: Such is Life, Hutchinson, Hawthorn, 1987, p. 214
Nancy Underhill (ed.), Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words, Penguin, Camberwell, p. 332

 

Overall good original condition, each panel is individually framed and under perspex
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Nolan and his wife Cynthia spent the European winter of 1955-56 on the Greek island of Hydra. The Australian writers George Johnstone and Charmian Clift were living on Hydra at this time, and Johnstone would later recall:

'(Nolan) had for the moment finished with Kelly and was searching for new themes for his painting: in pursuit of this he became quite obsessively immersed in our copies of Homer's Iliad and Robert Graves's Greek Mythology...

'He wanted to paint Troy, he said, in its pitiless heroics, in the true brutality of its images, within the impassive void of cosmic indifference: to alter those prettified costumed conceptions of Achaeans and Trojans so cloyingly fixed by the painters of the Renaissance: to give the story back the savage, sweaty, cruel, dusty, unadorned human grandeur that Homer had sung.

'He painted away at it in a ferment of excitement for five months, experimental sketches in oils or ins on heavy art paper mostly, hundreds and hundreds of studies concerned with nude figures interlocked and grappling, centaur-like horsemen, dessicated skulls and bones in formalized masks and helmets, the harsh edges of dry rock and brittle, snaggled vegetation against burning bright skies. There was no thought in his mind of a finished painting. 'I am just trying to work it out,' he would explain, surveying a vast floor carpeted with a hundred separate sketches. 'It will take a long time... maybe ten years before I'm ready to have a proper go at it.'¹

The present work, Nolan's greatest Trojan war picture, was indeed only completed a decade later, in 1966. It is the product not only of that initial encounter with the Homeric story, but also of further, intermediate inspirations: the Australian mythology of the Anzacs at Gallipoli (through reading Alan Moorehead's classic account and through a personal exploration of the Dardanelles landscape) and the story of Leda and the swan (through a poem by expatriate Australian Alwyn Lee and through personal encounters with Thames swans at Putney). However, the most immediate prompt for this work probably came from the American poet Robert Lowell, whom Nolan befriended in New York in 1966, and whose translations of classical texts included Euripides' play The Trojan Women. The Dragging of Hector has the same graphic repetitions and overlays, the same stacked bodies and fanned legs found in Nolan's illustrations to Lowell's anthology Near the Ocean, as well as in Inferno (1966, anonymous loan, Art Gallery of South Australia), which began as a response to Lowell's version of Aeschylus's Oresteia.

The incident represented is from Books XXII and XXIV of The Iliad. The Greek hero Achilles defeats and kills the valiant Trojan prince Hector in revenge for Hector having killed Achilles's beloved friend Patroclus. Still consumed by grief and rage at Patroclus's death, Achilles strips Hector's body of its armour, ties it behind his chariot and drags the corpse around the city walls. Following Patroclus's funeral rites, again Achilles drags Hector's corpse, circling Patroclus's tomb three times. Hector's father King Priam goes to the Greek camp to beg for the return of his son's body, clasping Achilles's knees and kissing his hands in supplication.

Nolan's painting is far from a literal illustration of the Homeric text (Hector was famously dragged by the heels, with his head in the dust). It is more the product of the artist's then-current preoccupation with vast multi-panelled works², combined with a meditation on (or rather a competition with) ideas of Greek art. He described the work in an interview as 'very linear and it is based technically on the vase paintings. It is completely flat and it is filled in, in a way, it's not quite the same as a vase painting but it is basically the same technique applied to a frieze.'³  The dark ground and the flat, pale bodies recall the Attic red-figure style of pottery decoration, and the first two panels, with their 'merry-go-round' horses, legs all interlocked, also parallel the repetitions of classical vase painting.

Whatever its origins and motivations, the present work is, like all of Nolan's best painting, at once raw and lyrical. It is a weirdly ambiguous composition, both spatially and psychologically. The figure of Hector blossoms at the crotch into a strange six-legged / six-armed / six-organed monster-plant, or perhaps the additional limbs are those of a body diving into Hades. In the final two panels, the floating figure of Priam drifts towards or is held close by a headless, one-armed Achilles. This encounter of youth and age, virility and impotence and mutual grief is outlined in a strange, disturbing way: Achilles sex seems to sprout from Priam's armpit, while Priam's outstretched arm gives Achilles a bold, priapic profile.

In its dynamic interplay of Greece and Australia (and possibly Vietnam), figure and ground, violence and sexuality, eros and thanatos, The Dragging of Hector is a powerful painting, and one which fully justifies Kenneth Clark's assessment of Nolan's 'success... in painting Homeric themes.'⁴

1.  George Johnston, 'Gallipoli Paintings', Art and Australia, vol. 5 no. 2, September 1967, p. 466
2.  Contemporary multi-panel works on other themes include Riverbend (1964-65, XXX); Eureka Stockade (1965-66, Reserve Bank of Australia); and Landscape (Salt Lake) (1966, National Gallery of Victoria)
3.  Sidney Nolan, interview with Ivan Page (National Library of Australia), London, 19 January 1978, in Nancy Underhill (ed.), Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words, Penguin, Camberwell, p. 321
4.  ibid.