SIDNEY NOLAN

David Jones' Gallery, Sydney
Mr David Coventry; purchased from the above in 1950
Modern British Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture, Sotheby's, London, 21 November 1973, lot 206
Lord McAlpine of West Green, United Kingdom
Australian City Properties, Perth
The Bishop's House Collection, Phillips, Sydney, 12 August 1999, lot 478
Gould Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney (label on reverse); purchased from the above
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Sidney Nolan: Exhibition of Central Australian Landscapes, David Jones' Gallery, Sydney, 8 March - April 1950, cat. 1
Twentieth Century Australian Art: A Major Collectors' Exhibition, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 25 March - 30 April 2000; Sydney, 13 May - 11 June 2000, cat. 15 (illus.)
Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 7 March - 8 April 2001, Gould Galleries, Sydney, 2 May - 3 June 2001, cat. 8 (illus.)
Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 6 June - 17 August 2003, cat. 14 (illus.) (label on reverse)
Sidney Nolan, Gould Galleries, Sydney, 12 November - 7 December 2003, cat. 4

Geoffrey Smith, Sidney Nolan: Desert & Drought, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 147

Work is in good original condition. UV examination reveals spot retouching in sky upper centre and left centre.
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Aside from the iconic Kelly paintings, Sidney Nolan's outback pictures of 1949-53 are possibly his most original and important extended sequence.¹ Working in a thematic 'tradition' initiated by colonial expedition artists, subsequently extended by Hans Heysen, Albert Namatjira and  Russell Drysdale and widely popularised in the pages of the Walkabout pictorial magazine.  In his desert paintings Nolan forged a personal vision of the Australian landscape which still resonates strongly today. Nolan's outback is 'transparent and at the same time impenetrable',² a place haunted by frontier history, a place of harsh, dessicated beauty. The works have their origins in Sidney and Cynthia Nolan's journeys through Queensland in 1947 and Central Australia and the Kimberleys in 1949, supplemented by a 1952 commission from the Brisbane Courier Mail to record the devastating northern drought of that year.

The first public exposure of these paintings was in a David Jones' Art Gallery exhibition in 1950, a show which was heralded by the artist and critic James Gleeson as '...one of the most important events in the history of Australian painting. It is a superb and overwhelming experience, and it may not be too fanciful to imagine that future art historians will date the birth of a predominantly Australian idiom from this exhibition.'³ 1 in the David Jones catalogue, purchased on the opening day, Pentecost Range  can be considered the first of the first, the initial work in this most innovative sequence.

The 1950 exhibition included landscapes of Western Queensland, the Macdonnell Ranges and the Kimberleys, subjects seen from the road and from the air, all combined in a singular, epic vision of outback desert and mountains. Indeed, as hung in David Jones' gallery, 'many of the pictures shared a common horizon line.'⁴ In this curious compression, this synthesis of disparate locations, we can see clearly the artist's poetic intention, his aim to present 'composite impressions',⁵ 'the actuality of the landscape ...intensified to the point of a dream.'⁶

The present work does have a particular point of origin. With Kimberley, King Leopold Range, Carr Boyd Range, Mueller Range and Fitzroy River, it was one of the half dozen identifiable north-western landscapes in the show. More specifically, it depicts the Pentecost Range, one of the spectacular series of jumbled  mountains along the Gibb River road west of Kununurra. Nevertheless, it could be a picture of anywhere, or nowhere. It is a definite Kimberleys location, but it could as easily be  Mars, or the moon. The central mesa may be a specific geological feature, but it is as much an abstract form, a generalised monolith, a petrified Kelly mask, even.

What impresses above all is the quality of the paint surface, the play between solidity and liquidity. Nolan described the 'process of putting on layers of colour and then burnishing them off with the stocking until I get the translucent quality I want'⁷, and here 'the white priming undercoat shows through... thinly painted hills and valleys – worked with a semi-dry bristle brush and some finger-painting.'⁸ Through such technical virtuosity, Nolan here creates a vision of the Kimberley desert in which (in the words of the journalist Norman Bartlett) 'the blaze of reddish-brown hits you like a ton of real red earth.'⁹

1. See Geoffrey Smith, Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003
2. Sidney Nolan, diary notes, Alice Springs, 28 June 1949, Jinx Nolan papers, quoted ibid., p. 16
3. James Gleeson, 'Landscapes triumph for Aust. Artist', The Sun, 31 March 1950, p. 19
4. Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 111
5. ibid., p. 109
6. Sidney Nolan, letter to Geoffrey Dutton, quoted in 'Sidney Nolan's Burke and Wills Series', Art and Australia, vol. 5 no. 2, September 1967, p. 459
7. Sidney Nolan, Time, 26 April 1963, cited in Nancy Underhill (ed.), Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words, Viking, Camberwell, 2007, p. 278
8. Clark, op. cit., p. 111
9. Norman Bartlett, 'Nolan: An Australian artist grows up', Daily Telegraph, 7 April 1950, p. 8