SIDNEY NOLAN

Title sheet, incorporating image from no. 5, below
No. 1 Illustration for 'Waking early Sunday morning' (p. 21 in book)
No. 2 Illustration for 'Waking early Sunday morning' (p. 25 in book)
No. 3 Illustration for 'Fourth of July in Maine' (p. 35 in book)
No. 4 Illustration for 'Near the Ocean' (p. 42 in book)
No. 5 Illustration for 'Near the Ocean' (p. 49 in book)
No. 6 Illustration for 'For Theodore Roethke' (p. 43 in book)
No. 7 Illustration for '1958' (p. 55 in book)
No. 8 Illustration for 'Spring (Horace, Odes, 1,4)' (p. 57 in book)
No. 9 Illustration for 'Serving under Brutus (Horace) (p. 63 in book)
No. 10 Illustration for 'Cleopatra (Horace)' morning' (p. 67 in book)
No. 11 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 73 in book)
No. 12 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 87 in book)
No. 13 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 91 in book)
No. 14 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 95 in book)
No. 15 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 99 in book)
No. 16 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 103 in book)
No. 17 Illustration for 'Brunetto Latini (Dante, Inferno, Canto XV)' (p. 117 in book)
No. 18 Illustration for 'The Ruins of Time' (p. 121 in book)
No. 19 Illustration for 'The Ruins of Time' (p. 125 in book)
No. 20 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 101 in book)
No. 21 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 101 in book)
No. 22 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 72 in book)
No. 23 Illustration for 'The Vanity of Human Wishes (Juvenal, 10th Satire)' (p. 107 in book)

The great Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was America's T.S. Eliot. A poet of classical inclination, though with a psychological tendency to mania, Lowell's writings ranged from rigorous literary-formalist verse, as in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle (1947) to the freer and more dynamic expressions of Life Studies (1959) and an extensive body of loose translations (or rather re-formations) of European poets, from Horace and Juvenal to Rimbaud and Rilke (Imitations, 1962).  In the mid-1960s Lowell also became something of a political-cultural celebrity, having very publicly declined an invitation to lunch at the Johnson White House in protest against the American War in Vietnam.

Sidney Nolan met Robert Lowell shortly after this cause célèbre, while living in the Chelsea Hotel, New York in early 1966, and the odd couple painter and poet became friends.  Nolan produced more than one hundred drawings inspired by the Imitations anthology, and he worked closely with the poet on illustrations for his 1967 collection Near the Ocean. Describing the book to his friend Elizabeth Bishop in February 1967, Lowell wrote; '... I'll have Giroux send you my new book.  There are quite a few changes from the version you saw, translations added, and pictures, which you may not like, tho [sic] I do.' ¹  He was more effusive in his published prefatory note.  A number of the poems addressed the 'greatness and horror' of the Roman Empire, and Lowell commented: 'how one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems in something of a mystery to me.  Perhaps the bridge is made by the brilliant drawings of Sidney Nolan.  May my lines throw some light on his!' ² 

The twenty-four black and white drawings published in Near the Ocean do illustrate particular lines of verse and are in this sense quite literal.  Yet they are also strange and potent graphic inventions in their own right.  Nolan revisited the compositions in this handsome suite of 'spare and seemingly nonchalant'³ drawings in coloured crayon.  More crisp and confident than the occasionally blurry, sketchy monochromes, the present works are nevertheless extremely close to the originals⁴ and share both their raw, hectic, graffiti-like line and their strangled, stylised violence and sexuality. 

1. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, 26th February 1967, in Saskia Hamilton (ed) The Letters of Robert Lowell, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2005, p. 483.
2. Robert Lowell, Near the Ocean, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1967.
3. Elwyn Lynn, 'Assessing Sidney Nolan: His December 1972 Exhibitions in London', Quadrant, no. 82, vol. XVII, no. 2, March-April 1973, p. 9
4. Only one of the published drawings is not included in the exhibition set: 'Throw Hannibal on the scales...', which appears on p. 81 of the book.