SIDNEY NOLAN

In 1939, the art critic Peter Bellew owned a painting by Sidney Nolan which the artist had titled with a quotation from William Blake's mythopoetic confection 'The Book of Urizen': The Eternals Closed the Tent. Serge Lifar, principal dancer and choreographer with the de Basil company, saw the painting at Bellew's and liked it, and this led eventually to one of Nolan's first great professional successes, the 1940 designs for the ballet Icare.

While the image of the tent is therefore of considerable importance in the development of Nolan's career, its origin is obscure. The Blake reference would appear to be an accidental-surrealist conjunction: Nolan admitted to Elwyn Lynn in 1984: 'I'm not further to understanding the phrase now than I was then. Just a kind of mad Blake statement in a way.'¹  Formally, there is in these first tent pictures an echo of the Big Dipper's scaffolding, and there is undoubtedly a homage to the flap-like cubist shapes of Picasso's Guernica. In an interview with Bernard Smith Nolan suggested that 'the tent motif was ... associated with youthful memories of St Kilda, involving erotic thoughts about mysterious happenings that might be going on behind the canvas, or tacky intrigues invoked by spruikers in Luna Park sideshows.'²  Barry Pearce also notes 'a softer aesthetic interest. Whilst in the army [Nolan] became entranced by the interior light diffused through the fabric of tents and thought they would make ideal studios for painting.'³

But whatever its source - Blake, Luna Park or the Caulfield Racecourse army induction camp - the tent is, as Tom Rosenthal has perceptively noted 'a striking image, one of the first to stick in Nolan's mind as a source of endless variation.'⁴  It is there in the white canvas military tents of Dream of the latrine sitter (1942) and in the newspaper photograph image of the eccentric Melbourne old-age pensioner Mrs Carroll in Woman and Tent (1946). It appears as tent-cum-humpy in Death of Captain Fraser (1948) and in skeletal form in the miners' lean-tos and pitheads of the same year. The blinding white sunlit roof and outhouse of The Butcher's Hut, Sturt Station (1949) present the same play of triangle, square and parallelogram, and there is a goldfields Tent amongst the 1949 paintings on glass. Later still there is the Antarctic explorers' tent in Camp (1964), the digger's tent in the Reserve Bank Eureka Stockade mural (1965), even the tent-like Egyptian pyramids which appear in the background of the various Notes for Oedipus (1975).

The present work is relatively early, from the first Kelly series of 1946-47. While not included in the core group of twenty-seven Kelly pictures exhibited at the Velasquez Gallery in 1948, Kelly's Tent is vintage Nolan: a rich mix of Wimmera and Warby Ranges foliage-palettes below a high horizon and a cloudless blue sky. Appearing as a faceted white jewel in the scrabbled, scrubby bush, the tent itself floats within the landscape. It is weightless and unanchored, like a formal mirage of human knowledge, a geometric ghost of human habitation. Although angled, white and shadow-dappled (as opposed to square, black and flat), here the tent functions in a manner closely analogous to the Kelly mask: as an assertion of humanity against an uncaring, if not hostile nature. As Nolan himself put it: 'one is always trying to put something in front of the bush.'⁵

1.  Elwyn Lynn papers, Art Gallery of New South Wales, cited in Nancy Underhill (ed.), Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words, Viking, Camberwell, 2007, p. 251
2.  1961 interview, paraphrased in Barry Pearce, 'Nolan's parallel universe', in Barry Pearce (ed.), Sidney Nolan 1917-1992 (exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 27
3.  ibid.
4.  T.G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, p. 23
5.    Sidney Nolan in conversation with Noel Barber, cited in Jane Clark (ed.), Sidney Nolan: landscapes and legends (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 71