Sidney Nolan

The artist
The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 16 September 2001, lot 40
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above 

Nolan, Piper, Richards, Marlborough New London Gallery, London, April - May 1966, cat. 6 as 'The Vanity of Human Wishes - III'
Sidney Nolan, Oeuvres d'un grand peintre Australien, Embassy of Australia, Paris, 16 June - 28 July 1978, cat. 30 
Waddington Galleries, London (labels on the reverse)

Robert Lowell and Sidney Nolan, Near the Ocean, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1967, p. 103, for related drawing
Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and legends 1937-1987, ICCA and Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 153, n. 3 

Work is in good, original condition.
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Throughout his career, Nolan was deeply involved with literature and writers: from Ern Malley and Patrick White to Shakespeare's Sonnets and more. During 1966, living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, Nolan worked with the American Robert Lowell on illustrations for a book of Lowell's poetry, entitled Near the Ocean. The present painting relates to 'The Vanity of Human Wishes', Lowell's free translation of the first-century Roman satirical poet Juvenal. Indeed, Lowell believed that it was Nolan's art which 'made the bridge' between ancient Rome and contemporary America.

Juvenal depicted contemporary society and denounced its vices. Here Nolan's image comes from Juvenal's and Lowell's image of Messallina, vengeful and lustful third wife of the emperor Claudius, who eventually brought about her own execution by going through a form of marriage with one of her paramours. 'Meanwhile', continues Lowell's poem, 'obey your love, if one or two days life means much –  whatever's best or costs the smallest effort, to bring your fair white body to the sword'. Interestingly, Nolan also related the image to Ern Malley's poem Palinode when a triptych of three canvases based on The Vanity of Human Wishes was exhibited in the 1980s (now in the Art Gallery of South Australia).

As Mary Nolan has observed, 'That distinctive female nude shape started way back – he first used it in the 1940s. But these poetic subjects in the 1960s –  from Robert Lowell – were the first large-scale painted versions of it. You also see it in his drawings for Lowell's poetry. He used this female form – it's almost a symbol – a lot. He even made sculpture in marble on the same theme [Lady Nolan assisted with the clay maquettes for Carrara marble and bronze versions]. And that face – the man – it's not just a one-off face. It keeps coming back and it's certainly seen in the illustrations for Lowell's poems.'

Patrick McCaughey has admired 'the chilling sexual acrobatics' of this series and the 'deepening sense of the tragic that informs later Nolan... Nolan's vision changes as drastically as his style'. ¹ Nevertheless, despite the emphasis on female breasts and buttocks in Nolan's distinctive and recurring pictograph of 'woman', the sexual theme is neither prurient nor even overt. Rather, like Kelly's mask, the form becomes a personal and yet universal symbol.

1. The Age, 17 December 1983.