Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends

Organized by the National Gallery of Victoria, this exhibition was a major undertaking made possible by grants from News Limited and Clemenger Australia, with assistance from Qantas Airways Limited. It was managed by International Cultural Corporation of Australia Limited, and indemnified by the Australian Government through the Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment.

Nolan’s London retrospective in 1957 had covered only ten years of his career. The well-presented exhibition for his fiftieth birthday, in 1967, was likewise not fully representative: the Kelly paintings of 1946-47 being a major omission. No exhibition could show every aspect of this extraordinarily vast and wide-ranging oeuvre. I have nevertheless included paintings from 1936-37 (his earliest dated works) to the present, as well as some examples of his work for ballet and opera, and records of involvements with film, printmaking, poetry and book illustration. By a most felicitous coincidence, the recent appearance of Brian Adams’ Sidney Nolan: such 1s life, a biography (Hutchinson) has enabled me to concentrate on Nolan’s art and confine biographical data to summary form.

Nolan has been called a ‘strange chick from an Irish hatchery’; also ‘the first modern Australian painter’—perhaps the first to work coherently within a post-Cubist idiom without compromising his own original, poetic vision. Internationally, he has become an intrinsic part of everything that ‘Australian’ means. And he is the most honoured Australian artist of his generation.

Sourced from: Jane Clark & Patrick McCaughey, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends: a retrospective exhibition 1937-1967, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 6.