Sold by the Artist to a Private Collection, UK
Agnew’s Gallery, London
Private collection, Sydney
This painting is part of a rare and important series of Kelly works dating from 1962. In this group of paintings, the Kelly head is framed by yellow, blue-black and red stripes. The coloured stripes are familiar from previous appearances within Nolan’s oeuvre – in the 1940s we see them in a Melbourne football jumper, in a St Kilda beach towel, a Dimboola railway signal or tiger brand flour bag.
Damian Smith has observed that the 1962 Kelly pictures present “a series of intriguing questions concerning the construction and presentation of public and private personas”. Such issues can be related not only to Kelly, but also to Nolan, who faced similar issues of celebrity. Smith’s is a plausible thesis; in 1962 Nolan had returned home to Australia for the first time since 1957, to take part in a whistle-stop tour involving the opening of an exhibition at the Skinner Galleries, Perth, the launch of a film about his work and a hectic schedule of press and television interviews. These paintings may well represent the outlaw-artist cornered by and defending himself against the onslaught of reputation and expectation.
On Kelly Study (1962), a similar Kelly work by Sidney Nolan from the same year as King Kelly, Edmund Capon AM OBE has remarked:
“I regard, without hesitation, Sidney Nolan as the great Australian painter of the twentieth century. This assertion is made not only for his constantly persuasive imagery and the sheer facility of his painting, but more for his seeing the Australian landscape, not as an end in itself, but as a theatre for the human drama to which he, with his turbulent life, made quite a contribution. Nolan populated our landscape with the human presence and thereby gave that overwhelming image, one that had so driven and shaped the Australian psyche, a whole new dimension, and indeed, purpose.
Nolan was an iconoclast, fiercely independent, ruthless with himself but richly endowed with a remarkable human spirit that was forever curious about the whys and wherefores of our presence here on earth. His relentless curiosity and his imagination were matched by his art; always direct, forthright and almost wilful in its apparent expediency. His portraits, such as this ironic image of his most famous subject, are redolent with his own distinctive traits and motifs: the Kelly-like mask, the coloured stripes, the sense of latent anger and that mysterious anonymous background which defies definition and hints at the void which cannot be defined; all are part of the indelible Nolan style. Nolan was a driven soul, relentless in his pursuit of emotional and intellectual adventure, which fed and furnished his art and gave it such urgency and purpose. There is nothing about Nolan’s art that is incidental or unnecessary”.
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso)
Private collection
Australian and European Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings, Part 1, Christies, Melbourne, 27 August 1997, Lot 35
Savill Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso)
Private collection, Melbourne
Bonhams, The Fehily Collection of Contemporary Art; Important Australian Art, Sydney, 29 May 2012, Lot 113
Private collection, Sydney
Exhibited:
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
Ned Kelly and Beyond, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 18 March 9 April 1998, cat. no. 6 (illus.)
Nolan and his wife Cynthia went on an adventure through Africa from September to November in 1962. It was this trip that inspired Nolan’s African series the following year and also led to Cynthia’s publication of One Traveller’s Africa (1965). Giraffe is one of the largest and most impressive works from this series. The distinctive markings on this noble creature are precise yet freely painted in beautiful orange hues, which contrast subtly with it’s vast landscape environment.
Purchased directly from the artist circa 1980s
Private collection, United Kingdom
Private collection, Sydney
This painting, from a U.K. collection, is part of a relatively unknown and rare series of Kelly works dating from 1962.
In this group of paintings, the Kelly head rectangle contains a soft, haunting death mask/Veronica’s Veil portrait within a framing of yellow, blue-black and red stripes. The coloured parallels are familiar from numerous previous appearances – in the 1940s we see them in a Melbourne football jumper, in a St Kilda beach towel, a Dimboola railway signal or tiger brand flourbag. They also brand the forehead of a Self-Portrait (1943. Private collection) and they cover Kelly’s whole body in The Chase (1946, National Gallery of Australia). While the stripes are relatively familiar (albeit nostalgic and ambiguous), the nudity of the Kellys in this sequence is unusual and unsettling.
Nolan himself asks in his poem Ned Kelly: “If we picked up human beings as we pick up sea-shells on the beach, how would we respond to the square-headed boy from the bush lying in Our land’s hand… “[1]. Awkward, pink and big-headed, exposed on a blank, spaceless ground, the 1962 Kellys appear young and exposed, in spite of their guns and armour. Elwyn Lynn wrote that they presented ‘the most wispy, wraith-like, vulnerable creature Nolan has painted’[2].
More recently, Damian Smith has described how ‘the naked outlaw appears to dance across the canvas in a private and secluded performance reminiscent of indigenous Australian dance’[3]. Smith goes on to claim that these pictures, like Kelly in armour of the same year, present ‘a series of intriguing questions concerning the construction and presentation of public and private personas. Such issues can be related not only to Kelly, but also to Nolan, who faced similar issues of celebrity’[4].
Smith’s is a plausible thesis; in 1962 Nolan had returned home to Australia for the first time since 1957, a whistle-stop tour involving the opening of an exhibition at the Skinner Galleries, Perth, the launch of a film about his work and a hectic schedule of press and television interviews. These paintings may well represent the outlaw-artist cornered by and defending himself against the fire of reputation and expectation. 1. See Damian Smith, ‘Nolan through Kelly’, in Unmasked: Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950-1990 (exhibition catalogue), Melbourne, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, 2006, p. 28. Smith mentions six works. Kelly I – Kelly IV, a group of square (122 x 122) oil on hardboard works were shown at Nolan’s Marlborough Galleries exhibition in May-June 1979; II and III were included in Unmasked. Kelly VI (Christie’s Australia, 26 August 2003, lot 47) is rectangular, of the same dimensions as the present work. The (natural) assumption that this painting is the unaccounted for Kelly V is not however confirmed – the work’s inscription clearly identifies it as ‘no. 1. Having been purchased directly from the artist, it may not have been included in the Kelly I-VI group, but is rather a related but unexhibited work.
[1] Sidney Nolan, ‘Ned Kelly’, 1971, published in Nancy Underhill (ed.), Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words, Melbourne: Viking, 2007, p. 411
[2] Elwyn Lynn, Myth and imagery: Sidney Nolan, London: Macmillan, 1967, p. 46
[3] Smith, op. cit., p. 28. There may be an echo of the bodies of the dancers in the Royal Ballet’s 1962 Rite of Spring, which Nolan designed.
[4] Ibid.
The collection of Elijah Moshinsky, until 2007
Christopher Kingzett Fine Art, London UK
Private collection, Sydney
AGNEWS Fine Art Dealers, 43 Old Bond Street, London, 2011
From the late 1930s onwards, Nolan had been involved in stage design and this remained an important part of his work. In the 1980s he forged a highly productive relationship with the opera director, Elijah Moshinsky, also an Australian. The first results of this collaboration were the sets and costumes for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden for Moshinsky’s production of Samson et Dalila by Saint-Saëns in 1981, which are generally considered to be his most important achievement in the field of stage design and are still in use today. Nolan produced designs for everything from backdrops and gauzes to the costumes of the principal singers.
Nolan wrote of these, ‘I was allowed to make my own costumes, so I brought silk back from China and I draped it around the girls and put in pins …… Then I followed Elijah’s instructions fairly closely. I tried to provide a kind of cross between an oriental and an Australian setting …… a sort of lush desert. I’d been going to China a lot at that time and with my Australian background I felt it was my job, and Elijah felt it was, to feed in some sensuous kind of visual reality to a work which was maybe a little bit stilted in some way. It was actually very beautiful but it needed something. What I did in conjunction with Elijah and with Nick Chelton was to load the whole thing with images and, in a sense, almost subliminal images’. ¹
A further commission for a production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Sydney Opera House followed in 1983 and for Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1987. The present designs remained in the collection of the producer, Elijah Moshinsky, until 2007.
¹ Nolan lecture, ‘Painting and the Stage’, Royal Academy, London, 1988
Elijah Moshinsky, until 2007
Christopher Kingzett Fine Art, London UK
Private collection, Sydney
AGNEWS Fine Art Dealers, 43 Old Bond Street, London, 2011
From the late 1930s onwards, Nolan had been involved in stage design and this remained an important part of his work. In the 1980s he forged a highly productive relationship with the opera director, Elijah Moshinsky, also an Australian. The first results of this collaboration were the sets and costumes for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden for Moshinsky’s production of Samson et Dalila by Saint-Saëns in 1981, which are generally considered to be his most important achievement in the field of stage design and are still in use today. Nolan produced designs for everything from backdrops and gauzes to the costumes of the principal singers.
Nolan wrote of these, ‘I was allowed to make my own costumes, so I brought silk back from China and I draped it around the girls and put in pins …… Then I followed Elijah’s instructions fairly closely. I tried to provide a kind of cross between an oriental and an Australian setting …… a sort of lush desert. I’d been going to China a lot at that time and with my Australian background I felt it was my job, and Elijah felt it was, to feed in some sensuous kind of visual reality to a work which was maybe a little bit stilted in some way. It was actually very beautiful but it needed something. What I did in conjunction with Elijah and with Nick Chelton was to load the whole thing with images and, in a sense, almost subliminal images’. ¹
A further commission for a production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Sydney Opera House followed in 1983 and for Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1987. The present designs remained in the collection of the producer, Elijah Moshinsky, until 2007.
¹ Nolan lecture, ‘Painting and the Stage’, Royal Academy, London, 1988
Private collection, London
Private collection, London
Private collection, London
Private collection, London
The artist;
Marlborough galleries;
Private collection, Sydney
Lawsons, Australian & European Paintings, Sydney, 27/07/1981, Lot No. 169, Sotheby’s, Fine Australian Paintings, Melbourne, 22/08/1994, Lot No. 130
Private Collection, Sydney
Marlborough Gallery, London, May, 1963
Kym Bonython Gallery, Adelaide, March, 1964
Encountering African landscapes and culture for the first time with his wife Cynthia in 1962, Nolan was described by his wife as “wrenched sideways, almost standing, concentrated, taut, his eyes like arrows shooting to nail this enchanted moment”; the intense impact of Nolan’s journey was lasting and culminated in a well-acclaimed exhibition of 34 works titled Sidney Nolan:African Journey held at Marlborough Gallery, London just a year later.
Durlacher Bros. Galleries, New York;
Private collection, New York;
Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 1996;
Private collection, Melbourne;
Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney, 15 March 2006, lot 17;
The Estate of Eva Breuer, Sydney
Durlacher Bros. Galleries, New York
From Streeton to Whiteley: A Selection of Art, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 18 October – 10 November 1996, cat.15
Unmasked: Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950-1990, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, 11 November 2006 – 4 March 2007.
Nolan 1917-1992, Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney, 2007, cat. 19.
The collection of Ann Robin Banks;
thence by decent to a private collection, London
The artist Ann Robin Banks was a close friend of Cynthia Nolan and worked on the Eureka Stockade mural with Sidney Nolan. This mural was commissioned for the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1965 and is now housed at the Australian National University, Canberra.
The artist Sidney Nolan rented Ann Banks’ studio in Fulham and eventually purchased it when she moved to Scotland.
The collection of Ann Robin Banks;
thence by decent to a private collection, London
The artist Ann Robin Banks was a close friend of Cynthia Nolan and worked on the Eureka Stockade mural with Sidney Nolan. This mural was commissioned for the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1965 and is now housed at the Australian National University, Canberra.
The artist Sidney Nolan rented Ann Banks’ studio in Fulham and eventually purchased it when she moved to Scotland.
The collection of Ann Robin Banks;
thence by decent to a private collection, London
The artist Ann Robin Banks was a close friend of Cynthia Nolan and worked on the Eureka Stockade mural with Sidney Nolan. This mural was commissioned for the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1965 and is now housed at the Australian National University, Canberra.
The artist Sidney Nolan rented Ann Banks’ studio in Fulham and eventually purchased it when she moved to Scotland.
1955-56 marked a pivotal point in the trajectory of Nolan’s career. The artist travelled extensively not only to Gallipoli, Turkey, India and Cambodia but also spent nine months living on the Greek island of Hydra, reading Robert Graves on the pre-Hellenic Myths and introducing mythological iconography into his work. He also visited Italy finding inspiration in Etruscan art and the archaeological discoveries of Pompeii while simultaneously finding a great sense of familiarity in these foreign lands to native Australia. Having found strong influences on these travels Nolan went on to produce new bodies of work that reenergised his subjects.
Sir Sidney Nolan, United Kingdom, until 1992;
Lady Nolan, United Kingdom, until 2016;
The Estate of Lady Nolan, United Kingdom;
Private collection, Sydney
Private collection, Australia;
Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso);
Private collection;
Sotheby’s, New York, 31 October 1984, lot 143;
Severn Family Foundation Collection;
Bonhams, Important Australian Art, 24 August 2021, lot 71;
Private collection, Sydney
The estate of Lady Nolan;
Private collection, Australia
Private collection, Melbourne
Australian galleries, Melbourne;
Private collection, Melbourne, then by descent;
Private collection, Sydney
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