Outlaw and income
Michael Davie
SIDNEY NOLAN by T. G. Rosenthal Thames & Hudson, £42, pp. 304, ISBN 0500093040 THE BOYDS by Brenda Niall Melbourne University Press, £23.50, pp. 392, ISBN 0522848710 Even Nolan fans (Sir Sidney Nolan, OM, 1917-92) will find Rosenthal's superb study of his work full of surprises. Rosenthal calls his output 'prodigious', and so it was: 10,000 'significant works', or about four a week for 50 years. He was obsessional. The number of paintings, drawings and sketches he produced of his best-known obsession, the outlaw Ned Kelly in his iron mask, whose life and significance as myth form Rosenthal's longest and perhaps his best chapter, are beyond counting. One of Nolan's last drawings, in 1992, a card to a
friend, shows Kelly armoured and with a heart. 'Kelly was the millstone around my neck,' he said. The millstone was also the foundation stone of Nolan's fame and bank-balance. however.
Rosenthal's sumptuous volume is emphatically an art book, a commentary on Nolan's work, not a biography. It contains 373 illustrations. 270 of them in excellent colour, as you would expect at this price from this publisher. Rosenthal deals not in chronology but in themes: Kelly, Mrs Fraser, Burke and Wills. Leda and the Swan, Gallipoli, Eureka and the Miners, and so on. The illustrations are closely married to the text, which is uniformly clear, intelligent and blessedly free from artspeak. Along the way, Rosenthal, who, he tell us, knew Nolan for more than 30 years, quotes generously from Australian writers and critics. More surprises appear as the book proceeds, especially Nolan's continued search for and interest in new materials and techniques, and his little-known experiments with sculpture.
Rosenthal has been lucky in one respect. He has persuaded Jane Clark to update and expand to 17 pages her indispensable chronology of Nolan's life, originally compiled for the big Nolan retrospective in Melbourne in 1987. Nolan's father worked on the trams and the boy left school at 14 to spend six years in a hat factory; yet unlike his near contemporaries, Fred Williams and Jeffrey Smart, Nolan was never, or only briefly, a struggling artist. He had the nerve, aged 21, to approach Rupert Murdoch's powerful newspaper baron
father, Sir Keith Murdoch, boss of the Melbourne Herald, and show him a folio of drawings. The Herald reviewed his first one-man show (highly esoteric') and he was on his way.
Then comes a mystery. Nolan was conscripted in 1942 into the Australian army, serving in the back-blocks of Victoria. He deserted ('goes absent without leave', the chronology generously puts it) in July 1944, when it looked as if he might be sent to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. But he did not receive his dishonourable discharge until 1948. During that interval, when he was presumably on the run, he was, as the body of the book makes plain, exhibiting, starting on his great Kelly series, and submitting a portrait for the celebrated Archibald prize. Why wasn't he locked up and court-martialled?
Rosenthal describes Nolan the artist as a rebel. Possibly the Kelly series could be regarded as rebellious, Nolan is clearly on Kelly's side, although his grandfather was one of the party that hunted Kelly down. But his life was scarcely rebellious. He liked publicity, and accepted commissions from almost anyone who could provide it: covers for Time, illustrations for Queen magazine, outback drawings for the Brisbane Courier Mail. His friends and supporters were leaders in their fields: Kenneth Clark, who bought his first Nolan in 1949, calling him 'a genius'; Benjamin Britten: C. P. Snow (more highly regarded then than now); Robert Lowell; Lord McAlpine. His galleries in London were the Marlborough and Redfern, and in Sydney the Macquarie Galleries. It was his apparent pursuit of the well-placed in the UK, after he moved to London in the mid-1950s, that caused him to be reviled in some quarters in Australia — criticism he found deeply wounding long before the brutal assault by Australia's most patrician writer. Patrick White. His CBE in 1963 was awarded for 'services to British art', which didn't help.
Nolan appears in Brenda Niall's intricate but highly readable collective biography of four generations of Australia's most talented artistic dynasty, the Boyds. His third wife was a Boyd. One of her ancestors was Victoria's Chief Justice in 1854 at the treason trial of the rebel gold-miners of the Eureka stockade, as painted a century later by her future husband. Another ancestor, who married the Chief Justice's son, and was the founding mother of this prolific, brilliant, and public-spirited family, was the daughter of an ex-convict. The Chief Justice was not pleased. John Mills was a teenage Gloucestershire tearaway who, after serving seven years in Tasmania, started a brewery and bought up much of early Melbourne. It was his fortune that happily trickled down to the Boyds — of whom Arthur Boyd the painter and Martin Boyd the novelist are perhaps the best known — suggesting that there was something to be said for transportation after all.
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