Nolan’s Africa, Andrew Turley (The Miegunyah Press)
Art critics and historians frequently focus primarily on the breakthrough moments in an artist’s career to the detriment of that artist’s wider career. In the case of Sidney Nolan, their focus is predominantly on the Ned Kelly series, both the initial paintings that secured his reputation and the later works, such as the nine panel Riverbend series from 1964/65, which further developed the series and theme. Critics and historians maintain this focus partly because it becomes a convenient shorthand for discussion of the artist and also because they are wedded to a narrative about modern art which sees its development as a series of movements which are of significance only in their initial phase of development. Nolan responded to such analysis with a 1988 self portrait entitled ‘Myself’ in which his well-defined image of himself has the rough outline of Ned Kelly’s helmet and armour graffitied over the portrait.
Nolan’s Africa, by contrast, is a deep dive into a neglected and misunderstood period of the artist’s career; yet one which throws significant new light on other aspects of Nolan’s oeuvre. The focus of Andrew Turley’s research and book is Nolan’s African Journey exhibition at London’s Marlborough Galleries and the period of preparation for that exhibition which included travels in Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia, preceded by a trip to Auschwitz.
Nolan’s paintings at this time represented a ‘warning to society’ that went ‘beyond the theory of art and belongs to life itself’. In the book, Turley explains how a confluence of influences coalesced in these works to create the warning that Nolan, in common with others in the period, was flagging to society. As a result, we encounter a prophetic dimension to Nolan’s works which deepens our understanding of both the works themselves and their continuing relevance to our own day and time.
The influences that Nolan was absorbing and channelling at this time included: ‘African independence, conservation, Western civilisation devouring the world’s natural splendours, and Auschwitz—where civilisation had turned on itself, devouring human freedoms and the human species.’ In seeking to understand these global events, Nolan had ‘soaked up [John] Ruskin’s Eagle’s Nest, [Romain] Gary’s Roots of Heaven, [Alan] Moorehead’s No Room in the Ark, [Kenneth] Clark’s Landscape into Art, [Julian] Huxley and [Stephen] Spender from The Humanist Frame and of course [Arthur] Rimbaud’s poetry and life’.
In preparing to visit Auschwitz, Nolan created a plethora of drawings featuring ‘a tortured stream of figures crucified on smoking crosses, skeletons overflowing wheelbarrows and bodies laid out in neat rows of death’. By doing so, he joined artists such as Francis Bacon, Romare Bearden, Marc Chagall, Abraham Rattner, Graham Sutherland, and others in finding the image of the crucifixion to be a visual and emotional equivalent to the suffering imposed and endured in the Holocaust. Nolan’s Auschwitz images are among the rawest expressions of the unredeemable horror that was the Holocaust. However, the actual experience of Auschwitz itself left him with emotions that were so deep and so strong they essentially overwhelmed him, meaning that the visit triggered ‘an unexpected and lasting retreat from any direct Auschwitz imagery’.
The emotions of Auschwitz were instead sublimated into the works he created following his African journeys where his concern was with the destruction of Africa’s habitats and creatures through a combination of the legacies of colonialisation and globalisation. Turley carefully and in detail tracks the intellectual, actual and artistic journeys Nolan undertook in preparing these works explaining how Auschwitz can be ‘seen in a dying gorilla’, the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, ‘on the open savannah’, and ‘the global winds of change blowing through faces and figures’.
Underpinning these influences and works was Nolan’s commitment to the insights and approaches of the Symbolist French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Nolan came under Rimbaud’s spell early on in his life being captivated by the way his ‘poetry was built upon grand, illogical, intuitive associations’. Rejecting naturalism and realism, Rimbaud ‘believed that the purpose of art was not to represent reality but to access greater truths by the “systematic derangement of the senses”.’ These ideas ‘proved to be some of Nolan’s most enduring and formative influences’, so much so that, when in Africa, he made a point of travelling to Harar to see for himself where Rimbaud had lived.
Turley concludes his study of this period of Nolan’s life and work by exploring the connections between his understandings of Rimbaud and Ned Kelly. Nolan sees key similarities between the two in that, ‘”there was in both these men, a force that they didn’t hide or try to disguise.”‘ He notes that ‘Sidney’s 1963 revival of the French poet was important in Kelly’s 1964 transformation’ in that ‘It was the year after Rimbaud’s resurrection in African Journey that Sidney painted his famous Ned Kelly Riverbend on nine panels: a polyptych format more usually used for an altarpiece—a stage on which great religious dramas played out’. He also notes that, ‘Not long after the African paintings, Sidney painted a small study of miracles, crucifixions and resurrections’ in which ‘Rimbaud sits below a cross, outside a tomb-like opening carved from rock and alongside a version of Figure at Harar‘ as ‘Ned Kelly, naked on horseback, approaches him to pay homage.’ This image synergistically connects Christ, Rimbaud and Kelly in a way that made sense for Nolan.
Turley, by rejecting the easy shorthand with which many write about Nolan, has succeeded in bringing the African Journey images out of the shadows and into the light. Through his extensive research, Turley succeeds in shining new light on Nolan’s examination of nature, human nature and the nature of modern civilisation. He revives Nolan’s warning to society by urging his readers to consider the effect that the Holocaust, animal extinctions, colonial disenfranchisement and human conflict has had not just on the artist but also on society.
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Jonathan Evens
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