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Nolan
on Nolan
:Sidney Nolan in his own words
Edited
by
Nancy
Underhill
Penguin/Viking, $69.95rrp, 472pp.
This
miscellany is divided into four parts of seesawing worth: first,
‘Notebooks and Diaries’; secondly, ‘Letters’; thirdly, ‘Public
Statements’; and fourthly, ‘Poems’. A reviewer has a pair of
disconnected tasks: one, to consider what these literary materials add
to our understanding of Nolan as a visual artist, and, two, to report
the quality of Underhill’s editing.
No
issue recurs more often, or with finer grades, than what it meant for
Nolan to be an Australian, an Australian artist and an expatriate when
that term was coming into its own as aesthetic equivalent of scab.
Nolan’s market was back here. He might flit about
Antarctica
,
Africa
and
China
, but he had to keep his eye on the Australian light and lucre. After
1948, he painted Australian subjects in his English studio but had
realised, by 1985, how
[o]ne’s
mental apparatus is in a way separate from one’s visual apparatus
and no matter how much you wish to paint an Australian landscape in
England
unless you have been there a short time before you would not be able
to do it.
He
concluded: ‘I’ve never had any problems seeing myself as an
Australian, despite spending half my life away from it’. Should that
‘despite’ have been ‘because of’?
Nolan
exemplified the experience of de-dominisation before chatter about
Post-Colonialism drowned out the tensions specific to the
Austral-Briton. His memory of the warmth of his early reception in
London
stands against Bernard Smith’s suspicion that Kenneth Clark welcomed
the Australians because their rawness confirmed
England
as the civilised centre against the primitives from the bush. Nolan
encountered the promise around the 1951 Festival of Britain followed by
editorials about a New Elizabethan Age at the 1953 coronation when the
re-jigged Empire-Commonwealth expected its black, white and brown
subjects to become co-workers in a revival of British arts, as
Paris
had expected from its gens de
couleur across two centuries. Nolan’s ease with Princess Margaret
of
Hesse
, the knighthood and the Order of Merit were marks of absorption into
English liberalism. Resident down under, dare he become ‘Sir Sid’?
A
remark of D H Lawrence’s about being frightened by
Australia
provoked a reflection: ‘It frightens all of us. It frightened Streeton
into sterility. Roberts into a passive middle age. Furphy into an
insular pride. And so on. But generally the end result is silence of one
sort or another’. Did Nolan to keep on talking – and painting – to
fill that silence? A gift of the gab did not deny a literary
intelligence with keen perceptions and depth of reading.
The
land did not frighten him as much as did the social life of
Melbourne
, which he saw as a ‘badly written Kafka’ with its brutality and
‘cold stupidity’: ‘I will have to paint a novel, the only way I
can deal with the thirties and forties in
Melbourne
. All this runs the risk of megalomania but I cannot forget the ruined
lives’. In like vein, he reacted against Manning Clark’s calling
Patrick White a ‘Great Australian’: ‘Everyone is a great
Australian, the problem is to find a minor Australian. Sixteen million
“experts”, such is our population’.
Myth-making
about himself as well as
Australia
through Kelly, Burke and Wills, Mrs Fraser and the Anzacs, Nolan
projects the futility of his family’s five years of clearing a farm
block into the social strata who, some thirty years before, had been
Kelly sympathisers. The Legend was genealogy. In talking about his
Gallipoli series, he convinces one interviewer that he had been a
warrior, perhaps persuading himself in the process. Yet he does not miss
a beat when Peter Fuller flings his technical desertion into an
interview. Being the first Anzac ashore, or going AWOL, it is all one to
Nolan. Not everyone agreed, and the RSL resisted admitting his Anzac
series into the War Memorial. That’s where a knighthood comes in
handy.
The
fifty pages of poems display a wicked wit and several striking phrases
but few would have been published had their author not been a famous
painter, and their reappearance does no service to prosody or to
Nolan’s reputation. All are attenuated, cascading down the almost
blank sheets in lines short enough to catch his inability to carry an
idea, as became truer and sadder about the paintings. Nolan’s verse
recalls the young poet in Eugene O’Neill’s Long
Day’s Journey into Night who compares himself with a hobo bumming
a cigarette: ‘I don’t have the makings, just the habit’.
By
juxtaposing brief extracts, Underhill has enlivened his pronouncements
which are duller than his letters but nothing he wrote was as worthy as
everything of John Reed’s, although Nolan’s comments on politics
during Reed’s preparing in 1946 to publish a monthly, Tomorrow,
come close to the ponderous. ‘A Guest of Honour’ talk in 1964 is
restrained but more than usually focused. By far the most engaging piece
is a 1990 interview from Aldeburgh on Britten - read this, if nothing
else. The documents are a pudding for scholars in several corners of the
Humanities with throwaways on Patrick White, the failed plan to produce
Wagner’s Ring in Melbourne,
and his dismissal of Abstract Expressionism as funerary décor,
revealing an Antipodean in spirit if not a signatory to their Manifesto. Is he joking about the Kelly mask as a Malevich black
square on horseback? The actual mask was cylindrical but Nolan had
problems depicting three dimensions in two. Other sources for that box
were buildings with windows around St Kilda and Dimboola.
The
editing
The brief and sparse notes at the bottom of a few pages mix the
informative, the tantalising and the embarrassing. The footnote to the
1954 documentary, Back of Beyond,
should have included a clue as to its subject matter. Identifying
Kierkegaard as a ‘proto-existentialist’, Heidegger as an
‘existentialist’ ‘concerned with issues of Being’, and JMW
Turner as the ‘much admired romantic’ is better left unsaid.
The
use of ‘(sic)’ bedevils academic writing as scholars strive for
exact transcription and grammatical perfection. An introductory
statement that obvious misspellings and slips have been corrected, or
left standing, is preferable to the ungainliness of parenthetical
intrusions such as ‘its [sic]’ for Nolan’s ‘it’s’. At least,
Underhill does not resort to ‘sic’ to assert moral or political
superiority to her subject. However, there are occasions when a (sic)
might have been used, such as Barbara Baynton’s novel, Human
Toll, not ‘Tool’; and the musician Deryk Cooke, not Corke.
The
index is extensive yet includes no primary entry for film or Ripolin,
two media significant for Nolan’s creativity. He involved himself in
film-making while movie-going influenced his visual perceptions. In a
show of his visual omnivorousness, he dissects their subjects and their
mechanisms, comparing Mad Max III
and Razorback with his outback
canvases. Ripolin’s three mentions deserve a lead entry and
sub-entries under ‘colour’, ‘paint’ and ‘materials’. How
much less impact would the first Kelly series carry had it been brushed
from
Windsor
and
Newtown
and not enamel?
The
fifty-two colour illustrations across thirteen pages are tiny, as if on
a website, but not always as crisp.
A
spat between Nolan’s step-daughter and his widow means that primary
materials are held to ransom. Hence, Nolan
on Nolan needs to be supplemented by Bert
& Ned, The Correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan
(2006). Underhill edited the John Reed letters in 2001 and is now
working towards a biography of Nolan. Studies, in print or in train, of
Albert Tucker, Manning Clark and Patrick White, will triangulate her
subject. Her 1991 study of Sydney Ure Smith guarantees that she will
take us beyond the silences and fibs in Nolan’s self-promotions. For
instance, what did Nolan mean when he said that the first Kelly
paintings were an objective correlative to his emotional state, a
scandal with which he often teased interviewers but swore never to
discuss? The other veil for Underhill to tear aside is the one through
which Nolan became known but to which he never alluded: his PR agents.
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