Sunday too far away
John Ness Barkes SIDNEY NOLAN: SUCH IS LIFE by Brian Adams
Hutchinson, £16.95
Sidney Nolan's 70th birthday is current- ly being marked by a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The show is proving a revela- tion, a final justification of , Kenneth Clark's often quoted and disputed opinion that Nolan is a major artist of the 20th century. Nolan has always been a con- troversial figure, especially in Australia, Where his work and personality are the subject of violent disagreement. The ex- hibition has shown that the work can stand Oil its own, but the enigma of the man remains, Brian Adams's biography is, together with a film and video also being produced by Adams, part of the major marketing exercise that is accompanying the birthday Jamboree. Any expectation that Nolan's complex personality will be revealed here is quickly disappointed. Adams has spent a great deal of time with the artist during the last two years, but the resulting form of the book is a mistake. For it immediately becomes dismally clear that Adams's method of biography is to inter- view the subject at length and transcribe the tapes into reported speech. Press cut- tings, exhibition catalogues and old filmed interviews are diligently examined to pro- vide relevant quotes. That is all. Two colleagues from the early days, long estranged from Nolan, are thanked for their comments. Otherwise no witnesses are examined, neither artist nor academic, neither friend nor enemy. We are left with Nolan's version of events, long on anec- dote and short on constructive criticism and analysis. But in this largely predictable account of wartime Melbourne bohemia are casual statements and flatly reported events that make one sit bolt upright. In 1944, faced With the possibility of service in Papua New Guinea against the Japanese, Nolan de- serted the army. This has never been Spoken of before, and puts a completely different complexion on the body of work that remains the greatest of all his achieve- ments and the basis of his reputation. As a fugitive from the civil and military police, Nolan visited the bushranging country of northern Victoria, sketched the landscape and vainly attempted to establish a rapport with the descendants of the Kelly gang which had been the cause of a good deal of local trouble two generations previously. He then returned to Melbourne and painted the original series of 26 Ned Kelly subjects while hiding in a makeshift studio in an industrial suburb. The paintings attracted little critical notice the first time they were exhibited, but, reinforced by Nolan's subsequent reworkings of the motif, quickly attained legendary status. Nolan transformed Kelly from being just another long-dead horsethief into the cen- tral figure of Australian folklore, the national icon.
Adams really makes very little of the desertion. It seems to me that it changes Nolan's obsession with Kelly from being an esoteric parochial fascination into the first and purest expression of the theme that is the key to his life's work. The Irish have been a strong minority in Melbourne and Victoria since town and state were estab- lished. Here we have the fugitive Irish artist, the same age as the Irish bushranger was when he was captured and hanged by the British police and judiciary, identifying completely with the romantic hero. The predestined isolation, betrayal, capture and killing of the romantic hero is the theme in the Kelly series.
Some or all of the elements recur again and again in the years to come, as Nolan devoted himself to different narrative series. The saga of the romantic hero was manifested through the Australian stories of 'Mrs Frazer and Bracefell', 'Burke and Wills' and 'Gallipoli' and the classical myths of 'Troy' and 'Oedipus'. The model can also be applied to the body of work on Antarctic exploration. Nolan's African work is an exception, but his plans to produce a series of paintings on the story of a Jewish elephant-hunter surviving Au- schwitz by conjuring up images of the freedom of the animals show that he is still making the same connections.
The book clearly shows that all of Nolan's life has been spent in the company of strong-willed, devoted women, each in turn absolutely vital to his motivation and inspiration. His early work was done with the encouragement and patronage of John and Sunday Reed. They owned a property, 'Heide', just outside Melbourne, which was the focus of the group of young artists and writers whose work was determining the future course of Australian art. Nolan lived with the couple in a menage a trois during his army service, and was supported and protected by them after he deserted. The extent of their influence is shown by a crucial development in Nolan's work. In 1942, when he was mainly painting pas- tiches of Klee, Mir6 and Picasso, he took up landscape painting 'at Sunday's instiga- tion and John's approval'. An interesting statement as Nolan, with Boyd and Drys- dale, was to be responsible for changing the conventions of Australian landscape painting.
In 1947 Nolan broke with the Reeds and married John Reed's widowed sister Cynthia. Adams quotes Patrick White's admiration for their relationship and his belief that her strength of character helped Nolan maintain the integrity of his work: 'White saw Cynthia as the dominant figure, more maternal than wifely because in his view Nolan needed a mother figure to look after him rather than a marriage partner.' After her death, Cynthia was described by C. P. Snow as Nolan's muse, a touching and accurate compliment. Yet both White's and Snow's appreciations seem imprecise, and leave one guessing as to the nature of the personal interaction that is necessary for Nolan's artistic potency. He later married Mary Boyd, whom he had known for most of his life. Mary and her brother Arthur had both been part of the group around John and Sunday Reed, as had Mary's first husband John Perceval. Thus Nolan is still loved, encouraged and protected by one of the original magic circle.
The almost total dependence of the author on Nolan as his prime source gives the book predictable biases. Not that Nolan always spares himself. The vindic- tiveness with which he pursues his awful vendetta with Patrick White and the cruel way he persectited Xavier Herbert are hardly credible. But there are many untold stories, as evidenced by the regularity and swiftness with which discarded or alienated characters disappear from the plot. Many of the protagonists are now dead, including John and Sunday Reed, whose papers are locked in the Latrobe Library for 100 years. The story of the Reeds and their group at 'Heide', a vital period in Austra- lian art history, has never been unravelled and many chalices are missed here. For example, Dana Vassilieff, an imaginative and experienced Russian painter and sculptor, was the senior artist there. It seems obvious that he had a catalytic effect on the work of Nolan and the other young Australians. One would like to know Nolan's opinion, or even if he remembers him.
The main untold stoiy, however, is what really goes on inside Nolan's head. He has a vivid fantasy life and imagination, and an astonishing ability to project it on to his art. Yet no attempt is made to define or analyse the man. The final frustration is to be told towards the end of the last chapter that Nolan is considering, in a future project, 'incorporating. . . his continuing interest in Sigmund Freud, whom Nolan now regards as a Mythical figure'.
Perhaps this review should have started with Saul Steinberg's evaluation of the artist's conventional gifts: Every word that Sidney says is camouflage. Everything he says goes off on a trail away from what he really believes, thinks, intends to do, has done in the past. He is like the bird dragging a wing, leading the hunter away from its nest and young.
After reading this on page 44, one's reaction was that it should have been more prominently displayed. It certainly makes one feel sympathetic to Brian Adams, especially after Nolan, in a recent Mel- bourne interview, appeared to repudiate the entire document.
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