Contemporary Arts
The Key to Kelly
THE huge, sparsely populated ter- ritories of the Commonwealth— Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand—possess none of those conditions which are generally counted as having provoked and energised the great schools and periods of painting and sculpture. The physical, social and visual challenges which they offer to the artist have not been met or rebuffed; the mental images we have of these continents or part-continents, however inexact, are more mas- sive and suggestive than any artistic works which have come from there—which could not be said of Europe where the Michelangelos and Rubenses, Bramantes and Rodins, not to mention writers and musicians, have long been in command. Sidney Nolan, the subject of a large retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery who was born in Australia forty years ago, promises to be the most remarkable, and is already the most interesting, painter both to tome from the Dominions and to meet the challenge.
Hitherto the most obvious and easy artistic response in the Dominions has been to the land- scape, but this has generally resulted in the representation of general and rhetorical platitudes of the scene dashingly brushed in with a large display of pigment and emotive gesture. (Some present-day Americans seem also to assault their environment by similar means, though in a non- figurative way.) Nolan has been, to my mind, the only painter from these new territories whose landscapes are not deeply picturesque and European in language, though no doubt loyal Canadians would wish to put forward the name of A. Y. Jackson. He has painted Australia not as a visitor or a picturesque traveller, but as an inhabitant. It is as if the genius loci had taken brush and with it manipulated the very essence of local earth and vegetation. There are occasions When the painter has been tempted to use the Victorian lettering of a shack hotel sign or the Spidery skeleton of a farm machine to spice and colour the dry, bare terrain a little too artfully, but it looks true and plausible and such elements do not obtrude. His methods in these, as in all his pictures, are remarkably direct and appro- priate. He is a thoughtful and sophisticated observer and craftsman, but no one has painted any European region quite like this. Any sense of exoticism or romantic strangeness these pic- tures possess has been imported into them by us, the foreign spectator, and not by Nolan. They may not communicate a very large part of the truth but they are, I am sure, sternly and sensi- tively veracious.
It is far more difficult for the artist in these new, demanding societies to project the habits, Spirit and thrust of their culture with such direct- ness and in a distinctively local accent, either in terms of immediate, contemporary situations or via some aspects of their limited history, by means of some significant mythology. The history of American painting is crammed, no doubt, with Pictures of Cowboys and Indians, frontiersmen and railroaders, Yankees and Southerners, but as far as I know there has been no artist who has transformed any part of this story or the vast range of folklore into pictorial images of any hold or consequence—except through the cinema. Modern American painting is distinctive and influential, as a national expression, by reason of such elusive qualities as scale, energy, calligraphy, etc. Australian history has none of the American richness and variety, none of its decisive and inspiring conflicts, no strong geographical drives and tensions, no racial amalgam as fruitful as the States has derived from immigration, no racial stresses as dynamic as those afforded by Indian and Negro. Don't take my word for it, but read the brilliant, apt, entertaining and helpful introduction to the catalogue by Colin Macinnes. For this reason Nolan's achievement in resur- recting the figure of the bank robber Ned Kelly, who with a few companions fought a private war with the law in Victoria in the 1870s, and in making him a personage in the painting of the present is unique in the artistic history of the new white culture. If his early landscapes were slightly populated by small, forlorn, vulnerable figures, waifish' and pathetic, the figure of Kelly dominates the scene like a conqueror in many roles, fortified and ruthless, but also sympathetic. Having said that in praise of this remarkable series of pictures, I must also ask an awkward question. The story possesses one outstanding advantage for a twentieth-century painter. On his exploits Kelly wore a kind of elementary armour, a metal helmet hiding his face and a breastplate. Nolan founds the changing image of his hero upon this forbidding and suggestive mask, one which Max Ernst might have designed. When parts of the face do appear they make a disturb- ing contrast with the metal casque. So one is bound to ask: does this object which the painter has only roughly reinterpreted, which is so up to date in its form and implications, give the pictures their undoubted force; just because of its accidental modernity? Has it saved Nolan from having to invent a persuasive image of the robber with only the human body as material? How would he have succeeded if the Bandit had not worn this thing? His interpretations of other Australian stories, such as that of the naked and abandoned Mrs. Fraser who was saved from the aborigines and returned to civilisation by a con- vict only to double-cross him, are a better guide to his talents. Nolan has not a great constructive gift nor outstanding powers of formal invention. He possesses a most intelligent, refined and imaginative sensibility which enables him to feel into the heart of places, situations and events, and he has an exceptional gift of poetic, literary improvisation. What his works evoke is more remarkable than their formal substance. For that reason he would seem to depend very greatly . upon the nature and force of the situations which beset him. I do not find that the woi k he has done in Europe in the last few years, far more zesthetic as it is, has matched the pictures produced in
response to his own continent. BASIL TAYLOR
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