Sidney Nolan’s search for paradise lost and found

Inspiration for the new Sidney Nolan show at Heide Museum of Modern Art came from the artist himself. A tiny painting from 1942 entitled Woman and Tree (Garden of Eden) was the starting point, metaphorically and physically. It has all the hallmarks of the biblical scene: the woman, the tree, the apple and the snake.

Head curator at Heide Kendrah Morgan says it depicts Sunday Reed and references a lifelong obsession for the acclaimed modernist.

Kendrah Morgan holds Sidney Nolan’s Woman and Tree, 1942.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“He saw Heide as a form of Eden, then of course became very angry about it because it was also the site where he lost his innocence,” she says. “It illustrates how Heide took shape in Nolan’s youthful imagination as a mythical arcadia and site of lost innocence that would form the nucleus of his creative activities and romantic interests for almost a decade from 1938. When he finally left, it would haunt him forever.”

Called Sidney Nolan: Search for Paradise, the show includes several well-known pieces and masterpieces, including the artist’s self-portrait from 1943. Originally timed to coincide with the museum’s 40th anniversary last year but rescheduled for this month, the exhibition traces the artist’s extraordinary work and its evolution. In the process, it reveals something of his life as it intertwined with Heide’s founders.

Nolan was in a menage a trois with John and Sunday Reed for several years and despite his leaving Heide in 1947, the complicated relationship would overshadow much of the rest of his life. It is referenced again and again in works such as the Mrs Fraser series.

Sunday Reed wiping seaweed from Sidney Nolan’s face, Surf Beach, Point Lonsdale, Christmas 1944. Credit: Albert Tucker. Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art, gift of Barbara Tucker 2002

Escape is a strong theme throughout Nolan’s career. “He escaped from one paradise to another when the first failed, a series of escapes to the new promised land, when it didn’t work out, another exile, another escape,” says Morgan. “At the same time, Australia for him was the wellspring of his inspiration, the place to where he returned. He left it because he was disenchanted with it but he kept returning to Australia as a kind of paradise in progress that he felt really connected with.”

One part of the show is dedicated to Nolan’s depictions of St Kilda, particularly time spent at Luna Park. Many were painted while he was based in the Wimmera, based there with the army, yearning for places lost, his memory “sharpening the magic”, he said. Beautiful landscapes, also created while he was in western Victoria, show the young artist reimagining the Australian bush.

Morgan says Nolan was drawn to places where civilisation had flourished but equally to places where it had perished, in the idea of “paradise but also its inversion”. Paintings of places like Greece, with its beautiful, white-washed villages and seas, were followed by works depicting the Trojan War, which led into a suite of works on Gallipoli.

In the exhibition, Nolan’s search for paradise is equated with his search for self-understanding and self-identity. One room is dedicated to self-portraits and alter egos, and features his famous self-portrait of 1943 with piercing blue eyes and stripes across his forehead, representing the artist as warrior. There’s also a portrait of Ern Malley as an Australian Digger but a half-skeletal corpse “to show he is half ghost and half what happens when you go to the war and you come back”, Nolan said. There are several works from the Kelly series, including an image of Kelly naked with his armour falling away.

Detail of Nolan’s Bathers 1943, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Bequest of John and Sunday Reed 1982Credit: © The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust/DACS. Licensed by Copyright Agency

Part of Heide’s philosophy is to take a revisionist approach to history, to invite contemporary artists to create works in conversation with older works. “I did want to show that this exhibition is not about hagiography – we want to critique Nolan as well as celebrate him,” says Morgan.

The gallery commissioned multi-disciplinary artist Dean Cross to create a response to Search for Paradise, which he has done in a video called Sometimes I Miss The Applause. The moving image work focuses on the life, work, and persona of Sidney Nolan, drawing on some of Nolan’s most recognisable imagery, including a mask based on the 1943 self-portrait.

Before the Heide commission, the 36-year-old of Worimi descent had produced several works on Nolan; for this show, he zeroed in on the costume designs Nolan created for Kenneth MacMillan’s radical production of Rites of Spring, staged at London’s Royal Opera House in 1962. It is a classic example of the colonial approach and cultural appropriation. “The central theme that Nolan borrowed was the classical hand outline you would see in the cave paintings,” Cross says. “He had just returned from one of his outback adventures where he’d seen them and they are the main element of his theatre costumes.”

The hand appears regularly throughout Cross’s work as a theme, in the title of this piece – referencing his first career as a dancer – and in the video sequence when he paints his own hands red, symbolic of reclaiming Nolan’s theft. The result is “much more bloody than I’d anticipated”, he says. “The blood on his hands, being caught red-handed; [Nolan] managed to escape criticism for the work he’d produced.”

Cross says in his work and his writing Nolan “was actually very sensitive to the Aboriginal people but was still complicit when it came to his own work, which is a product of the time”.

“There’s no denying Nolan’s legacy,” he says. “You stand in front of his paintings and they could have been painted yesterday. How do we hold both of those things, that’s the core question of the work. Picasso is an obvious example of someone who has an extraordinary legacy but an extremely problematic personal life.”

Cross argues we should be capable of more elasticity, more nuanced thinking around such complex issues. “We should be able to understand that every human is flawed, some unforgivably, of course.”

Nolan himself was aware that his quest for paradise was, by its nature, never-ending, but also evident in moments: “The thing you come to realise is that nothing is fixed – that everything keeps being transformed – and you have to sense where paradise is in the process.”

Sidney Nolan: Search for Paradise runs until June 13

Dean Cross: Sometimes I Miss the Applause runs until May 29.

A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.