Sidney Nolan: Nancy Underhill’s biography an uncharitable caricature

This rather sour-toned account of Sidney Nolan’s life inspires pity for the complex and misunderstood artist.

Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW were initially appalled by the purchase of Nolan’s Pretty Polly Mine.

Even before Australia’s most celebrated painter Sidney Nolan subsided due to complications from pneumonia in his Whitehall flat in 1992, his triumphs and shortcomings had been raked through like the entrails in an ancient Greek temple divination.

The latest mission to create a psychological portrait of the man, as distinct from the painter, comes from academic and art historian Nancy Underhill.

Underhill does not set out to endear herself to her predecessors in the task. Of the biographers and interviewers who came before, she suggests “few people ever asked him the key questions … the result is that critical assessment of Nolan’s work has been skewed”. This may come as a surprise to those who have written so perceptively of the man and his oeuvre through the decades.

Does her book reveal more of the man than previous scholarly exercises? Given the wealth of material at Underhill’s disposal and her unfettered access to those still standing, the reader is entitled to expect some fresh insights. This one found few. Underhill’s sleuthing casts a relentlessly uncharitable light on a complex and ambitious man that almost eclipses the mercurial individual who captivated a swath of literary and art-world luminaries in the mid-20th century: poets Stephen Spender and Robert Lowell, art historians Kenneth Clark and John Russell, composer Benjamin Britten and novelist and scientist CP Snow, to name a few.

A dazzled Patrick White said of Nolan’s retrospective of 143 paintings at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1967: “Sid has had wonderful triumphs right and left … it was staggering to see all the imaginative and painting genius that has poured out of one man … To me this has been the greatest event — not just in painting — in Australia in my lifetime.” This captures the heady effect he had on his contemporaries here and abroad.

Eighteen years earlier, AGNSW director Hal Missingham had persuaded the procrustean trustees to allow him a modest sum to be spent at his discretion. Result? Nolan’s Pretty Polly Mine found its way on to the gallery walls. The trustees were so appalled Missingham was temporarily “relieved of his power to purchase”.

In the main, Underhill views Nolan’s contingent of Australian supporters, his artist friends, writers and critics, as dupes who were insufficiently sophisticated to see through his compulsive mythmaking.

However, it is this ‘‘mythmaking’’ that offers the reader the most rewarding elements in the book, as Underhill skilfully links Nolan’s inner imperatives to the actual flood of images created with translucent enamels that race through the decades of his paintings: Burke and Wills, the convict Bracewell and Mrs Fraser, Leda and the Swan, Gallipoli, biblical heroes, Australian miners and African animals. In fact Underhill has offered some of the most perceptive analysis of Nolan’s individual paintings this reviewer has come across.

It is a commonplace now that Nolan identified with Ned Kelly, whose appeal is still embedded in elements of the Australian psyche today in the form of a distrust of arbitrary authority. Nolan’s tussle with his early mentors John and Sunday Reed, the cultivated and over-­sensitive escapees from the Melbourne establishment, to reclaim the Ned Kelly paintings produced while they supported him at Heide resulted in decades of psychological warfare that the Reeds won. They presented them, ‘‘with love’’, to the National Gallery of Australia in 1977.

This demitasse drama has passed into local art world folklore. But of greater interest than Nolan’s faux-primitive narratives of the bushranger’s exploits is how the black box helmet mutated through the decades into a symbol that was floated into landscapes and scenarios drawn from around the world: Nolan as painter, a peripatetic traveller and consumer of poetry and literature, wanted to be everywhere at once.

This impulse resulted in a dizzying stream of subjects: the desiccated outback of Australia, Mediterranean mythologies, the frozen wastelands of Antarctica, the animals of Africa, the highlands of New Guinea and the mountains of China. Even in these locations Ned Kelly — or his helmet — could make an unexpected appearance.

In summary, Underhill characterises Nolan an opportunistic, light-fingered, publicity-­obsessed, devious character whose “stylistic grab bag” came from his earliest work as a designer-illustrator in a hat factory. There is a touch of snobbery in her comments on his friendships with prominent figures such as Britten: “not something that often happens to a tram driver’s son from St Kilda”. The Reeds fare no better, with Underhill’s reference to mental instabilities, unwanted pregnancies and a “rarefied life of the new rich”.

Underhill documents the early successes that set Nolan securely on a path to become the most discussed Australian painter of his day. His 1953 show at Redfern Gallery in Mayfair was a triumph and his 1957 show at the Whitechapel Gallery was a watershed. In 1960, his Leda and the Swan series at Matthieson Gallery was dismissed by London critics, but according to the Observer at the time, it was second only to the Picasso retrospective at the Tate in publicity, popularity and dinner party conversations. Through the years the Tate Gallery would acquire 135 of his works.

He enjoyed confounding his audience. His exhibition Notes for Oedipus at Marlborough Fine Art in 1975, in which a giant chook loomed over a shrunken sphinx, mystified viewers, was savaged by critics and prompted painter Lucian Freud to pass Nolan a note at the opening: “lay off my grandfather”.

One feels sorry for Nolan, no longer here to enjoy the fray. He has been reduced in this rather sour-toned account to a fluttering specimen pinned to a board with a clouded magnifying glass held over him. The reader is advised to seek out the sturdy volumes produced through the decades by Beagle Press, as well as Tom Rosenthal’s Sidney Nolan (2002), Brian Adams’s Such is Life (1987) and Elwyn Lynn’s Sidney Nolan: Myth and Imagery (1967).

Patricia Anderson is a writer and critic.

Sidney Nolan: A Life

By Nancy Underhill

NewSouth, 416pp, $44.99 (HB)