Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan is widely regarded as Australia’s foremost modern artist of the twentieth century. Appointed Australian commissioner at the 1954 Venice Biennale, his international reputation was consolidated when MoMA and Tate acquired works from his second Kelly series, exhibited at London’s Redfern Gallery in 1955.

Growing up in an extended Irish clan, Nolan was enthralled by tales from his grandfather, a policeman who pursued the Kelly Gang in rural Victoria. Completely familiar with ‘Kelly Country’ from childhood summers, he immersed himself in Kelly literature and traveled to Glenrowan with poet Max Harris for firsthand research. Nolan met John and Sunday Reed in 1938, finding informed supporters who sustained his practice. His famous first Kelly series was painted at the Reeds’ Heide home between 1946 and 1947.

After remarrying, Nolan settled permanently in London in 1953. Between 1954 and 1956, he produced a second Kelly series demonstrating new maturity and tragic grandeur, cementing the Kelly paintings as his singular crowning achievement.