Ned Kelly and Swamp 1960

SIDNEY NOLAN (1917-1972)

Ned Kelly and Swamp 1960

synthetic polymer paint and polyvinyl acetate on board
91.5 x 122.0 cm; 109.0 x 139.5 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Nolan
signed, dated and inscribed verso: KELLY/ Nolan/ 28th April 1960

Provenance:
Blue Boy Art Gallery, Melbourne, April 1981
Mr & Mrs Kirk & Anne Douglas, United States of America
Thence by descent, private collection, United States of America
Acquired from the above, private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
(possibly) Sidney Nolan, Durlacher Bros, New York, 27 February - 24 March 1962

Estimate: $500000 - 700000

Result Hammer: $525000

The strangeness of Ned Kelly and Swamp is the strangeness of many things. Face down, half in and half out of fetid water, Ned Kelly drowns in polyvinyl acetate and powdered pigment, while fingers that are both human and landscape desperately cling to the trigger of his rifle. Where darkness has been wiped away, armour and landscape gleam.

This painting belongs to a small but distinct group of Kelly works with unique and surprising origins. Since their conception they have appeared at important exhibitions, from Nolan's 1961 Hatton Gallery exhibition touring England and Scotland to his 2007 Art Gallery of New South Wales retrospective touring Australia. But Ned Kelly and Swamp also has a very particular claim to fame, selected to represent the best of 20th century modernism in the Los Angeles art collection of Kirk and Anne Douglas, alongside works by Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Marc Chagall (1887-1985) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).

Nolan's Ned Kelly needs little introduction. It is his most iconic and collected imagery: renowned the world over, held in New York City's MoMA, and compared to Pablo Picasso's (1881-1973) Dove of Peace for its singular power and recognisability. The works with widest exposure are those from 1946, 1955-56 or 1964, and although it would be easy to attempt to define this painting in their light, Ned Kelly and Swamp has a history just as fascinating and far more complex.

The most psychologically intense works by Nolan have a thematic trajectory, with DNA that can be traced back through time. Ned Kelly and Swamp is no exception. Its narrative begins in 1957 as he was working on his Mrs Fraser series, contributing to Australia's emerging identity on the international stage. He painted Eliza Fraser and the convict Bracewell, half-in and half-out of water. They materialised in ponds, lagoons, marshes and swamps, sometimes together and sometimes alone, but always surrounded by dark, impenetrable landscape. It was his first major use of the claustrophobic and often misunderstood medium of polyvinyl acetate, its effect intended to be psychological as well as visual. Nolan explained:

When I turn to darkness, to the impenetrable, or rather to what you know is penetrable, solid blackness ... I employ this method of revealing light through dark or letting darkness confront light ... so it's PVA that is called for.(1)

One particularly dark work from 1957 was devoid of human figures. A suffocating landscape choked in PVA was simply titled Swamp and he scribbled a half-formed thought on the reverse: 'Do Kelly?'. In the same year he immersed himself in Gallipoli. Contrary to popular belief his decision to paint ANZACs was made in September 1957,(2) and he began lifting faces and bodies of soldiers through the same thick, inky PVA surfaces. Kelly was still front of mind:

As a background to all this, I was always listening to the stories of old Australia; everything from Ned Kelly to Gallipoli ... in fact, I thought about doing Gallipoli quite as early as I thought about painting Ned Kelly ... As my grandfather was telling me the Kelly story, I could look up on the wall and see a brown faded photograph of an uncle or somebody who had been at Gallipoli; so the two images have always been interwoven.(3)

Leda and the Swan evolved in parallel with the iconic Gallipoli works. Nolan said that when he visited the Dardanelles, he had looked across the Turkish Straits to the site of ancient Troy and felt that the history of Gallipoli and ancient Greece was connected.(4) In Greek mythology the Spartan queen, Leda, was seduced by Zeus who took the form of a swan. Leda bore a daughter, Helen, who would become known as Helen of Troy and the reason for the Trojan war. Nolan was clear:

I have always felt the best way I could paint Gallipoli was to get a long way from it and to imagine it could have happened in the time of Troy...these two things ran together in my mind.(5)

Between 1958 and 1960, his exploration of Gallipoli and Leda continued, with board after board covered in thick PVA. The blackness of violence and conflict was a physical and metaphorical veil that he lifted as he scraped and wiped it away to reveal images of character and humanity. On 28 April 1960 he was putting the finishing touches on Leda when Kelly broke through.

Just three short months before, Nolan had sent a letter to thematic confidant and doyen of British art, Kenneth Clark. He explained: 'I have now come to see that Kelly is in part invented by the need to communicate through paintings concepts not necessarily connected with bushranging in the bush'.(6)

The visage in Ned Kelly and Swamp is still Ned Kelly, no doubt about it, but the painting is also a concept. Part angst ridden realism and part biomorphic symbolism. With a genesis in Mrs Fraser, gestation in Gallipoli and birth through Leda and the Swan, the formal properties of Nolan's iconic Australian identities - ANZACs, Leda, Eliza Fraser and convicts - are infused, encapsulated, and now felt rather than seen. They are part of an inherent Australian-ness ‘confronting darkness.’ His swamp remains a swamp. The alien and unexplored Australia he once painted full of mythic flora and fauna is cloaked in doom. Nolan had been in the United States between 1958 and 1960 as part of a Harkness Fellowship, witnessing the Cuban revolution of 1959 that placed Fidel Castro in power, present as the United States and Soviet Union moved to the brink of nuclear conflict, and watching, as the threat of global annihilation hung like the sword of Damocles. He would later rationalise the tension he created between subject and paint: ‘You've got to belong to a civilisation that is doomed and express paradise.’(7) As he scraped and wiped the PVA away, Kelly and the Australian bush gleamed. Beacons in the darkness.

The Tate defines modernism as a style that departs significantly from conservative value in a spirit of experimentation, with emphasis on innovation in materials, techniques and forms, and a tendency to abstraction in order to create and better reflect the spirit of a modern society. Ned Kelly and Swamp ticks every box, the very definition. Selected for the important Hatton Gallery exhibition it was intended to hang with the two larger works from the same thematic group - Kelly in Moonlight and Kelly in Landscape - however there was only room for 61 large paintings, and the two larger works were preferred. The present work’s moment of fame would come 20 years later.

On 6 April 1981 actor Kirk Douglas met Nolan at Australian Galleries in Melbourne. Although Kirk starred in over 60 films, his wife Anne had the lead role in building their impressive modern art collection. She had worked in a Paris gallery and together they had met Braque, Chagall and Miro, talking to and understanding each artist's intent and sometimes selecting works directly from their studios.(8) Kirk and Nolan certainly talked, polaroids taken of the pair attest to it. In the same month, the Douglas’ modern art collection quickly and discretely acquired Ned Kelly and Swamp. The Douglas' connection to the painting was highlighted when, almost ten years later, they pivoted to contemporary works, sending their much loved modernist collection to auction. All except for Ned Kelly and Swamp. It stayed with them for another 30 years, kept company by the books on Nolan in their library, alongside publications on Matisse, Klee and Picasso,(9) until Anne passed in 2021.

FOOTNOTES

1. Sidney Nolan in Lynn, E. & Nolan, S., Sidney Nolan - Australia, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1979, p.120
2. Having returned to Greece, Nolan wrote: 'Arrive Hydra ... talk about Anzac, Gallipoli and Mooreheads' book. Confirms my decision to do Anzac paintings and go to Dardanelles', Sidney Nolan in his appointment diary, 23 September 1957, accessed in Papers of Sidney Nolan, box 1, item 7, MS 10245, National Library of Australia, Canberra
3. Sidney Nolan quoted in Barber, N., Conversations with Painters, Collins, London, 1964, p.90
4. Sidney Nolan quoted in ‘The Anzac Story: Famous Painters Gallipoli Series Feature Film’, The Australian Women's Weekly, 17 March 1965, p.3
5. Barber, N., op. cit., pp.95-96
6. Sidney Nolan letter to Kenneth Clark, 14 January 1960, in Underhill, N., Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in His Own Words, Viking Australia, Melbourne, 2007, p.192
7. Sidney Nolan quoted in Fuller, P., ‘Sidney Nolan and the Decline of the West’, Modern Painters, Summer, 1988, vol.1, no.2, p.41
8. Muchnic, S., ‘Douglas Modern Art Collection to be Auctioned’, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, 22 February 1990
9. ‘Property from the Collection of Kirk and Anne Douglas’, Andrew Jones Auctions, Los Angeles, 18 May 2022

Andrew Turley
Andrew Turley is researcher, writer, curator and authority on Sidney Nolan's culturally significant 1960s work, having unearthed the unknown histories of Auschwitz, the Adelaide Ladies and Nolan's Africa (a monograph to be published in October by Miegunyah Press). His essays, interviews, book extracts and exhibitions have been published and reviewed in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian. His published work is held in the Tate, the National Library of Australia, MONA and many state galleries and libraries.

• 

  Cameron Menzies, Chairman & Head of Private Sales

  cmenzies@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 466 636 142 

• 

  Asta Cameron, Art Specialist

  acameron@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 3 9832 8700
  +61 (0) 400 914 088

• 
  
  Clementine Retallack, Front of House Manager & Associate Art Specialist
  
  cretallack@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 2 8344 5404
  +61 (0) 478 493 026