Sir Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), artist, was one of Australia's most original painters and one of the few to have achieved an international reputation in the twentieth century. Beginning his career as a commercial artist in the 1930s, he mounted his first solo exhibition in 1940. After having served as an army storeman in the Wimmera, he became associated with the modernist art patrons John and Sunday Reed at Heide, Victoria. At Heide between 1945 and 1947 he made the enormously complex Ned Kelly series of paintings for which he is best known. He continued to explore Australian themes and landscapes in paintings of Burke and Wills, Eliza Fraser, Gallipoli and the Eureka rebellion, and in his huge masterpiece Riverbend (1965). Many of his most significant works are housed in Canberra institutions. From 1950 Nolan lived abroad, returning to Australia at regular intervals.
Purchased 2003
© Estate of Axel Poignant
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Works by Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan bring the desert, the misty seashore and the hot Monaro plains to exhibition Open Air: Portraits in the landscape.
The complex connections between four creative Australians; Patrick White, Sidney Nolan, Robert Helpmann and Peter Sculthorpe.
