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Lot Essay
As part of his three years of Army service during the Second World War, Sidney Nolan was stationed in Victoria's Wimmera district, in north-eastern Victoria, for almost two years from May 1942. The region proved to be the stimulus for Nolan's revolutionary new vision of the Australian landscape, which fulfilled the promise of transforming the vision of the Heidelberg School into one which looked with new, gently nationalistic eyes.
Nolan wrote to Sunday Reed in May 1943 that "It was alright while we [were] in sight of the Grampians and then suddenly [there] was nothing of the earth except a thin line. And while I was thinking about all these things, it came simply that if you imagined the land going vertically into the sky it would work." (S. Nolan in J. Clark, Sidney Nolan, Sydney, 1987, p.42).
This new vision is evinced in Wimmera Landscape, in which the golden wheatfields and dry soil of an Australian rural summer cut great swathes through the image. The fields form a brilliant contrast with the dazzling blue of one the lake, one of four located south-west of Horsham, and which are seen also in Wimmera ( from Mount Arapiles), 1943 (National Gallery of Victoria collection). The clean, structured distinctions between the water, land and horizon, as well as around the front of the houses, bear the hallmarks of Nolan's earlier forays into collage.
A small girl stands in the central foreground, her small figure drawing the eye through the gap between the two white buildings, and through into Nolan's "land going vertically into the sky" (Ibid). The scrubby trees, which were to become a favoured Nolan motif, are "swiftly brushed and scumbled, seem almost to dance into the shimmering distance- over a landscape pitched in such high key and so bright that it works in your stomach as well as your eyes." (Ibid, p.54).
The new Australian vision that Nolan articulated through his Wimmera paintings of the 1940s remained at the core of his painting throughout the rest of his career. "While Nolan only returned once to repaint the Wimmera, in 1966, every landscape after 1944 in a fundamental sense is rooted in the seeing and questioning of this time. The Kelly series, like all of Nolan's treatment of myth, is inconceivable without the achievements of 1942-44 - landscape is the reality and framework within which myth and legend acquire identity and substance." (R. Haese, "The Wimmera Paintings of Sidney Nolan 1942-44", in R. Haese, Sidney Nolan, Melbourne, 1983, p.30).
Nolan wrote to Sunday Reed in May 1943 that "It was alright while we [were] in sight of the Grampians and then suddenly [there] was nothing of the earth except a thin line. And while I was thinking about all these things, it came simply that if you imagined the land going vertically into the sky it would work." (S. Nolan in J. Clark, Sidney Nolan, Sydney, 1987, p.42).
This new vision is evinced in Wimmera Landscape, in which the golden wheatfields and dry soil of an Australian rural summer cut great swathes through the image. The fields form a brilliant contrast with the dazzling blue of one the lake, one of four located south-west of Horsham, and which are seen also in Wimmera ( from Mount Arapiles), 1943 (National Gallery of Victoria collection). The clean, structured distinctions between the water, land and horizon, as well as around the front of the houses, bear the hallmarks of Nolan's earlier forays into collage.
A small girl stands in the central foreground, her small figure drawing the eye through the gap between the two white buildings, and through into Nolan's "land going vertically into the sky" (Ibid). The scrubby trees, which were to become a favoured Nolan motif, are "swiftly brushed and scumbled, seem almost to dance into the shimmering distance- over a landscape pitched in such high key and so bright that it works in your stomach as well as your eyes." (Ibid, p.54).
The new Australian vision that Nolan articulated through his Wimmera paintings of the 1940s remained at the core of his painting throughout the rest of his career. "While Nolan only returned once to repaint the Wimmera, in 1966, every landscape after 1944 in a fundamental sense is rooted in the seeing and questioning of this time. The Kelly series, like all of Nolan's treatment of myth, is inconceivable without the achievements of 1942-44 - landscape is the reality and framework within which myth and legend acquire identity and substance." (R. Haese, "The Wimmera Paintings of Sidney Nolan 1942-44", in R. Haese, Sidney Nolan, Melbourne, 1983, p.30).