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Lot Essay
Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings are, by common consent, the most important of his entire career. From the first great sequence of 1946-47 they dominated his output, and made his reputation at home and abroad as a leading and radical modern painter in post-war Australia. They remain among the most sought-after of his work.
The 1960s Kelly subjects are as perfect an expression of Nolan in middle-age as the first Kelly series was of Nolan in youth. The prominent figure of Kelly which had once dominated the landscape, now recedes into it. The 1960s Kelly pictures- and this shift of emphasis from human action to landscape as subject- are enriched conceptually by Nolan’s recent African journey, where he observed animals and their camouflage in the landscape, and by his journey to Antarctica at the beginning of 1964, where the landscape overwhelmed him: ‘This instantaneous fear at the first glimpse of it, that it would annihilate one… was overcome straight away by the sense of wonder at it. You know it was so remote, so big, and in a way so beautiful that this swept over any fear you had, and there was a kind of feeling at the back of my mind that if one had to die there, in one way it wouldn’t be so bad. It represented a reality stronger than oneself’ (A.B.C. radio broadcast, 23 March 1964).
The 1960s Kelly subjects are as perfect an expression of Nolan in middle-age as the first Kelly series was of Nolan in youth. The prominent figure of Kelly which had once dominated the landscape, now recedes into it. The 1960s Kelly pictures- and this shift of emphasis from human action to landscape as subject- are enriched conceptually by Nolan’s recent African journey, where he observed animals and their camouflage in the landscape, and by his journey to Antarctica at the beginning of 1964, where the landscape overwhelmed him: ‘This instantaneous fear at the first glimpse of it, that it would annihilate one… was overcome straight away by the sense of wonder at it. You know it was so remote, so big, and in a way so beautiful that this swept over any fear you had, and there was a kind of feeling at the back of my mind that if one had to die there, in one way it wouldn’t be so bad. It represented a reality stronger than oneself’ (A.B.C. radio broadcast, 23 March 1964).