Preoccupied with the inhumanity of Nazi Germany, the artist painted 220 works in just four weeks: a ‘rambling, tumbling turmoil’ that he did not speak of for decades
previously unknown and dark chapter in the life and work of Sidney Nolan is in the spotlight, with the unveiling of early paintings documenting the horrors of Nazi Germany – which the Australian artist never wished to be shown in his lifetime.
Sydney researcher Andrew Turley began learning of the existence of the works in 2012, when he was gathering material on his forthcoming book about Nolan’s African series, created in the early 1960s when the artist toured Serengeti national park in northern Tanzania. In 1944 Nolan painted Lublin, which depicted the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city the same year the Russian army liberated it from German occupation. That work was acquired by the
But while the link between the artist’s Troy and Gallipoli series in the 1950s have been commonly acknowledged, Turley says Nolan’s third little-known trope – the Holocaust – was in fact “the vertical weave” in the thread of the artist’s great tapestry.In 1961, Nolan wrote in his diary: “Link Anzacs with Auschwitz.”
“Consistent tortured imagery, 90 works of skeletons, trolleys, smoking crosses, crucifixions of smoke pouring out the top of skeletons being crucified … he just simply could not expel the trauma.In the space of just four weeks, Nolan created 220 pictures.Photograph: Sidney Nolan Trust In the face of such abject abomination, and after taking a series of photographs at Auschwitz for Alvarez, Nolan resolved never to commit to canvas another image of the Holocaust. He resigned the Observer commission, and that outpouring of works created over a four-week period in 1961-62 was relegated to a dark unseen corner of the artist’s oeuvre for the next half-century.
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