Provenance:
James Fawcett London
Lord Alistair McAlpine, Australian City Properties Perth

Gallipoli became a major focus for Nolan from around 1956 until the early 1960s. Gallipoli 1959 is one of the most important works of the series. In 1956, Nolan and his wife Cynthia were holidaying in the Greek islands whilst Nolan immersed himself in ancient Greek mythology and Homer’s Iliad. His reading of Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli (1956) had a marked affect on Nolan and as Rosenthal explains Nolan “was beginning to see the Trojan tragedy not only in epic terms but in relation to the terrible droughts of Australia as he had already painted them, linking the military struggles of Troy with the heat and dust and deprivation of Central Australia.”1

Although Nolan took up some of the imagery made famous by earlier artists such as George Lambert ‘soldiers swimming, struggling and dying’ he made no claim to ‘document’ the First World War. Indeed it has been said that Nolan’s Gallipoli paintings break ‘over the senses like a lamentation for lost souls’.2

Remarking on the technique used in the Gallipoli suite, Cynthia Nolan observed that the dark polyvinyl acetate was swept and scraped over a white ground to reveal the image. “He was using three magnificent blues and working through the night to the accompaniment of Bach. First the paint glowed darkly, and then the sad young figure would shine palely out.”3 Nolan’s own brother had died young whilst in service, though not at Gallipoli and, in Nolan’s own words, he saw the Gallipoli situation “as the great modern Australian legend, the nearest thing to a deeply felt common religious experience shared by Australians – even today.”4
RM

1 Rosenthal. T.G., Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p.155.
2 Borlase. N,. The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1980, quoted in Clark. J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, ICCA, Sydney, 1987, p.130.
3 Nolan.C., Open Negative: An American Memoir, Macmillan, London, 1967, p.222.
4 Spencer. CS., Myth and Hero in the paintings of Sidney Nolan, Art in Australia, Vol.3, no.2, 1965, quoted in Fry. G., Nolan’s Gallipoli, Rigby, 1983, p.8.