A A previously unknown and dark chapter in the life and work of Sidney Nolan is brought into the spotlight, with the unveiling of the first paintings documenting the horrors of Nazi Germany, which the Australian artist never wished would be shown in his lifetime.
The obscenity of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps haunted the artist for more than two decades, throwing him into a personal crisis that led him to seriously question the role art should play, if any, in the face of a total absence of humanity.
After lying buried within the vast collection of the Sidney Nolan Trust on the outskirts of Presteigne, on the border between England and Wales, for more than half a century, 50 of these works are now on public display in Australia for the first time, at the exhibition of the Sydney Jewish Museum. Shocked to the Core: The Untold Story of Nolan’s Auschwitz.
Sydney researcher Andrew Turley first became aware of the works in 2012, when he was collecting material for his next book on Nolan’s African series, created in the early 1960s when the artist toured the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania.
Turley was challenging the theory that Nolan had become increasingly concerned with the decline of Western civilization; he would eventually learn that the seeds of that concern had been sown in the artist long before, when he was barely out of his teens, and some years before he embarked on his famous ned kelly series.
In Nolan’s files, Turley found a newspaper clipping from the weekend magazine Argus dated January 6, 1938 about the inmates of Buchenwald: one of the first and largest concentration camps to open within its own borders. from Germany, which would imprison the political enemies of the Third Reich, the mentally ill, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and, ultimately, tens of thousands of Jews.
Nolan had overpainted the photograph of the Buchenwald inmates with his first Holocaust box, called Prison Camp; on the reverse of the image were inscribed the words: ”Camp… Tears (St Kilda Beach)”.
I was 21 years old.
“So you have a boy in Melbourne, living on the edge of the world,” says Turley. “And he is writing this, usually before anyone in Europe addresses this, let alone addresses it in the art world. This is before Francis Bacon, one of his key contemporaries, this is before Picasso”. Bacon’s Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion and Picasso’s The Charnel House were created around 1944.
In a second newspaper clipping, Nolan writes, “Divine Comedy, Pit Concentration Camp,” referring to Dante’s Circles of Hell 8 and 9, which represent fraud against humanity and treason, respectively.
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. This work was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1974, but for the next two decades the Holocaust would continue to haunt Nolan, and his depictions became more literal: brick kilns with imprisoned bodies, bars, stripes, smoke from chimneys.
Outside of a small Sidney Nolan Trust exhibition at the artist’s home in the UK last year, these works have not been shown to the public and will surprise those who know Nolan for his Australian iconography: his paintings of Ned Kelly and the Anzacs. .
But while the link between the artist’s Troy and Gallipoli series in the 1950s has been commonly acknowledged, Turley says that Nolan’s third little-known trope, the Holocaust, was in fact “the vertical weaving” in the great tapestry thread. of the artist.
‘Linking Anzacs with Auschwitz’: a decisive year
In 1961, Nolan wrote in his diary: “Link Anzacs with Auschwitz.”
It was the same year that Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s chief architect of the “final solution to the Jewish question,” was captured in Argentina and tried in Israel. The nine-month trial received intense international media coverage and, unlike the Nuremberg trials, relied heavily on graphic first-person testimony from dozens of concentration camp survivors.
The coverage brought Nolan’s concern and fear to the fore.
The artist made dozens of drawings in the final weeks of the trial, capturing the shadowy, thin-lipped mouth, receding hairline and distinctive rounded glasses of the war criminal sitting behind bulletproof glass.
On December 15, 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death.
“This gave Nolan the release he needed… There was a huge amount of work in a matter of weeks, it was like a valve that had the cap taken off and steam came blasting out,” says Turley.
From mid-December to early January 1962, he painted 120 pictures.
“Smoke starts to come out [in Nolan’s paintings]the paint is scratched, screams appear in the mouths”, he says.
“By December 29, the heads had become skeletal, almost like a skull and crossbones.”
For nine days, from late December to early January, Nolan appeared to rest. Then a “two-day torrent,” says Turley.
“Constant tortured images, 90 skeletal works, carts, smoking crosses, crucifixions with smoke coming out of the top of the crucified skeletons… I just couldn’t get the trauma out.
“It’s a whirlwind of work that goes round and round.”
In the space of just four weeks, Nolan created 220 images.
Earlier the same year, Nolan’s friend and Observer poetry editor Al Alvarez suggested that the artist accompany him on a trip to Auschwitz. Alvarez planned to write an essay about the camp and wanted Nolan to provide the footage.
The Iron Curtain was in full swing, the Berlin Wall had cut a swath through the heart of the German capital a few months earlier, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was brewing. Nolan’s conviction that Western civilization was crumbling under a festering moral cancer became more embedded in his conscience.
“He completely immersed himself in this human suffering,” says Turley.
“The concept that civilization was failing was huge, and Auschwitz was a representation of that failure…revealing a possible reality for the future that was horrible.”
Faced with such abject abomination, and after taking a series of photographs at Auschwitz for Álvarez, Nolan resolved never to commit another image of the Holocaust to the canvas. He resigned from the Observer commission, and that spate of work created over a four-week period in 1961-62 was relegated to a dark and unseen corner of the artist’s oeuvre for the next half-century.
“Auschwitz was beyond heartbreak for Nolan and it was a place where total psychopath was a reality,” says Turley.
“The reality of Auschwitz, with the piles of prosthetics, hair, suitcases, glasses and iron carts in the crematoria, and the way the camp was laid out, like a Mondrian grid designed to house hens awaiting slaughter. It was a reality that went far beyond his previous imaginations and he just couldn’t accept that lack of humanity.”
Nolan, who saw art as a Geiger counter for civilization, as an early warning system, could not accept the art he had created about the Holocaust.
“He no longer knew how to paint an illness, and he didn’t paint or talk about it for decades.”