The article discusses Sidney Nolan, a prominent Australian artist known for his work inspired by Australian landscapes and myths. Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator at AGNSW, highlights Nolan's significant contributions to modernist art in Australia from 1939 until he moved to London in 1953. The text specifically mentions key works like "Kiata," painted during WWII when Nolan was stationed near the town of Kiata, and "Fire, Palais de Danse, St Kilda," which reflects his childhood memories of a fire that destroyed a local venue.
Written locally by qwen2.5:14b on 2026-10-07,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
Australian artist Sidney Nolan was interested in the stories and myths we tell about ourselves, from the life of bushranger Ned Kelly to the trials of saints.
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"Sidney Nolan has to be one of our most creative and inventive painters that emerged out of the period of war and the decades following," says Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW).
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"He posed questions about place, our identity, and our individual search for meaning within the continent and landscapes of Australia.
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Born in 1917, the modernist artist would prove to be one of Australia's most influential and prolific, initially as part of the infamous Heide Circle alongside Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and Joy Hester.
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He would go on to be acquired by the likes of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.
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Curated by Mimmocchi, AGNSW's new exhibition Nolan: Origins charts the artist's career from 1939 until he moved to London in 1953.
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It features places like St Kilda and central Australia — environments that would continue to spark his imagination throughout his life.
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"I wanted to look at what inspired him," Mimmocchi says.
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"And what we're looking at really is Australia."
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In 1943, during WWII, Nolan — who had been conscripted in 1942 — was stationed at Nhill, guarding Australia's food reserves.
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The job left him with a lot of time to paint.
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One work he made during this period is this landscape of the nearby town Kiata, in western Victoria.
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"Kiata is really a breakthrough moment," Mimmocchi says.
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"This is when the abstract artist also becomes a landscape painter."
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As he figured out how to capture the vastness he encountered, Nolan came to appreciate an earlier generation of Australian artists, the Impressionists, like Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Charles Conder, who would often paint outdoors.
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"He looks to and echoes in his own way the idea of painting the Australian light and landscape, but he does it through his own modern sensibility," Mimmocchi says.
A year later, in 1944, when he found out he was going to be sent to fight in Papua New Guinea, Nolan deserted the army.
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In 1948, he received an amnesty for deserters and was formally discharged.
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Fire, Palais de Danse, St Kilda
When Nolan was nine and growing up in Melbourne's St Kilda, the Palais de Danse burned down.
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It was an event that became etched in the artist's memory.
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He painted the scene 20 years later, in 1945, while living between his studio in Parkville, Melbourne, and Heide on the city's outskirts, in the home of philanthropists Sunday and John Reed.
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There, Nolan had an affair with Sunday, before marrying John's sister, Cynthia, a writer, in 1948.
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"When he's living in hiding, he starts to paint with greater intensity these memories of his childhood in St Kilda," Mimmocchi says.
"
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He goes up in scale as well.
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In that expansion comes this incredible impact of the energy contained within them."
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She describes that energy as "frenetic", with the human figures in the painting appearing almost like ants.
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"You get this sense of palpitating movement," Mimmocchi explains.
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Mimmocchi boils that anxiety down to Nolan viewing these moments from his childhood through the lens of the "wartime present".
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While living at Heide, Nolan spent a year, starting in 1946, creating a series of 27 paintings of bushranger Ned Kelly.
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One inspiration for the series came from the stories Nolan's grandfather told him when he was a child, of being part of the search for the Kelly gang.
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But it also stemmed from his own desertion from the army.
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"He's a bit of an outlaw in his mind himself," Mimmocchi says.
"
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He saw the Kelly figure as a rebel poet.
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He saw him and his family as the victims of great injustice.
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At the same time, coming out of that experience of war, where he was trained to use the 'utmost violence', the idea of brutality was at the forefront of his mind."
To create the series, Nolan pored over newspaper clippings and the 1881 Royal Commission report into the Victorian police, and visited Glenrowan, the site of Kelly's final shoot-out with police in 1880.
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"He's interested in painting the landscape and the stories within it; how history becomes legend becomes mythology," Mimmocchi says.
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That's perhaps exemplified by the view through the letterbox-style slit in Kelly's helmet.
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"We view the landscape through the Kelly helmet," Mimmocchi says.
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"It's almost as if Nolan is saying our experiences of place are shaped or framed by these stories, by these figures."
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The Ned Kelly series and the now-iconic blocky shape of Kelly's helmet also marked a turning point in Nolan's practice.
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"He said he was an abstract painter and then he became a painter of the landscape, and this brought the two together," Mimmocchi says.
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…and 26 more, not listed.
The Aporia