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Lot Essay
'It was during the European winter of 1955-56, and on the Greek island of Hydra, where I was living at the time, that Sidney Nolan's Gallipoli paintings had their genesis. ... He had for the moment finished with Kelly and was searching for new themes for his painting: in pursuit of this he had become quite obsessively immersed in our copies of Homer's Iliad and Robert Graves's Greek Mythology. Yet, nourished by these and living in the very heartland of classical mythology, he still clung to his particular Australianism; he was able somehow to associate the great Trojan epic tragedy with drought paintings he had done ...The ringing clang of bronze armour, audible now only in the mind, evoked to his attentive ear the mute clangour of Australia's own brazen Inland. ... He wanted to paint Troy, he said, in all its pitiless heroics ... to give the story back to the savage, sweaty, cruel dusty, unadorned human grandeur that Homer had sung.
He painted away at it in a ferment of excitement for five months, experimental sketches in oils or inks on heavy art paper mostly, hundreds and hundreds of studies concerned with nude figures interlocked and grappling, centaur-like horsemen, dessicated skulls and bones in formalized masks and helmets ... 'I am just trying to work it out,' he would explain, surveying a vast floor carpeted with a hundred separate sketches. ... The switch from ancient Troy to Gallipoli came in a curious way. Alan Moorehead had been living in the neighbouring island of Spetsae writing his book, Gallipoli, and a very deeply felt memoir of his, dealing with the Anzacs had already appeared in The New Yorker. It affected me, and I gave it to Nolan to read. It was like unlocking a door. From then on, when the retzina circled and wild winter buffeted at the shutters of the waterfront taverns, we would talk far into the small hours about this other myth of our own, so uniquely Australian and yet so close to that much more ancent myth of Homer's. Nolan's poetic imagination saw them as one, saw many things fused into a single poetic truth lying, as the true myth should, outside time.' ('Gallipoli Paintings by George Johnstone', Art and Australia (Nolan Issue), Volume 5, Number 2, September 1967, pp. 465-66)
He painted away at it in a ferment of excitement for five months, experimental sketches in oils or inks on heavy art paper mostly, hundreds and hundreds of studies concerned with nude figures interlocked and grappling, centaur-like horsemen, dessicated skulls and bones in formalized masks and helmets ... 'I am just trying to work it out,' he would explain, surveying a vast floor carpeted with a hundred separate sketches. ... The switch from ancient Troy to Gallipoli came in a curious way. Alan Moorehead had been living in the neighbouring island of Spetsae writing his book, Gallipoli, and a very deeply felt memoir of his, dealing with the Anzacs had already appeared in The New Yorker. It affected me, and I gave it to Nolan to read. It was like unlocking a door. From then on, when the retzina circled and wild winter buffeted at the shutters of the waterfront taverns, we would talk far into the small hours about this other myth of our own, so uniquely Australian and yet so close to that much more ancent myth of Homer's. Nolan's poetic imagination saw them as one, saw many things fused into a single poetic truth lying, as the true myth should, outside time.' ('Gallipoli Paintings by George Johnstone', Art and Australia (Nolan Issue), Volume 5, Number 2, September 1967, pp. 465-66)