Sidney
Nolan's Gallipoli Paintings
By George Johnston
It
was during the European winter of 1955-6, and on the Greek island
of Hydra, where I was living at the time, that Sidney Nolan's
Gallipoli paintings had their genesis.
Nolan
and his wife were staying on the island in the great old house of
the Greek painter, Ghika (Nikos Hadzikiriakos),. 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, with
an Australian background of parched earth, dust, prickly
vegetation, death, heat, bones in the dry burning of the sun. The
ringing clang of brows armour, audible now only in the mind, evoked
to his attentive inner ear the mute clangour of Australia's own
brazen Inland. In images separated by the width of the world and
3,000 years of time, he sensed a parallel, indeed a mutual poetry
concerned with human struggle.
He
wanted to paint Troy, he said, in its pitiless heroics, in the true
brutality of its images, within the impassive void of cosmic
indifference;
to alter those prettified costumed conceptions of Achaeans and
Trojans so cloyingly fixed by the painters of the Renaissance; to
give the story back the savage, sweaty, cruel, dusty, unadorned
human grandeur that Homer had sung.
He
painted away as if 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, desiccated
skulls and bones in formalized masks and helmets, the harsh edges
of dry rock and brittle, snaggled vegetation against burning
bright skies. There was no thought in his mind of a finished
painting. 'I am just trying to work it out,' he would explain,
surveying a vast floor carpeted with a hundred separate sketches.
It will take a long time... maybe ten years before I'm ready to
have a proper go at it.'
The
switch from ancient Troy to Gallipoli came in a curious way, Alan
Moorehead had been living on the neighbouring island of Spetses
writing his book, Gallipoli, and a very deeply felt memoir of his, dealing with the
Anzas 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 ancient 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
soldiers
Photographs
remembered from the old Anzac
Book of nude soldiers grappling with each other or swimming
horses in Anzac Cove, naked bathers stretched sunbaking on the
splintered grey planks of St Kilda Baths (the subjects of Nolan's
very first paintings), the naked, sweating, antique figures of
long ago locked in bitter eternal conflict on that coastal plain
that looked clear across mythic waters to the craggy ridges of
Gallipoli - to Nolan all were one. 'I think I might tackle
Gallipoli first' he said, 'as a way of feeling into the bigger
thing of Troy.'
In
the spring of 1956 the time came for him to leave Hydra, but he
pursued his new obsession. Not from books any longer - he now had
to walk on the actual plain of Troy, clamber the mound of
Hissarlik, trace where Scamander flowed. Postcards came. From
Gallipoli, from the site of ancient Troy, from Mudros and Lemnos,
from Turkey, the Black Sea. Cards bearing little sketches - a
spike of asphodel springing from the flints and kookluthia
and the scruff of wild thyme, thorns on a ridge, rocks dropping
into a clear sea, emergent heads (less portraits of Anzacs than
faces half remembered from strange dreams), hinting drifts of
music heard from behind the dark arras of time.
Crouching
soldier wearing plumed hat
We
corresponded intermittently but I did not see him for several
years. He was back in London and a poem by an Australian had
diverted him again, into exploration of another of the ancient
myths, Leda and the Swan. 'It helps to work some of those other
things out,' he wrote in a letter. 'Its another step towards
Troy.'
At
the beginning of 1961 t was in London and visited him at his
Thames-side studio in Putney. That was the first time I saw any of
the finished Gallipoli paintings. He had gone beyond the stage of
sketches now and was painting big. He was very busy at this stage
with other shows, commissions, decor for theatre, but whenever he
could find the time he returned feverishly to the Gallipoli
pictures. The studio was stacked with them - those haunting
ageless heads that seemed neither dead nor alive, neither of the
past nor of the present, eerie centaur figures half submerged in
Lethe-like waters, nude men who wrestled or writhed or groped
against harsh cliffs, faces like memories impasted on the textures
of blood and stone, grotesque forms that were more living than
rock, more indestructible than flesh, gouts of colour like
starshells or splashes of blood, placid drownings, the games of
innocence, saddle-me-nag and cockfighting, a butterfly, a maimed,
nude figure sprouting a crutch where a leg had been. The struggles
and the spirit of man spreading and spreading across timeless
spaces. Gallipoli. What does the name matter?
I
remembered one howling meltermi-swept
night in Ghika's house when all the kerosene lamps had been
dancing in a jump of shadows, and in a rare outburst of emotional
passion he had flung his sketches down and cried, 'You can't paint
it! You need metal and a forge, its got to clang!' But he had
painted it. I realized that, there in Putney, with a damp black
fog creeping quietly up the river banks. Perhaps without even
realizing it he had begun painting Troy. It might take all of
those ten years before he finishes it, but he will do it, I think.
Young
soldier
Gallipoli
light horseman mounted on a horse swimming in the sea
Gallipoli
landscape with body, sea and bird
Soldiers,
one with rifle, in Gallipoli landscape with blue sea and hills
Gallipoli
landscape with cliffs, three trees and blue sea
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