A previously unknown and dark chapter in the life and work of Sidney Nolan is in the spotlight, with the unveiling of the first paintings documenting the horrors of Nazi Germany, which the Australian artist never wanted to show in life
The obscenity of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps haunted the artist for more than two decades, throwing him into a personal crisis that made him seriously question what role, if any, art should play. had, in the face of a total absence of humanity.
After being buried within the vast Sidney Nolan Trust collection outside Presteigne, on the England-Wales border, for more than half a century, 50 of these works are now on display in Australia for the first time , at the Jewish Museum Sydney exhibition. Shaken to the Core: The Untold Story of Nolan’s Auschwitz.
Sidney Nolan’s Holocaust paintings go on display in Australia for the first time. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
Sydney researcher Andrew Turley first learned of the works’ existence in 2012, when he was gathering material for his upcoming book on Nolan’s African series, created in the early 1960s when the artist toured the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania.
Turley was questioning the theory that Nolan had become increasingly concerned with the decline of Western civilization; he was ultimately to learn that the seeds of this preoccupation had been sown in the artist much earlier, when he was barely out of his teens, and a few years before he embarked on his famous Ned Kelly series.
In Nolan’s archives, Turley came across a newspaper clipping from the weekend Argus magazine of January 6, 1938, about the prisoners at Buchenwald: one of the first and largest concentration camps to be opened within borders of Germany, which would imprison political enemies of the Third Reich, the mentally ill, Romans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and, ultimately, tens of thousands of Jews.
Nolan had overpainted the photograph of the Buchenwald prisoners with his first image of the Holocaust, called Prison Camp; on the back of the image were inscribed the words: ”Field of… Tears (St Kilda Beach)”.
I was 21 years old.
Andrew Turley first discovered an old cutout of a concentration camp, which Nolan had overpainted when he was 21. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
“So you’ve got a guy in Melbourne, who lives on the edge of the world,” Turley says. “And he’s writing this, generally before anyone in Europe was dealing with this, let alone 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, “The Divine Comedy, concentration camp,” referring to circles 8 and 9 of Dante’s Inferno, which represent fraud against humanity and treason respectively.
In 1944 Nolan painted Lublin, depicting the Polish city’s Jewish ghetto 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.
The Holocaust would continue to haunt Nolan, with his increasingly literal depictions. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
Apart from 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 series and Gallipoli in the 1950s has been commonly acknowledged, Turley says Nolan’s third little-known trope, the Holocaust, was in fact “the vertical fabric” in the thread of the artist’s large tapestry.
“Linking Anzacs to Auschwitz”: a turning point 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.
Adolf Eichmann during his 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was found guilty of war crimes against the Jews and executed the following year. Photography: Popperfoto
The coverage brought Nolan’s concern and fear to the fore.
The artist produced dozens of drawings in the final weeks of the trial, capturing the war criminal’s grim, thin-lipped mouth, receding hairline and distinctive round glasses as he sat behind bulletproof glass.
On December 15, 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death.
“That gave Nolan the release he needed… There was an outpouring of work in a matter of weeks, it was like a valve with a broken cap and steam coming out,” says Turley.
From mid-December to early January 1962, he painted 120 paintings.
“Smoke is starting to appear [in Nolan’s paintings]the paint is scratched, screams appear in the mouth”, he says.
“By December 29 the heads had become skeletal, almost like a skull and crossbones.”
The works of Sidney Nolan are exhibited at the Jewish Museum. Photography: Sidney Nolan
For nine days, from late December to early January, Nolan appeared to rest. Then a “torrent for two days,” says Turley.
“Consistent tortured imagery, 90 works of skeletons, chariots, smoking crosses, crucifixions with smoke pouring over the top of the skeletons being crucified… he just couldn’t expel the trauma.
“It’s a flurry of rambling work and falling.”
In just four weeks, Nolan created 220 images.
‘Auschwitz was beyond distress for Nolan’: a photo of the site taken in 1962 by the artist. Photograph: Sidney Nolan Trust
Earlier that 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 at its height, the Berlin Wall had cut a swath through the heart of the German capital just months earlier, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was brewing. Nolan’s conviction that Western civilization was collapsing under a oozing moral circle became more embedded in his consciousness.
“He was completely immersed 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 horrifying.”
Faced with such abject abomination, and after taking a series of photographs in Auschwitz for Alvarez, Nolan decided never to commit another Holocaust image to the canvas. He relinquished the Observer commission, and this outpouring of works created over a four-week period in 1961-62 was relegated to an invisible dark corner of the artist’s oeuvre for the next half century.
“Auschwitz was beyond anguish for Nolan and was a place where the totally psychopathic was the reality,” says Turley.
“Consistent tortured imagery” unrolled from Nolan’s brush over a four-week period in the early 1960s. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
“The reality of Auschwitz, with the piles of prosthetic limbs, hair, suitcases, glasses and iron carts in the crematoria, and the way the camp was laid out, like a Mondrian grid designed to house the chickens awaiting the killing It was a reality that was far beyond his previous imaginings and he simply could not accept this inhumanity.”
Nolan, who saw art as a Geiger counter for civilization, as an early warning system, could not therefore 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 afterward.”