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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  29 Aug 2016 ~ 6.30pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 78)
  30 Aug 2016 ~ 2.30pm - Part 2 (Lots 79 - 328)
• Lot #:
  49
• Lot Description:
  § Sidney Nolan
  (1917-1992)
  Burke 1966
  oil on paper
  74.2 x 51.2 cm
  signed and dated lower right: Nolan / 1966
• Provenance:
  Lister Gallery, Perth; Private collection, Perth (acquired from the above); Important Australian & International Art, Sotheby's Australia, Sydney, 25 August 2015, lot no. 23; Private collection, Melbourne
• Notes:
  Sidney Nolan first painted the Burke and Wills series in 1948, around the time he and his family took a trip on the 'Ghan' to Central Australia. In the same way Nolan revisited the Kelly series throughout his career, he returned to the legend of Burke and Wills several times, most conspicuously, in the mid-1960s. While the first series is distinguished by Nolan's clearly defined hard line figures, which hover on the surface like cut-out collages, the components of the later works are conversely developed like a hazy and turbulent dreamlike vortex of colour and form. Or as Dr Sarah Engledow put it, 'by the 1960s man and camel became fused in the seamless treatment of their construction. The figures are apparitions, ghost-like in a landscape of mirages - man and nature finding themselves together at the Gulf of Carpentaria in a place where water and earth meet in a shifting, invisible mix.'1 Nolan's artistic gift lay in his ability to represent, with conviction, this sense of all-overness of the desert and man's experience within it, incidentally bringing him closer to abstraction than he had been since his first artistic experiments in 1939-40. When the works were first exhibited in 1962, they were met with praise. Allan Edwards wrote how 'the camels are unforgettable, slightly comic but also disquieting with their long sinewy necks,... their wobbly swaying stance; and their riders perched precariously on the steep rump seem to have grown into the beasts, a kind of desert centaur. Sitting well back they look rather like figureheads on the wrong end of the desert.'2 The present work shows the bearded Burke sitting stiffly and awkwardly on this camel, gazing directly at the viewer, or perhaps at a distant horizon looking for a way out of this hopeless place. This direct gaze engages the viewer, ensuring the figure is no generic, inconsequential element of staffage, but the centre of this emotional and heroic ordeal. In this work, and the series to which it belongs, Nolan delivered a new level of lyrical historicism which he himself could hardly match again. Petrit Abazi 1 Sarah Engledow, 'Through blue eye', Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, no. 30, Summer 2008-2009, p. 24 2 Allan Edwards, The Critic, Perth, vol. 3, no. 5, 23 November 1962, cited Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: landscapes and legends, International Cultural Corporation of Australia, Sydney, 1987, p. 134 § Indicates that Resale Royalty of 5% will be applied to the hammer price of this work.
• Estimate:
  A$18,000 - 24,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.