Source : the age
“How can a disease be painted?” Sidney Nolan wrote these words in his diary in 1961, in the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind behind the railway system that fed people to Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.
Nolan’s attempts at answering this question form Aftershocks: Nolan and the Holocaust, a new exhibition at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.
The series of paintings based on Ravensbrück women’s camp have never been on public display.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Nolan, one of Australia’s most renowned modernist painters, had been commissioned to illustrate an article about the Holocaust. He visited Auschwitz in 1962, but had such a visceral reaction to the place that he withdrew from the commission. Nevertheless, he went on to create over 200 paintings on the subject, most of which were filed away, not sold or exhibited.
Dr Breann Fallon, the Holocaust Museum’s Head of Experience and Learning and co-curator of Aftershocks, speculates that Nolan couldn’t bring himself to profit from the subject.
“They were never designed to be displayed,” says Fallon. “Is it art-making, or is it a diary? We’ll never know.”
Much of this work was exhibited at the Sydney Jewish Museum first, but it has been reconfigured for the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. Several are from private collections, and the series of paintings based on Ravensbrück women’s camp have never been seen on public display.
The amount of work Nolan produced about the Holocaust may surprise people. The work in this show is less than a quarter of it.
Sidney Nolan in Western Australia in 1962, the year he travelled to Auschwitz. Credit: Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore
“We entertained other names for the exhibition, and Obsessed was one of them,” says Fallon. “People will be shocked to know this has been sitting in the background of his catalogue. He’s so known for his Kelly series, and his desert works, but this is a different side to his psyche. I don’t think you can look at any of his other works the same way after knowing he created this series.”
Nolan wrote in his diary about how his visit to Auschwitz affected him. In the months after, he couldn’t listen to music. After attending a concert, he wrote: “I see 4000 people sitting listening to Mozart. I think, ‘my God, that’s one-third of a day’s batch.’ I can’t drive that thought from my mind.”
Fallon says: “It feels different to his other work. You can feel the process. This is not a man who is standing in a studio painting, this is something different. You can feel the raw emotion. You can feel Nolan.”
He worked quickly, and with a limited palette, largely muddy burgundy, the colour of dried blood. Sequences of paintings are dated to periods of a week or even a few days. There’s a series of portraits of Eichmann, depicting him as menacingly unremarkable. In the series based on Ravensbrück women’s camp, Nolan paints woolly, scratchy figures, prone on a plain background smeared with dark red. These, as well as a series of skeletal figures, seem rushed, frenzied — but up close, you can see detailed faces, buried in the chaos.
Dr Breann Fallon, curator of Aftershocks: Nolan and the Holocaust, at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.Credit: Paul Jeffers
“There more you stand here, the more each artwork starts to stand on its own,” says Fallon, “Each carries its own personality and its own sense of weight and emotion.”
The show culminates in Auschwitz (1965), the most direct and composed work in the room. Nolan juxtaposes men in striped prisoner uniforms, a print of a Byzantine painting of the Virgin and Child, and a cross with a plume of smoke coming from its peak. The use of the Christian cross recalls Nolan’s contemporary, Jewish artist Marc Chagall, though the conflation of the cross and an Auschwitz chimney add a brutal weight.
“The crucifix imagery isn’t Christological for him, it’s about suffering and martyrdom,” says Fallon. “He’s trying to come to terms with the horror of what he’s depicting.”
Auschwitz (1965) at Aftershocks: Nolan and the Holocaust.Credit: Paul Jeffers
The Christian imagery is also a reminder that Nolan wasn’t Jewish. Fallon reminds us that the Holocaust is typically seen as a Jewish story, but it’s also human history.
“Nolan isn’t a Jewish artist, but he’s a Melbourne artist,” she says. “We have a duty to connect Melburnians to this history that is not long ago or far away. So this is exactly the right place for it to be on display.”
The paintings, as Fallon describes them, see Nolan “grasping at smoke”. He is asking a series of questions, and answering them the only way he knows how.
“I think it would be easy to look at this and focus on the inhumanity, but he’s also coming to terms with the legacy of it,” says Fallon. “How can a human inflict this violence on another human? And how do we try to represent it for future generations?”
These questions, Fallon says, are painfully relevant. “There’s something deeply powerful about a Melbourne artist looking at what’s happening on the other side of the world and having this reaction,” she says.
Aftershocks: Nolan and the Holocaust is at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum from May 1 to June 29.
