Sidney Nolan - Mask and Memory
“All of us see the Australian outback, whethere we have been there or not, through the eyes of Sidney Nolan” - Patrick McCaughey, Art historian
Sidney Nolan, Ned Kelly 1946, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Many regard Sir Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) as the greatest Australian painter of the 20th century. Sidney Nolan - Mask and Memory is based on a retrospective of Nolan’s work curated by Barry Pearce which opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007.
“Nolan was famously obscure about the personal content behind all of his pictures. He said ,I am just masquerading as an anecdotal painter. Underneath there is a personal connotation to it and a significance and I’m not telling anybody. So we all have to take our own journey through the pictures to work out what it is” - Barry Pearce, Emeritus Curator of Australian Art, AGNSW
Sidney Nolan, Luna Park 1941. Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust/DACS. Copyright Agency
The film explores the origin and development of Nolan’s work. He painted his first pictures of the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in the mid-1940s and the image of Kelly would often reappear in later decades. But his work ranged far beyond Kelly and the Australian landscape, from Africa to Gallipoli, from Antarctica to Europe. By the end of his life, he said, he had become a painter of the entire planet.
And if all art has a biographical element, this was dramatically true in Nolan’s case.
“In a sense there’s a lot that’s autobiographical in the paintings but I’m not going to try and point that out becuase it’s too complex.” - Sidney Nolan
Through interviews with family and friends, this film reconstructs the intimate relationships that shaped his life, the women he loved and who loved him.
Narrated by Judy Davis, Sidney Nolan - Mask and Memory explores the rich personal history behind the art of this brilliant but enigmatic figure.
Director & Producer/Catherine Hunter, Writers/Catherine Hunter and Peter Thompson, Camera/Bruce Inglis, Editor/Paolo Febbo, Composer/Amanda Brown (winner of the APRA Best Music for a documentary 2009). Made in assocation with the Art Gallery of New South Wales © 2009 Catherine Hunter Productions
Sidney Nolan, Self portrait 1943. Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust/DACS. Copyright Agency
Greg Hassell, Sydney Morning Herald, Show of the Week, June 2, 2009
“Narrated by Judy Davis, with a haunting soundtrack by former Go-Between Amanda Brown, this gentle, thoughtful documentary spends much of its time lingering lovingly on his work.”
“Sidney Nolan was one of the giants of Australian art, coming of age during the tentative flowering of Australian modernism in the 1930s and 1940s. This documentary, however, is not concerned with his place in the nascent modernist movement; rather it traces his artistic evolution through his tumultuous personal life…. Nolan admitted his work was highly autobiographical and here critics and curators attempt to place the work in the context of his private life, so often marked by sadness and upheaval.”
© Catherine Hunter Productions 2024