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Sunday, 11 July 2021

Artlyst: Sidney Nolan: Colour of the Sky – Auschwitz Paintings

My latest article for Artlyst is a preview of 'Sidney Nolan: Colour of the Sky - Auschwitz Paintings' at Sidney Nolan Trust:

'The emotions of Auschwitz were so deep and so strong, however, that they essentially overwhelmed him with the visit triggering ‘an unexpected and lasting retreat from any direct Auschwitz imagery.’

Yet, for that brief period between the Eichmann portraits and his leaving for Poland, Nolan joined Francis Bacon, Romare Bearden, Marc Chagall, Abraham Rattner, Graham Sutherland, and others in finding the image of the crucifixion to be a visual and emotional equivalent to the suffering imposed and endured in the Holocaust.

Nolan had first worked with religious imagery in the summer of 1951 and 1952 when he created a series of seven religious paintings, including Flight into Egypt and St Francis receiving the stigmata, all intended for a future exhibition that was never realised and some for the Blake Prize exhibition of 1952. The series was inspired by a European trip on which he realised ‘that the painters who moved me most (El Greco & Giotto) seemed men primarily of faith.’ Nolan, therefore, joined artists such as Arthur Boyd, Bernard Buffet, Eric Gill, David Jones, Colin McCahon, Georges Rouault, F.N. Souza, Stanley Spencer, and others in expressing a modernist preoccupation with religion and spirituality in this period. Nolan’s Auschwitz paintings are among the rawest expressions of the unredeemable horror that was the Holocaust.’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Posted by Jonathan Evens at 22:32
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