Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

PatrickWhite ARingeofLeaves Nolan and Reid were accommodated and where they socialised, was relentlessly male and more than a little eccentric — images of the hard-working, hard-drinking timber workers sporting wildflowers in their hats would creep into the work of both Nolan and Reid after this trip. Everywhere in the surrounding landscape the historical spectre of Eliza Fraser, naked and cowering in the mangrove swamps and merging into the rainforest, became a focus for Nolans powerful and bitter imagination.7 The great achievement of Nolans art during this decade (but perhaps never after with the same astonishing effect) was to relate the landscape, that key signifier of 'Australianness', to the concept of modern life. He accomplished this with a degree of menace and vernacular confidence that astounded the likes of the influential art historian and taste maker Sir Kenneth Clark.8Nolans work of the 1940s features a single theme in a recurrent trope — the outsider set against an environment which resists occupation. The artist explored these ideas in three famous series which deal with historical characters given mythic status by the cultural claims made on their behalf —the outlaw Ned Kelly, the failed explorers Burke and Wills, and the amoral, unreliable widow Eliza Fraser. When Nolan turned his attention to Mrs Fraser he was thirty years old, absent without leave from the army (he would be dishonourably discharged the following year) and miserably, angrily in love —at an emotional and artistic crossroads. Even the normally reticent Sir Sidney Nolan later admitted that this combination was an ideal genesis for a new and riveting series of works: With these ghosts as his familiars, Nolan settles back, his eyes lost in a reverie of assessment and recalls the displacements of Eliza Fraser ... 'I'd painted her as someone who'd turned in her convict rescuer; she is called a traitress... In 1947 she was of interest to me because she was bound up with an emotional state Iwas in.'9 Left Photograph of the artist in his London studio, reproduced from Sidney Nolan [exhibition catalogue], Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1957 Front cover of the first edition of A Fringe o f Leaves by Patrick White, 1976 Right Sidney Nolan Mrs Fraser and convict 1962-64 Oil and enamel on composition board 151x121cm Purchased 1988 w ith the assistance of David Jones Australia (Queensland Division) and Sir Sidney Nolan to mark the company's 150th anniversary, through the Queensland A rt Gallery Foundation Nolan's initial group of twelve paintings on the adventures of Eliza Fraser were first exhibited at the Moreton Galleries, 202 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965