SIDNEY NOLAN

Sotheby's, New York
Private collection, United States of America; purchased from the above circa 1980 

Sidney Nolan, The Matthiesen Gallery, London, April 1960

Overall very good original condition. Two minor flecks of paint loss left hand edge and one fleck of paint loss lower right corner.
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The catalogue of Sidney Nolan's 1960 'Leda and the Swan' exhibition contained an introduction by the English poet Stephen Spender. Recognizing Nolan's acute, poetic instinct for metaphor, Spender wrote: 'What he seeks to create is a mythology made up of a great many stories, legends and actions, affirmations of human courage and suffering, identical as actions and feelings and truths, without respect to when and where they took place. Across the landscape of a beautiful but strangely dehumanised world, he depicts his chain of heroic legend, which helps us to live.'¹

Nolan himself is always slightly elusive, slightly ambiguous, not only in his paintings but in his public statements and writings. Around the time of the Leda exhibition he stated that he was 'trying to get an understanding of Greece through the figure of my daughter swimming underwater and my experience of that sport since I was a boy and the form of swans at Putney.'² On another occasion, he claimed that the series came from a broader mythical context: 'in a way, Leda and the Trojan Women are interchangeable with Mrs Fraser...it's the idea of a nude figure being overcome by some force or other - of Mrs Fraser being cast up on a totally strange beach, of Leda being overwhelmed by God, or of women enduring the sack of Troy'.³ Thirty years after the show he said that 'the story behind it was a private, personal one (the experience that caused the thing) and it was actually to do with England - all this green was a response to all the green of England...'⁴

Whether the series came out of observation, contemplation or experience, the image of Leda and the swan was certainly a long-standing and important one for Nolan. He painted his first version of the story as early as 1945, and the 1960 series began a few years previously, the initial works being developed in association with the Mrs Fraser and Gallipoli paintings.

The Leda pictures are famously fast and aggressive, exploring and exploiting the potential of new materials such as PVA and Helizarin dye. Their surfaces are swept, wiped and stained, slashed and dragged with a squeegee, creating a rich finish of multiple translucencies. While this pictorial attack was often directed against the figure of Leda - Cynthia Nolan recalled that 'sometimes the woman was bloody, the swan very savage'⁵ - here the woman is dominant. Rising above the Zeus-swan, arm raised in triumph or ecstasy, Leda rides a red-gold fire of sexual passion.

1. Stephen Spender, 'Introduction', in Sydney Nolan: Leda and the swan and other recent work (exhibition catalogue), The Mathiesen Gallery, London, 1960 (not paginated)
2. Sidney Nolan, quoted in G.S. Whittet, 'Sidney Nolan: Q & A', The Studio, October 1960
3. Sidney Nolan, quoted in Gavin Souter, 'An artist who stood in the acid', Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 1967
4. Sidney Nolan, quoted in interview with Mary Sara, Yorkshire Post, 3 August 1992
5. Cynthia Nolan, Open negative: an American memoir, Macmillan, London, 1967