KEY POINTS:
As Aussies go, Sidney Nolan was far from "fair dinkum". He deserted his family, the Army and his country, broke the cardinal rule of mateship - don't sleep with your mate's wife, or your mate for that matter - and spent much of his life worshipping an absinthe-addled French poet.
No matter: he was an "artiste", and one should excuse or expect such proclivities from one's creative types; maybe he really is the ideal art icon for the lucky country.
Still, it's a status currently under review courtesy of the first large-scale exhibition of his work to tour Nolan's homeland since his death in 1992. There was certainly a truckload for Sydney curator Barry Pearce to choose from. Nolan himself claimed to have completed about 35,000 paintings, so plenty of greatness can be found within that mountain of canvas and paint.
But for this collection of 117 works, on display at the Queensland Art Gallery until September 28, Pearce has gone for a thematic rather than populist approach, and you won't find any of Nolan's Gallipoli paintings.
If you have seen only a few Nolans it's inevitable they will have featured the otherworldly, black hole of Ned Kelly's armour, a motif he practically built a legacy around, returning to and recreating it over and over no matter where in the world he happened to be living.
But we are talking themes, so while there are a few Ned Kellys on display, they certainly don't dominate. Instead Pearce uses a simple chronological progression to illustrate how an idealised Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th century French child-poet and decadent role model, served as Nolan's constant north star.
Nolan was born in 1917 as a working-class kid from St Kilda who dropped out of school at 14. By 16 he was already knee-deep in Melbourne University's philosophy reading list while dividing his time between part-time jobs and art classes. Then a mate suggested he read Rimbaud after hearing Nolan laud the virtues of Paris over the drudgery of Sydney life and it was all on.
He was working in commercial art making illuminated signs, spray painted displays, and advertisements for Fayrefield Hats - shades of Kelly's helmet? - but he had grand ambitions of taking on the impressionist and post-impressionist art coming out of Europe.
It's not that his emerging, childlike style was particularly clever, it was more that no one else in Australia was doing it. So while his contemporaries churned out landscapes that looked like dusty versions of England with peculiar animals, Nolan was aping his long-dead muse by trying to stir people up.
By 1941, Nolan was married with a child, Imelda, but as was probably inevitable, his spirit saw him gravitate towards anything exhibiting the decadence, passion and pretension of his romanticised vision of Europe.
He quickly fell under the spell of the Heidi Circle, a shifting melange of artists centred on a former dairy farm north of Melbourne owned by John and Sunday Reed.
Mrs Reed had a predilection for the artists they hosted and Nolan was prime meat, feverishly listening to her recite Rimbaud to him in French - a language he couldn't speak. At times the trio would pool their passions for threesomes.
Mrs Nolan and wee Imelda were quickly forgotten as his painting entered a new phase, a style first seen in his Moonboy work.
Then war and conscription intervened with Nolan serving his time in outback Wimmera, a landscape he was still painting more than 20 years after leaving the area.
It was also where he discovered Ripolin, a house paint which played a huge role in his signature style for many years.
In early 1944 he was invited to illustrate the cover of a magazine being published to launch a brilliant new poet, Ern Malley. He threw himself into the idea only to discover he and the publisher had been hoaxed.
In July he deserted to avoid an impending posting to New Guinea and returned to the Reeds. In his mind both incidents resolved into the character of Ned Kelly as outlaw, fugitive, outsider and dreamer, while his depiction was pure Rimbaud, the collider of opposites, with blocks of impenetrable blackness on naturalistic backgrounds, a style that reached its zenith with his Riverbend series of the mid-60s.
Nolan's most recognised Kellys were painted in the Reeds' living room in 1946, but it ended in tears when Sunday refused to leave with him. Nolan's solution? He married John Reed's sister Cynthia and carried a grudge forever.
A couple of years later the new Nolans went to England after his genius had been anointed by English art historian Sir Kenneth Clark and his sideline career as compulsive traveller began. The exhibition features series based on his visits to Greece, Italy, the Middle East, the United States, China, Africa and Antarctica, dotted with the occasional Ned Kelly, desiccated desertscape and visual swipes at Sunday Reed.
By the 1980s, he returned to the spraypaint of his youth, hanging suspended over large canvases as he worked. This final phase ended in 1986 with his ghostly self-portrait, a lifetime and multiple stylistic shifts from the one he'd painted in 1943, and with that he declared his innings closed.
Yet, in all the time between those works and despite the evident change, Nolan remained an unreconstructed old-school Aussie - you won't see the slightest interest in anything Aboriginal in his work.
So, on one hand his efforts earned Nolan considerable cash and notoriety. He saw the world, he painted the world, he got a knighthood and he left a legacy. On the other hand, he dumped a family, his second wife killed herself in 1976 and Sunday Reed followed suit five years later despite an attempted reconciliation. You'll have to decide if Rimbaud would have approved of him yourself.
* Alan Perrott travelled to Brisbane courtesy of Air NZ and Brisbane Marketing.
SIR SIDNEY ROBERT NOLAN
Born: April 22, 1917 in Melbourne; died November 28, 1992, in London.
Who: Australia's best-known painter and printmaker, especially renowned for his Ned Kelly paintings.
What: Sidney Nolan: A New Retrospective
Where and when: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, to September 28.
