We've come for the Kellys

Australia's National Gallery rarely lets its Ned Kelly paintings out of the country, so Helen Clark tried a brazen ploy. Arts editor LINDA HERRICK reports.

It nearly went horribly wrong. Wellington City Gallery's negotiations to borrow the National Gallery of Australia's iconic Ned Kelly paintings by Sir Sidney Nolan were at an extremely delicate stage when Prime Minister Helen Clark stepped in.

City Gallery director Paula Savage laughs as she recalls the Prime Minister's blunt - and that's an understatement - tactics in Canberra on Anzac Day last year.

"The Australian National Gallery gets requests to borrow Ned Kelly all the time from around the world, but the series is on permanent display; they are an icon and a drawcard and people come to the gallery and expect to see them," Savage explains.

"The gallery rarely lets them go - they have only been out of Australia twice, to the Hayward Gallery in London and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And the City Gallery in Wellington is hardly the Met."

As Savage points out, "Timing is everything. If you want something, you don't put in a request and get turned down, because that's it. So I talked to Roderick Deane, who's the chairman of our foundation, and asked him if he'd come with me to Canberra to make a formal request."

Enter the Minister for the Arts ... "Helen Clark was going to be in Canberra to launch the Anzac memorial sculpture, and we asked her to come along to put the request to National Gallery director Brian Kennedy," continues Savage.

"She turned up with her entourage, she'd just got off the plane and we went up to Brian's office. Her first words were ... " - Savage's voice deepens into a passable mimicry of Helen Clark's most exaggerated NewZild drawl - "'We've come to get your Kellys. We've got the Hercules waiting'."

A perfect lift perhaps from Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winner True History of the Kelly Gang, when the police arrived "to get the Kellys", but Savage says everyone in the room gasped and froze - including Kennedy.

"He thought for a minute she was serious, that she actually thought she would be able to take the paintings right then, and the plane was ready. I thought, 'Oh no, she's stuffed it up, this is not a joking matter'.

"But then Brian, who's very Irish, realised it was a joke and it really tickled his fancy. So we got them - our chances were slight and we wouldn't have got them without Helen Clark. Mind you, Brian has written a lovely introduction to the catalogue where he talks about her coming in like a bushranger ... "

The resulting show, made up of Nolan's 27 paintings of the infamous Aussie bushranger, in his various permutations, is an internationally famous iconic series.

The late Nolan is regarded as Australia's greatest modernist painter and the best known internationally. When his Ned Kelly series opens at the Wellington City Art Gallery on February 23, it will serve as an important extra drawcard to the capital's International Festival of the Arts.

Nolan was also a witty man who would have been tickled by Clark's hand'em-over effrontery.

He began working on the series in 1945, after serving in the Army during the Second World War and becoming what he described as "more than interested in violence", even though he'd spent most of his conscription time in the Wimmera region of western Victoria.

Nolan decided to paint the Kelly story as a radical new way of showing the Australian landscape, fascinated by the myth of the young Irish larrikin who was hanged at the age of 25 in 1880 after killing at least one policeman.

Kelly fought his last stand dressed - ridiculously but heroically - in a homemade suit of armour. The police merely aimed for his legs to bring him down, and he was given a brief trial where Judge Sir Redmond Barry would not allow him to speak because he was anxious to get off to a race meeting.

On the judge's "May the Lord have mercy on your soul," Kelly cried out, "Yes, I will meet you there." The judge died two weeks after Kelly, an event considered as true justice by the popular outlaw's many fans.

Although as familiar as any Australian with the Kelly story, Nolan prepared for his epic by immersing himself so completely in Kelly literature and the primary historical documents that an artist friend said he was "poetically infected to an almost divine degree".

Living at "Heide" just out of Melbourne, an "open house for artists" owned by his patrons John and Sunday Reed, Nolan embarked on the series at great pace, using the high-grade, extremely fluid enamel paint called Ripolin, of which Picasso was a great fan.

Nolan's central motif was the defiant yet always poignant figure of Ned Kelly, starkly silhouetted in his black square of armour, an indelible symbol ranked by critics as akin to Picasso's minotaur.

Said Nolan, "The abstract square is a symbol which has been floating around in modern art for some time; all I did was put a neck on the square."

With the series completed by May 1947, John Reed's immediate assessment was that they achieved "the most sensitive and profound harmony between symbol, legend and visual impact." However, most Australian reviewers and the public at the time were indifferent or even hostile.

It wasn't until Nolan moved to London permanently in 1950 that he was almost immediately recognised in France and England as a truly great modernist who continued to work prolifically in painting, set designs for opera and ballet and book illustration. The Ned Kelly series, which he had given to Sunday Reed when he left "Heide", was gifted to the National Gallery in 1977, and Nolan was knighted in 1981. He died in London in 1992.

The Kelly series continues to appeal on many levels, says City Gallery curator Greg O'Brien.

"They are full of allegory and metaphor. They are history paintings, but not in the sense of the British tradition of equestrian portraits which were idealisations of the animal. Here, you get the horse's rear end and the figure in black. They are very knowing and have art history in them, but they are a statement of Australia.

"What does Ned Kelly symbolise now? He could be the Irish immigrant experience, the small man struggling against the police and the squatters [the rich land-owners], he could represent the modern artist, how Nolan was feeling at the time - an outsider in a culture that didn't want modernism."

The prominent Australian writer Murray Bail, who has contributed an essay to the Kelly catalogue, has gone as far as to describe Kelly as "a pioneering figure in what has become known as Conceptual Art, who went on to make a lasting contribution to performance art."

By the time Kelly's legs were shot out from under him outside the pub in Glenrowan, he had an audience of about 500 people, some standing on ladders, writes Bail.

"In all, his performance lasted barely 24 hours, but so indelible was the image of man-in-helmet that reports of it spread ... it took a more traditionalist artist some 60 years later, Sidney Nolan, also Irish, to recognise Kelly's achievement. It is difficult now to think of Nolan without seeing a Kelly head."

And now, thanks to our Prime Minister's own high-risk performance in Brian Kennedy's office, New Zealanders have the rare chance to "get the Ned Kellys" themselves. Just as long as we remember, says Kennedy, that we have to give them back.

What: Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series

Where: City Gallery, Wellington

When: February 23-May 19