From Irish ancestry, the Australian painter Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne in 1917. With Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and John Hester, Sidney Nolan is regarded as a great figure of Modern Movement of Australian art, based in Melbourne, who established and gave the pulse to contemporary art in his country. He attended classes at the National Gallery Art School. Even if he studied intermittently in an art school, he rejected the academic tradition of his artistic training. His influences...

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  Biography of Sidney Nolan

  From Irish ancestry, the Australian painter Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne in 1917. With Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and John Hester, Sidney Nolan is regarded as a great figure of Modern Movement of Australian art, based in Melbourne, who established and gave the pulse to contemporary art in his country. He attended classes at the National Gallery Art School. Even if he studied intermittently in an art school, he rejected the academic tradition of his artistic training. His influences came from poetry (Rimbaud, Rilke, etc) or modern artists like Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Really close friend with art collectors John and Sunday Reed, he is regarded as a prominent figure of the « Cercle de Heide » (with Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, John Boyd Perceval and Joy Hester). In the forties, Sidney Nolan joined the group « Angry Penguins ».  From 1945 to 1947, he painted a first series of Ned kelly, an Australian outlaw, which marked the beginning of his international fame. The modern Australian movement, in the fifties shocked violently the bourgeois and noble backgrounds. Great traveller (Europe, Mexico, Japan), he has lived in London since 1953. Sidney Nolan continued to select themes from Australian history, but also from classic mythology, in a style full with surrealist elements, particularly influenced by Max Ernst artwork. His figures, with a so expressionist nature, mostly wander in vast sweeps and humor is often present in his artwork. In parallel with painting, he produced illustrations for books and worked for ballet and opera. Sidney Nolan died in London in 1992.
  

  

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