“Sidney Nolan’s Odyssey”: his life revisited
Sidney Nolan, perhaps this country’s best known painter, was born on 22 April 1917. As his centenary approaches, so are new books making their appearance – beginning in 2014 with Brian Adams’ online Kindle e-book Sidney Nolan’s Odyssey: a life. Although he was written about in countless monographs, catalogue essays, journals and newspaper articles etc, the first Nolan biography as such was published in 1987 only five years before his...
Read Morewith reason, without rhyme: a Max Harris biography
Max Harris was many things to many people: poet, journalist, critic, bookseller, publisher, newspaper columnist, husband, father … and much more. He can be thought of as one of the great catalysts of Australian letters. He sped up the reaction – he made things happen. His footprints are certainly all over the territory covered by this website: Malley, Nolan, Heide and Comment. It was Max to whom Ethel Malley sent her dead brother Ern’s poems; it was Max who in 1945 visited...
Read MoreArise Sir Sidney: Nancy Underhill’s Nolan biography
With the phrase “Arise Sir Sidney,” the Queen presumably bade Sidney Nolan to his feet upon knighting him in 1981 – her words echoing in a sense what his many followers have wondered of him for decades: will the real Sidney Nolan please stand up. For Nolan, maker of myths with his brush, was no less skilled a myth-maker when it came to himself. Brian Adams, his first biographer (Sidney Nolan: Such is life, a biography, Century Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1987) has recently...
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