Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Mr & Mrs R. B. Hume, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1965
thence by descent
Private collection
Deutscher Menzies, Melbourne, 28 November 2001, lot 42
Corporate collection, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED
Sidney Nolan, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 21 September – 1 October 1965, cat. 23
Sidney Nolan: Antarctic Journey, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 29 November 2006 - 25 February 2007, cat. 30 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE
Australian Women's Weekly, Sydney, 15 September 1965, p. 11 (illus.)
Alan McCulloch, 'A great documentary artist', Herald, Melbourne, 22 September 1965, p. 15
Rodney Jane, Sidney Nolan: Antarctic Journey, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 2006, cat. 30, p. 35, p. 74 (illus.)


'Glaciers that are pitted and ruffled by the wind, like a choppy sea, creep down from their side to the open ocean, and sometimes as you gaze upwards, you see a tremendous mirage forming'

Alan Moorehead, January, 1965

In 1964 Sidney Nolan visited Antarctica as a guest of the United State Navy fulfilling a boyhood passion for the continent and the story of its explorers: Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott and Douglas Mawson. Nolan had embraced the opportunity after his friend Alan Moorehead first suggested the idea at the 1962 Adelaide Festival. Like his other series dealing with mythologised historical characters such as Ned Kelly, Burke and Wills and Leda and Swan, Nolan combined myth and landscape in his Antarctic series to produce a body of work comprising 63 documented paintings.

The present work is among a small number of paintings dedicated to the monolithic glaciers he had encountered. 'The Glacier paintings of 1 and 2 September figure among some of the most exuberant and exploratory of the Antarctic series. The Dry Valleys – on which these paintings are base – live up to their name: no rain falls there, snow appears only in patches and the small round stones are polished by strong winds. Nolan could have visited the area in one of the flights taken from McMurdo Sound or alternatively on the way down to Scott Admunsen Base at the South Pole. In line with this method of transport he returned to an aerial perspective in the paintings, looking down and across...

'Critics used terms such as 'anxious', 'troubled' and 'menacing' to describe works from the 1 and 2 September when they were first exhibited. The paintings are certainly animated and this is a feature annotated in Nolan's relevant diary entry for 2 September: 'green ice contorted mountains, snowy sky' and 'blue glacier across and down painting, dark sky'. In Glacier (the present work) broad sweeps of green, blacks, browns and blue are wiped over a white or cream base coat to simulate the glacial flow'.1

The present work is one of the more adventurous and dynamic works from the series, with its lively swirls of gritty paint capturing the harshness of the landscape Nolan had endured. The Antarctic series that followed Nolan's journey was to be his last major body of work that examined the making of modern legends.

1. Rodney James, Sidney Nolan - Antarctic Journey, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, 2006, p. 33