‘A nice reunion’: How Sidney Nolan’s signature Ned Kelly series was brought back together

It’s the art world equivalent of getting the band back together.

When the Art Gallery of NSW was preparing a new exhibition on Sidney Nolan’s formative creative years, it already had his celebrated Ned Kelly painting First-Class Marksman, having bought it for a record-breaking $5.4 million in 2010.

But the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra had the other 26 paintings in a series that is considered a national treasure, well known and loved enough to inspire a gang of letter-box Ned Kellys in the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics and influence the most recent Australian film on the legendary bushranger, Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang.

In an admirable display of co-operation the National Gallery has crated up its paintings and trucked them to Sydney so the full set – all the outlaws – can be exhibited together for the first time in almost 30 years, and the first time in Sydney for more than 60.

“It’s a nice reunion,” the gallery’s senior curator of Australian art, Denise Mimmocchi, said on a tour of the exhibition before it opens on Saturday. “It’s given us the opportunity to not just reunite them with the missing painting but also show them in a slightly different context.”

In a darkened room, the 27 vibrant paintings are presented in the order that Nolan preferred when they were originally exhibited in Melbourne in 1948 rather than the order in which they were painted. They seem almost like the storyboard for a wild new bushranger film.

“Nolan was deeply inspired by film and animation so there is something of a filmic quality to the sequence,” Mimmocchi said. “We wanted to present them in that context.”

The exhibition, Nolan: Origins, includes more than 150 works from his intense output as a young artist from the late 1930s until he left Australia for the United Kingdom in 1953.

It shows how he went from modernist experimentation to a visionary who, with his landscapes, is credited with redefining a vision of the continent.

Nolan painted the Ned Kelly series after deserting from the army in 1944 and living under the assumed name Robin Murray.

Mimmocchi said the series attracted little attention when it was first exhibited in Australia and became celebrated only after arts patrons John and Sunday Reed showed it in Paris, Rome and London.

“It gained international exposure before coming back here,” she said.

Elspeth Pitt, the National Gallery’s senior curator of Australian art, described the Ned Kelly paintings as “some of the best-known and best-loved works” in Australian art.

Its 26 works were valued at about $150 million last year.

“They’re key to the story of modernism in Australia,” she said. “They’re key also to the effort of artists in the 19th and 20th centuries to make myths around Australia and Australian identity,” Pitt said.

While they are usually on permanent display in Canberra, “we appreciate the great significance of the exhibition, and the undertaking the Art Gallery of NSW has embarked on, so we really want to support them,” she said. “It’s going to be a fantastic show.”

Kurzel said the Nolan paintings influenced his 2019 film True History of the Kelly Gang, based on a Peter Carey novel, particularly a work that had the gang member Steve Hart wearing a dress.

“There was something really playful and kind of abandoned about his paintings and a sense of fun and colour, too,” he said. “They’re almost like paintings from a car spray garage …

“For [them] to be painted in the ’40s in Australia, they must have been pretty avant garde and extreme. But they still feel really fresh and new and bold.”

So is there a quid pro quo for the National Gallery in lending the Nolan paintings? Does it want its Sydney counterpart to send First-Class Marksman to join the other 26 paintings when they are back in Canberra?

“Oh, that would be wonderful,” Pitt said. “I’m sure we’ll discuss that at some stage.”

Nolan: Origins opens at the Art Gallery of NSW on Saturday, October 3. Director Justin Kurzel will speak after a screening of True History of the Kelly Gang at the gallery the same day.

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