Curator Barry Pearce discusses the Kelly Series paintings which Nolan has said “are secretly about myself ... it’s an inner history of my own emotions”.

Nolan’s painting Mrs Fraser, where treachery has reduced the woman to a beast, can be viewed as a metaphor for events in Nolan’s own life, as Curator Barry Pearce explains.

In his paintings about these ill-fated heroes, Nolan reaffirmed the possibility of history painting at a time when rampant modernism had virtually stamped it out.

Curator Barry Pearce and Sidney Nolan discuss Nolan’s initial lack of interest in the Australian landscape as a subject for painting and the circumstances that led him to change his view.

The May 1944 edition of Angry Penguins trumpeted the discovery of a major Australian poetic talent – Ern Malley. Nolan painted the cover illustration, Arabian Tree, from one of the lines, and reflects here on his involvement.

Anyone who has experienced that creaking, nearer-my-god-to-thee roller coaster at Luna Park, St Kilda, will identify with this colourful, rickety painting by Sidney Nolan.

The Ern Malley hoax threw some of his modernist friends off balance, but Nolan’s self portrait expressed his reaction to controversy. When attacked with words, Nolan fought back with paint.

In 1939, Sidney Nolan showed his abstract Head of Rimbaud, executed with an inventive mixture of oil and Kiwi boot polish, and secured a commission as the designer for the ballet Icare.

Curator Barry Pearce explains why Nolan’s Boy with the Moon, painted in 1940, was a controversial painting for the time and contained the seeds for Nolan’s future work.

Barry Pearce, Head Curator of Australian Art from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, introduces the Sidney Nolan exhibition.