As a giant of Australian art, Sidney Nolan’s work and life have long occupied historians and gossip mongers. But until now, little was known about an event that had a devastating and lasting impact. It took an amateur sleuth from Sydney to piece together the story of Nolan’s 1962 visit to Auschwitz.
Andrew Turley was a former soldier running his own advertising agency when he and his partner, Rachael Ash, stumbled into a Sydney auction house in 2012. Turley knew little about Australian art but among the works being offered for sale was a 1963 Nolan work called Gorilla, featuring a traumatised creature set against an African mountainscape.
“It struck us immediately,” Turley recalls. “Because we had travelled to Africa, we felt something behind the paint that really connected with us.”
What happened next “scared me shitless”, Turley says now. The couple decided that Nolan’s Gorilla had to be theirs. “All the money went into that painting,” he says. “It was utter madness.”
Among the jigsaw pieces Turley uncovered in the Nolan archive in Melbourne was a haunting series of works relating not to Africa, but to Nolan’s journey from London to Auschwitz earlier the same year. Before leaving for Poland, Nolan completed more than 100 works on paper depicting Adolf Eichmann, who at the time was facing trial in Israel, and victims of the Nazi Holocaust.