“Shaken to his core”: Sidney Nolan’s encounter with the horrors of Auschwitz

[This weekend on Soul Search, you can hear an audio tour of the exhibition “Shaken to his Core: The Untold Story of Nolan’s Auschwitz” with Meredith Lake, who spoke with exhibition curator Roslyn Sugarman and Dr Avril Alba, Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney. They discuss how Sidney Nolan responded to the moral horrors of Auschwitz.]

Visual art is generally a wordless medium, yet we all know that it can speak volumes. The act of seeing, even a static image, frequently aids us in our inability to articulate the indescribable. From beauty that is beyond words to the fundamentally traumatic, art enables us to confront both the utopian and the dystopian. Perhaps this is the impetus behind the ongoing appointment of official Australian war artists to the present day — to help society reckon with the unspeakable cruelty humans are capable of, especially to each other.

It’s fair to say that when many of us think of the work of Sir Sidney Nolan, it’s not necessarily the indescribable that first comes to mind. Instead, for most, it is the stylised images of Ned Kelly — whose salient square helmet has become an icon of Australian art. For others, it might be Nolan’s devastating Drought Photographs from 1952.

But it is Nolan’s artistic response to the unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust that has, until now, remained largely unseen and unknown.

The Holocaust saw more than six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Millions more were executed during the genocide: people who were considered Untermenschen, inferior people, by the Third Reich, such as Roma, Sinti, persons with disabilities, homosexuals, Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents, and so-called a-socials — members of my own family died in the purge, because they were deemed Slavic Untermenschen.

Despite our incapacity to fully convey a sense of the crimes that were committed under Nazism, it remains of critical importance to keep trying to enact justice for the victims and survivors. Such justice can take numerous forms: memorialisation, education, reparation payments, and the prosecution of perpetrators.

Indeed, it was in the context of the 1961 televised trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann that Sidney Nolan began to confront the indescribability of the Holocaust. During that trial Nolan painted about a dozen portraits of the war criminal. But this was only an initial foray into the work Nolan was about to produce on the Holocaust. As Eichmann’s trial came to a close in December 1961 and the noose was being fashioned for the convicted, Nolan prepared to visit Auschwitz — where more than a million Jewish men, women and children were murdered — to work on an illustration he had been commissioned to produce for The Observer newspaper.

As Andrew Turley points out in his exhibit essay, it was during this period of preparation that Nolan’s focus turned from painting the perpetrators to portraying the victims of the Holocaust. Over a frenzied period of nine days, he produced nearly one hundred depicting skeletons, screams, and smoke.

Throughout his Auschwitz series, Nolan uses bold lines, archetypal imagery, and an uncomplex colour palette in such a way as to create an emotionally laden series of images that speaks volumes of the industrial killing undertaken at Auschwitz. Paring back the complexity of genocide to the stark contrast of death on white paper brings the audience face-to-face with the crushing finality of the decisions made by the human perpetrators at the camp. Nolan’s silent story of Auschwitz is a deafening portrayal of humanity’s capacity for evil — and, sadly, our communal forgetfulness of that deadly capacity.

As Turley notes, when Nolan did finally visit Auschwitz on 29 January 1962, what he saw shook him to his very core. It overwhelmed Nolan so completely that he refused the commission for The Observer newspaper. Nolan never revisited the atrocities of the Holocaust in his art, though the memories of his visit lingered.

Fifty of the works Nolan produced are being exhibited by the Sydney Jewish Museum in an Australian premiere of Nolan’s story of Auschwitz. The Sydney Jewish Museum is uniquely placed to premiere these works, because as many Holocaust survivors — including survivors of Auschwitz — share their recollections at the Museum which also houses a large permanent Holocaust exhibition. Displaying the works thus allows for the possibility of a larger conversation about history, memory, survival, and what it means to be human.

Shaken To His Core: The Untold Story of Nolan’s Auschwitz is on display at the Sydney Jewish Museum from 21 July to 23 October 2022.

Dr Breann Fallon is the Co-ordinator of Research and an educator at the Sydney Jewish Museum. She is the host of the documentary Trafficked to Australia, an advisory board member of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, associate editor of the Religious Studies Project podcast, and an ambassador for the Be A Mensch campaign.