Nolan wrote in his diary about how his visit to Auschwitz affected him. In the months after,he couldn’t listen to music. After attending a concert,he wrote:“I see 4000 people sitting listening to Mozart. I think,‘my God,that’s one-third of a day’s batch.’ I can’t drive that thought from my mind.”
Fallon says:“It feels different to his other work. You can feel the process. This is not a man who is standing in a studio painting,this is something different. You can feel the raw emotion. You can feel Nolan.”
He worked quickly,and with a limited palette,largely muddy burgundy,the colour of dried blood. Sequences of paintings are dated to periods of a week or even a few days. There’s a series of portraits of Eichmann,depicting him as menacingly unremarkable. In the series based on Ravensbrück women’s camp,Nolan paints woolly,scratchy figures,prone on a plain background smeared with dark red. These,as well as a series of skeletal figures,seem rushed,frenzied — but up close,you can see detailed faces,buried in the chaos.
Dr Breann Fallon,curator of Aftershocks:Nolan and the Holocaust,at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.Credit:Paul Jeffers
“There more you stand here,the more each artwork starts to stand on its own,” says Fallon,“Each carries its own personality and its own sense of weight and emotion.”
The show culminates in Auschwitz(1965),the most direct and composed work in the room. Nolan juxtaposes men in striped prisoner uniforms,a print of a Byzantine painting of the Virgin and Child,and a cross with a plume of smoke coming from its peak. The use of the Christian cross recalls Nolan’s contemporary,Jewish artist Marc Chagall,though the conflation of the cross and an Auschwitz chimney add a brutal weight.
“The crucifix imagery isn’t Christological for him,it’s about suffering and martyrdom,” says Fallon. “He’s trying to come to terms with the horror of what he’s depicting.”
Auschwitz (1965) at Aftershocks:Nolan and the Holocaust.Credit:Paul Jeffers
The Christian imagery is also a reminder that Nolan wasn’t Jewish. Fallon reminds us that the Holocaust is typically seen as a Jewish story,but it’s also human history.
“Nolan isn’t a Jewish artist,but he’s a Melbourne artist,” she says. “We have a duty to connect Melburnians to this history that is not long ago or far away. So this is exactly the right place for it to be on display.”
The paintings,as Fallon describes them,see Nolan “grasping at smoke”. He is asking a series of questions,and answering them the only way he knows how.
“I think it would be easy to look at this and focus on the inhumanity,but he’s also coming to terms with the legacy of it,” says Fallon. “How can a human inflict this violence on another human? And how do we try to represent it for future generations?”
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These questions,Fallon says,are painfully relevant. “There’s something deeply powerful about a Melbourne artist looking at what’s happening on the other side of the world and having this reaction,” she says.
Aftershocks:Nolan and the Holocaust is at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum from May 1 to June 29.