Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992), Inferno I, 1967, from the series Inferno, screenprint. Gift of John Lysenko, 1979. © The Sidney Nolan Trust. All rights reserved. DACS/Copyright Agency, 2021. Print Collection, Archives and Special Collections. 1979.2087

Sidney Nolan made a suite of nine screenprints which respond to the first section of The Divine Comedy. These were produced when the artist was living in Europe and creating works which responded to Western myths and stories in literature.

Famous for his iconic portrayal of Ned Kelly and the mixture of Surrealism and Expressionism he used in his depictions of the Australian landscape, throughout his career Nolan was interested in the ways in which religion and literature can act as a symbolic visual language. In 1962, this device became particularly pertinent after making a trip to see Auschwitz. What Nolan experienced there, and the images he saw in his further research, struck him profoundly on both a personal and political level, and impacted much of the work he did thereafter.

Nolan felt that art was the tool and the measure by which civilization could judge itself, and felt it was his duty to represent the human condition at its worst. Though he was unable to create art that addressed his feelings directly for some decades, the spectre of Auschwitz nonetheless haunted his work from the time of his visit onwards. Dante’s Inferno became a means to express the subject obliquely: the bodies in the series were influenced by pictures of women in the concentration camps. Art historian Andrew Turley records a conversation in which Nolan linked the figures in the paintings that were to inform these screenprints with images of bodies ‘stacked like firewood…as I painted they levitated…whirling around the skies and looked more like…lost souls.’

The University of Melbourne holds two of the nine images in this series.

Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992), Inferno VII, 1967, from the series Inferno, screenprint. Gift of John Lysenko, 1979. © The Sidney Nolan Trust. All rights reserved. DACS/Copyright Agency, 2021. Print Collection, Archives and Special Collections. 1979.2086