The Association is very honored to feature Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly - one of Australia's most iconic painting of the 20th century - on its 2009 Benefit Dinner Invitation courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.
About Ned Kelly
The bushranger Ned Kelly is one of Australia's greatest folk heroes. He has been memorialised by painters, writers, musicians and filmmakers alike. More books, songs and websites have been written about Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang than any other group of Australian historical figures.
Ned Kelly and his gang are Australia's most famous bushrangers. Pursued by police for robbery and murder, Ned Kelly was finally captured after a gun fight with police at Glenrowan. His gang members died during the siege and Kelly himself was later hanged at the Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880.
About Sidney Nolan
Of Irish origin, Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne, Australia on 22nd. April 1917. During his lifetime he became recognised as one of the foremost international modern artists.
In his youth during the 1940’s, Sidney painted his famous series of paintings inspired by the life of the outlaw Ned Kelly. At this time he was one of a group of painters in Australia who became known as the Angry Penguins. Before setting out for England, he travelled throughout Australia working on several remarkable sequences of paintings, the most notable of which depicts the landscape of the interior.
Sidney Nolan was knighted in 1981 and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1983. He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a member of The Royal Academy of Arts.
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Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly 1946
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra | Gift of Sunday Reed 1977
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The Ned Kelly paintings entered the National Gallery of Australia collection in 1977. Their exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shortly after Nolan’s death, cemented their position as one of the greatest sequences of Australian paintings of the 20th century. As a result of their familiarity, Nolan’s invention of an original and starkly simplified image for Ned Kelly – as a slotted black square atop a horse – has become a part of the shared iconography of Australia.
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