Sidney Nolan 'Leda and Swan' 1961
Artist: Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (1917-1992)
Title: plate 6 from the series ‘The Leda Suite’
Medium: lithograph on wove paper
Date: 1961
Publisher: Ganymed Press London Ltd.
Signature and numbering: Signed ‘Nolan’ in pencil lower left and numbered from the edition of 125
Size: 44.5 x 59 cm (image size)
Provenance: With Folio Fine Art Ltd., where acquired by the former owner in 1971
Stock number: RB00265
Delivery: Please note this is a very large and heavy item and will require additional delivery costs.
Sir Sidney Nolan, plate 6 from ‘The Leda Suite’ a portfolio of eight lithographs on the theme of Leda and the Swan, the first set of lithographs Nolan ever produced. Examples of this series are held in the collections of major public galleries in the U.K and Australia including the Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Artist: Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (1917-1992)
Title: plate 6 from the series ‘The Leda Suite’
Medium: lithograph on wove paper
Date: 1961
Publisher: Ganymed Press London Ltd.
Signature and numbering: Signed ‘Nolan’ in pencil lower left and numbered from the edition of 125
Size: 44.5 x 59 cm (image size)
Provenance: With Folio Fine Art Ltd., where acquired by the former owner in 1971
Stock number: RB00265
Delivery: Please note this is a very large and heavy item and will require additional delivery costs.
Sir Sidney Nolan, plate 6 from ‘The Leda Suite’ a portfolio of eight lithographs on the theme of Leda and the Swan, the first set of lithographs Nolan ever produced. Examples of this series are held in the collections of major public galleries in the U.K and Australia including the Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Artist: Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (1917-1992)
Title: plate 6 from the series ‘The Leda Suite’
Medium: lithograph on wove paper
Date: 1961
Publisher: Ganymed Press London Ltd.
Signature and numbering: Signed ‘Nolan’ in pencil lower left and numbered from the edition of 125
Size: 44.5 x 59 cm (image size)
Provenance: With Folio Fine Art Ltd., where acquired by the former owner in 1971
Stock number: RB00265
Delivery: Please note this is a very large and heavy item and will require additional delivery costs.
Sir Sidney Nolan, plate 6 from ‘The Leda Suite’ a portfolio of eight lithographs on the theme of Leda and the Swan, the first set of lithographs Nolan ever produced. Examples of this series are held in the collections of major public galleries in the U.K and Australia including the Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Leda and the swan was a persistent and important image for Nolan. His Leda pictures and the Leda Suite lithographs are famously spontaneous and combative, exploring and exploiting the potential of their medium. In the Leda Suite lithographs, Nolan drew the images directly onto the stone; sweeping and wiping the medium to create a series of images with layers of watery translucency. The stone was printed by John Watson at Ganymed Press in London who at the time were one of the leading print publishers in Europe.
Nolan first showed paintings on the theme in the exhibition 'Leda and the Swan and Other Recent Works: Sidney Nolan’ at The Matthieson Gallery, 142 New Bond Street London, from 16 June to 16 July, 1960. Stephen Spender wrote in the introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue, 'What he seeks to create is a mythology made up of a great many stories, legends and actions, affirmations of human courage and suffering, identical as actions and feelings and truths, without respect to when and where they took place. Across the landscape of a beautiful but strangely dehumanised world, he depicts his chain of heroic legend, which helps us to live.'(1)
Nolan stated that he was 'trying to get an understanding of Greece through the figure of my daughter swimming underwater and my experience of that sport since I was a boy and the form of swans at Putney.' (2) He also discussed the series in a broader mythical context: 'in a way, Leda and the Trojan Women are interchangeable with Mrs Fraser...it's the idea of a nude figure being overcome by some force or other - of Mrs Fraser being cast up on a totally strange beach, of Leda being overwhelmed by God, or of women enduring the sack of Troy'. (3) In the 1990s he explained that 'the story behind it was a private, personal one (the experience that caused the thing) and it was actually to do with England - all this green was a response to all the green of England...' (4)
1. Stephen Spender, 'Introduction', in Sydney Nolan: Leda and the swan and other recent work (exhibition catalogue), The Mathiesen Gallery, London, 1960 (not paginated)
2. Sidney Nolan, quoted in G.S. Whittet, 'Sidney Nolan: Q & A', The Studio, October 1960
3. Sidney Nolan, quoted in Gavin Souter, 'An artist who stood in the acid', Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 1967
4. Sidney Nolan, quoted in interview with Mary Sara, Yorkshire Post, 3 August 1992
