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Sidney Nolan

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Sidney Nolan

The speed at which Sidney Nolan worked, and the expansiveness of his production, has always presented something of a dilemma for the retrospective defining of his genius. John Olsen once described Nolan as having a "wild eye", by which was able to glimpse a motif with the instantaneousness of a lens shutter, spawning a bewildering plethora of images, from ephemeral sketches to large-scale compositions, many of which have become indelible icons of 20th century Australian art. His spectacular, highly original resolutions as a painter have often been obscured by Nolan the narrator, the storyteller, the raconteur