Australian Art and Sidney Nolan Book Covers

I picked up some new obsessions on my recent trip to Australia.

It started in the Australian Art Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. I particularly liked some of the women painters of the 20th century: Grace Cossington Smith, Ethel Carrick, and Clarice Beckett. That was also the first time I noticed Sidney Nolan.

Later I visited the MONA in Hobart, Tasmania. The MONA tries really hard to be different and edgy. You arrive by ferry, go underground, and see all kinds of wacky stuff without any labels.

But when I reflected afterward on what had struck me most, it was regular old paintings. Especially the Nolans.

I got to see a lot of my new favorites again in the Art Gallery NSW the next week.

Finally, at a wonderful used bookstore in Sydney that I will use as a model when I someday open my own, I picked up a retrospective of Nolan's work. It was only upon reading the introduction that I realized Sidney Nolan is probably the most renowned Australian painter there is and no special revelation of mine 😂

To get to the end of the story, I was excited to find that the list of Nolan's works included several book covers. In fact, he provided the art for more than 80 books; this blog post collects them all. I'm sharing a few of my favorites here.

These new-to-me discoveries were really inspiring and I guess I'm posting them here to remind myself.