Making HistoryNolan at the Newsagent

In July 1942 the young Sidney Nolan held a ground-breaking exhibition in the window of Sheffield’s newsagency in the Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg. It was the idea of Nolan’s benefactors, John and Sunday Reed, to take art ‘to the people’ rather than to an exclusive audience in an art gallery. The works were mostly experimental landscape images and the prices low, but nothing sold and many of the paintings subsequently languished in obscurity.

Nolan at the Newsagent re-creates this remarkable but little-known venture, bringing together the surviving compositions, which have been identified through photographs of the display taken at the time. The exhibition is the fourth in the Making History series, which focuses on artists central to Heide’s rich legacy and highlights artworks and material from the museum’s collection and archive.