While the ancient Trojan War leads logically to the ANZACs Gallipoli campaign that happened just across the water 3,000 years later, it’s not at all obvious how the myth of Leda and the Swan fits into the story.
But Sidney Nolan saw all three as inextricably linked – producing 500 related studies in just a few weeks. And now, contemporary Canberra-based artist Heather B Swann has brought the linkage up to feminist date at the invitation of Victoria’s TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA) through a new series of sculptures and paintings titled ‘Leda and the Swan’ – a comparative display to ‘Sidney Nolan: Myth Rider’.
Heather B Swann, Waterfall, 2019, ink and wash on paper, 70 × 102.5cm. Photograph: Brenton McGeachie. Courtesy the artist, STATION, Melbourne and Sydney, and TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne
For both artists, the myth of Leda being raped by Zeus in the form of a powerful swan led directly to the Trojan War. The offspring of this unwanted conjunction was the baby Helen, who went on to leave her Greek husband and elope with the Trojan prince Paris. ‘That violent transgression was where the strife begins,’ explained TWMA curator Anthony Fitzpatrick, ‘and it continues into our times.’
Mind you, this is a modern view. In Renaissance times, Fitzpatrick admits, in both stories, there was seduction and complicity in paintings of the myths. Agency by the women. ‘But Nolan had read Simone Weil: ‘The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man’, and he simply saw it as the catalyst for war.’
Nolan was a voracious reader, with sources for his thinking listed in Fitzpatrick’s literate catalogue essay, including writers George Johnstone and Charmian Clift, with whom he stayed on the Greek island of Hydra in 1955 to begin the decade-long series of paintings featured in ‘Myth Rider’; Robert Graves’ ‘The Greek Myths’ (1955), of course; Cyril Connolly whose ‘The present can always be illuminated by the past’ spoke mountains to Nolan; Alan Moorehead who first made the link between Troy and the ANZACs; and his fellow Heide artist Albert Tucker, who noted that ‘Myth has real meaning as a symbolic reflection in the minds of men and the forces of nature and society.’
Sidney Nolan, Pale Figure on a Horse, 1956, oil and enamel paint on composition board, 91.5 x 122.0cm. Private Collection. © The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images. Copyright is now managed by the Copyright Agency. Photograph: © Agnew’s, London / Bridgeman Images
The result at TWMA in the Yarra Valley is a hundred Nolans, many works on paper which Fitzpatrick believes are as important as his canvases, presented in a crowded salon hang. Nolan himself hung his work like that when distilling ten years of studies into ‘his final vision of war, force and tragedy,’ as the curator put it. ‘He needed 10 years to get a proper go at it. The Trojan War went on for 10 years too.’
Fitzpatrick and Swann came together via Roberto Calosso’s retelling of the Greek myths. The classicist believed that ‘myths were no mere fairy tales but essential allegories of what we were and are,’ writes Elspeth Pitt, Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, in the exhibition catalogue.
Pitt’s essay on Swann’s approach to Leda opens: ‘For many days now she has followed her. Through books, poems, and paintings. She has looked for her in ancient landscapes, in cypress forests and yellow ruins. She has seen her on Attic cups and encountered her likeness in stone. She has picked up the shards of the story and gathered them around her. She has, I suspect, seen Leda in herself.’
As a result, the artist decided to make both Leda and the Swan three times. The first story of Leda is one in which she stands equal to the Swan. In the second, she is Janus, god of beginnings, transitions and time, with eyes at the back and the front of her head. The third story of Leda is one in which she and the Swan are in union, but not in agreement.
It doesn’t sound as though Swann is daunted by the 60 years between the rich abundance of Nolan’s work and her own, as both artists’ offer their audience a new mythopoetical approach and fresh perspective of past and present, legend and history, masculine and feminine.
Jeremy Eccles is a specialist arts commentator who has been writing, broadcasting and filmmaking in Australia since 1983, with a special interest in Indigenous culture.
TarraWarra Museum of Art
4 December 2021 to 6 March 2022
Melbourne
