Shaken to his core: The untold story of Nolan’s unseen Auschwitz pictures

Sidney Nolan’s images of Auschwitz during the Eichmann trial have never been seen publicly in his homeland but will now be exhibited at Sydney Jewish Museum

It’s late July 1961, and Sidney Nolan, one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, is having lunch at home in London with a friend.

His companion, Al Alvarez, is the poetry editor of the British Sunday newspaper The Observer. Alvarez will later become a leading poet and man of letters.

Alvarez is Jewish. Nolan isn’t. Their conversation is dominated by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal and chief bureaucrat of the death camps.

Eichmann had been sensationally snatched by the Mossad from his hideaway in Buenos Aires a year earlier.

His trial - forever linked to two phrases: “the banality of evil” and “just following orders” – which has been front-page news around the world is coming to an end.

The poet puts a proposal to the painter: Let’s go to Auschwitz for an Observer article to coincide with Eichmann’s sentencing.

“(Al) is going to Poland,” Nolan wrote in his diary on July 23, 1961. “We talk about concentration camps. If we could paint the subject, it would be a duty to do so."

This is  the background to an extraordinary exhibition at the Sydney Jewish Museum featuring 50 Nolan works never exhibited as a group before in Australia: Shaken to his Core: The Untold Story of Nolan’s Auschwitz.

“Nolan and Alvarez went to Poland in late January 1962,” says Roslyn Sugarman, the museum’s head curator.