How to paint human suffering? Sidney Nolan's Auschwitz Paintings

"If we could paint the subject it would be a duty to do so"

In July 1944, after serving in the Australian Army for just over two years, Sidney Nolan applied for four weeks of leave without pay, never to return to arms again. With the help of his friends, Nolan went into hiding, changed his identity, wrapped his army uniform and rifle in a hessian sack and hid it in the attic. He was only able to resume his life in 1949 when he received his "discharged in absentia for misconduct" certificate after amnesty to all deserters in Australia was granted.

Many consider the act of desertion unquestionably immoral and deplorable. But Nolan was unable to go on - he was a profound pacifist.

In 1960 the Mossad agents captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and a watershed trial ensued, culminating in Eichmann's execution by hanging in 1962.

Eichmann, one of the main masterminds and overseers of the Jewish genocide, otherwise known as the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", was an ordinary-looking, skinny man with glasses, declared by a number of psychiatrists as very "normal", far from being insane. This very ordinary man said to one of his subordinates just before the end of the war: "I will jump into my grave laughing because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction."

During the trial, Nolan painted Eichmann in rapid swashes of brown, the emptiness of his eye sockets drifting past our gaze through the barrels of his round glasses. These morphing canvases are not portraits but rather the artist's visceral record of his own shock reaction to what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil". In his diary, Nolan wrote, "how can a disease be painted."

What followed was a storm of painful emotion collapsing on canvases in clouds of smoke, screaming faces, chilling lines of stripes and skeletons, bodies reduced to carcases piled up on carts and splayed out on crucifixes. In total, Nolan painted 220 images in four weeks.

In January of 1962 upon the request of his friend Al Alvarez, a Jewish journalist for the London's Observer, Nolan travelled to Poland. Alvarez was commissioned to write an essay on the horrors of Auschwitz and Nolan was going to illustrate it. The reality of the camp, however, hit Nolan harder than he could have ever imagined. Here is how Alvarez described what Nolan saw: "Mountains of human hair, suitcases, spectacles, shaving brushes, artificial limbs. Great mounds of old shoes reach up like rubble after an air raid...the tiers of bunks in which the prisoners slept, six men to a bunk, like battery hens waiting to be slaughtered." The imagery of Auschwitz was to haunt Nolan for the rest of his life.