Violet Cynthia Reed Nolan (1908–1976) was an Australian writer and gallerist who promoted modern art and design in Australia during the early to mid 1930s.
An affair with orchestral conductor Bernard Heinze during the late 1920s expanded her cultural and intellectual milieu, and she moved in a group of avant garde artists and patrons in Melbourne centred around her brother John Reed.
[6] Reed Nolan travelled overseas in 1929, seeking out contemporary theatre, art, design and music in London and then moved to Europe, staying with well-off families in Germany and Austria, including in Konigsberg East Prussia, Berlin and Vienna.
Although later estranged, Sunday and Cynthia Reed shared many tastes and habits in common and constantly exchanged letters and gifts such as clothing or seeds and plants for the Heide garden.
[11] Another high profile opportunity was providing the furniture and accessories for Alleyne Clarice Zander's 1933 exhibition of British Modern Art in the Herald Building.
Young Melbourne artists including Moya Dyring were employed to paint contemporary murals on commissions organised by Reed Nolan.
Almost immediately Reed-Nolan's network of contacts within both art circles and high society in New South Wales established Sydney Nolan as a prominent and successful artist and his reputation grew rapidly, even more than under John and Sunday Reed's promotion.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Reed Nolan knew many of the most significant creative talents in Britain, counting figures such as Kenneth Clark and Benjamin Britten among her acquaintances.
During two years in the United States 1958-9, when her husband was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, Reed Nolan was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which was successfully cured in New York.
Nevertheless she made meticulous preparations for the organisation and disposal of her estate, which included papers and artworks, before taking an intentional overdose of sleeping pills in a London hotel on 24 November 1976.
[20][21] Reed Nolan was increasingly forgotten until Patrick White's autobiography Flaws in the Glass, which presented an extended description of her character and achievements and equally a savage attack upon both her husband and the jealousies and hostilities directed towards her by mediocre Australian contemporaries.