Russell Drysdale
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Sir George Russell Drysdale (7 February 1912-29 June 1981) was an Australian artist. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize for landscape in 1947, and represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954.
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[edit] Apprenticeship
Born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, to an Anglo-Australian pastoralist family, and settled in Melbourne from 1923, Drysdale seemed destined for a life on the land until a chance encounter in 1932 with artist and critic Daryl Lindsay awakened him to the possibility of a career as an artist. Supported by a stipend from his family, Drysdale studied with the modernist artist and teacher George Bell in Melbourne, as well as undertaking a number of trips to Europe to experience modernism at first hand.
By the time of his return from the third of these trips in June 1939 Drysdale was recognised within Australia as an important emerging talent, but had yet to find a personal vision. His decision to leave Melbourne for Albury and then Sydney in 1940 was instrumental in his discovery of his life-long subject matter, the Australian outback and its inhabitants. Equally important was the influence of fellow artist Peter Purves-Smith in guiding him towards his characteristic mature style with its use of desolate landscapes inhabited by sparse figures under ominous skies.
[edit] Sydney
Drysdale's 1942 solo exhibition in Sydney (his second in point of time - his first had been in Melbourne in 1938) was a critical success, and established him as one of the leading Sydney modernists of the time, together with William Dobell, Elaine Haxton, and Donald Friend. His reputation continued to grow during the 1940s, with a series of paintings of drought-ravaged western New South Wales and later a series based on the derelict gold-mining town of Hill End. A painting of the nearby town of Sofala won the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1947.
[edit] London 1950
His 1950 exhibition at London's Leicester Galleries, at the invitation of Sir Kenneth Clark, was a significant milestone in the history of Australian art. Until this time, Australian art had been regarded as a provincial sub-species of British art; Drysdale's works convinced British critics that Australian artists had a distinctive vision of their own, exploring a physical and psychological landscape at once mysterious, poetic, and starkly beautiful. The exhibition initiated the international recognition of Australian art that quickly came to include Dobell, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Clifton Pugh, and others who came to national and international prominence in the 1950s.
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[edit] Assessments
Drysdale's output of paintings was surprisingly small - only fifteen solo exhibitions, all between 1938 and 1973. As this implies, he was a perfectionist, working slowly and painstakingly. He also took a very cerebral approach to his painting - not for him the unmediated, immediate reaction to the subject, recorded in a few bold guestures. Every canvas was the culmination of thinking, drawing, composing, rethinking, recomposing, painting, scraping, beginning over. By the time of his death Drysdale's stock among serious artistic circles had sunk considerably. Yet he was instrumental in redefining the way Australians saw their own country, and also instrumental, albeit not uniquely so, in integrating Australian art into the mainstream of the contemporary Western tradition, after a twenty year period (the period between the two world wars) when the Australian artistic establishment had deliberately tried to isolate the country from the 'degenerates and perverts' (to quote J. S. McDonald, the reactionary Director of the National gallery of Victoria) responsible for modernism.
Lou Klepac, summing up in his 1983 work on Drysdale, says: "He found in the common elements of the landscape permanent and moving images which have become part of the visual lingua franca of modern Australia...Those who see in Drysdale's paintings a world remote from the comforts and pleasures they depend on, feel that he depicts loneliness and isolation. To him it was the opposite, a liberation from the anguish of the civilised world."
