Russell DRYSDALE

English 1912–81
emigrated to Australia 1923

In November 1944 the Sydney Morning Herald commissioned Drysdale to record the effects of the drought in western New South Wales, considered to be the worst in Australia’s recorded history. The artist travelled with a reporter, Keith Newman, and returned with numerous sketches, several of which were reproduced with articles that appeared in the newspaper on 16, 18 and 19 December. The drought-stricken landscape transformed Drysdale’s response to the country: ‘The Herald ran great pages with the drawings which people tell me are good but which I feel are inadequate—I want to turn them into paintings. I feel very much like a new man—all this has done something to me which is difficult to explain.’ 1

Drysdale’s exhibition of seventeen drought paintings opened in Sydney on 21 November 1945 and critics and audiences were overwhelmed by the startling imagery:

From his former appreciation of the loneliness of the Australian country-side, he now moves with the spirit of tragedy. Here the atmosphere is pregnant with the deadly particles of dust. The vast lands are engulfed by the drifting soil, whose power of fertility has dried beneath a ceaseless sun. With a singular relief the trunks of trees, the bizarre forms of roots, rise from the sands of devastation. Into the agonies of tortured shapes … Russell Drysdale has written a most moving poem of destruction.2

1 Russell Drysdale, letter to Donald Friend, quoted in G. Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912–81 (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,
1997, p. 80.

2 Sydney Morning Herald, 21 November 1945, p. 9.

Geoffrey Smith

Russell Drysdale established an international reputation as the pre-eminent painter of rural and outback Australia. The artist’s deep commitment to the Australian landscape and its people has been described as representing ‘the passion of the converted’ for Drysdale was not Australian-born.1 It was perhaps for this very reason, however, that the artist was able to view his surroundings with a detachment that enabled him to create powerful images that explored themes of identity and alienation. Drysdale’s compositions often suggest an uneasy and complex relationship between the artist, his subject, and their place within the landscape, and at times reflected upon the rapidly evolving multiculturalism of postwar Australia.

Industrial landscape, 1937, is one of Drysdale’s earliest compositions and was painted while he was a student of the influential Melbourne artist and teacher, George Bell. To stimulate his students’ imagination and encourage them to solve artistic problems by exploring different ways of treating and symbolising a variety of forms, Bell set specific compositions. These exercises were usually executed on paper and cardboard and it is probable that Industrial landscape is such an example. The structured, cubist forms combined with bright colours and an overall naivety reveal the influence of modern French painting that was absorbed by Drysdale during his visit to Europe in 1934–35 and was subsequently promoted by Bell.

1 L. Klepac, ‘Russell Drysdale’, Australian Painters of the Twentieth Century, L. Klepac ed., Sydney, 2000, p. 89.

Geoffrey Smith

Drysdale’s rejection from military service due to blindness in one eye led him to dramatically reassess his subject. From 1940 he dispelled the School of Paris influences and began to paint themes that concerned themselves directly with the Australian experience, including the plight of rural dwellers and the impact of war on the homefront. Hangar, Rose Bay, 1944, is one of several preparatory studies for Drysdale’s most complex and ambitious works on paper completed during his career. The two versions of Airport at night, 1944, one in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and the other in a private collection, were influenced by the experimental drawings produced by Donald Friend that mixed watercolour with black and coloured inks. Drysdale purchased one of Friend’s drawings and wrote to him, ‘One day I’ll tell you just how much it has meant to me in one period of my life. It inspires me with all sorts of grand feelings, I can never be grateful enough to you for having painted it’.1 The night images of aircraft and hangar, shown in abstracted forms in black ink, create an altogether sinister and eerie interpretation of Rose Bay flying base and reflected Drysdale’s response to the uncertainty of war that permeated his immediate surroundings.

1 Russell Drysdale, letter to Donald Friend, quoted in G. Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912–81 (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,
1997, p. 76.

Geoffrey Smith

Drysdale’s understanding of the extreme hardship of outback life continued in his subsequent imagery and offered an alternative to the pastoral vision which had dominated Australian art until then. Study for The rabbiters, 1947, a preparatory work for one of the artist’s most famous images, purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1947, uses monumentality and shadow to evoke a sense of anxiety as the figures probe with sticks into the dark recesses of the boulders:

In ‘The Rabbiters’ … the dramatic distortion of the landscape serves to intensify its ultimate sense of reality. The two figures which first strike the eye as valuable accents in the macabre design of twisted roots and boulders, have an individual life and humanity of their own. They carry conviction as human beings—as rabbiters—and Australian rabbiters at that. Herein perhaps lies the key to Drysdale’s future place in the history of Australian art. If this country is to produce a national school of painting, it will surely be through painters of the calibre of Russell Drysdale who draw their inspiration from the very air they breathe, rather than from a sterile intellectual tradition.5

1 U. Hoff (ed.), Masterpieces of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1949, p. 232.

Geoffrey Smith

Drysdale’s often harsh and desolate landscapes, littered with twisted tree forms, carcasses and the remains of dwellings, shared similarities with the work of Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. Drysdale infused the Australian landscape with elements of grandeur, mystery and tragedy. In works such as Study for Tree form, 1945, and Tree form, 1945, Drysdale employed the devices of metamorphosis and deep theatrical space, characteristic of late Surrealism, to emphasise the Australian sense of emptiness and agoraphobia.

Geoffrey Smith