Russell Drysdale
Posted: 02 Feb 2010 | By: Sasha Grishin
Although Russell Drysdale (1912-1981) is one of Australia's best known artists, there is a paucity of serious literature devoted to his work. Lou Klepac's monograph, originally published in 1983, is the definitive book on the subject and it is gratifying to see it back in print in a revised and more elegant edition, accompanied by a new preface.
Drysdale could be thought of as an accidental Australian and an accidental artist. He was born in England of Australian parents and by the time he was eleven he was in Australia as a boarder at Geelong Grammar. While he always drew instinctively, it was only when he was twenty and receiving some medical treatment that his doctor saw some of his sketches and then showed them to the artist Daryl Lindsay, who recognised that he had talent and suggested that he should consider a career as an artist. His comfortably well-off parents were happy to fund their son's art studies and his numerous trips to Europe. In the early 1930s, he entered the circle of George Bell in Melbourne and was initiated into a rather timid form of Cézannesque modernism which, over time, he adapted to the needs of his own artistic vision. Peter Purves Smith and Sali Herman were his peers in the Bell studio, while Ian Fairweather and Henry Tonks were some of his early guiding influences.
Although his friend Sidney Nolan courted controversy, as Klepac astutely notes, "Drysdale was not a revolutionary nor was his training and background suited to anything of the sort. His sensitive nature shunned strong emotional outbursts and he did not like being caught in the middle of a conflict. His allegiance to modern art had made him a target of ridicule and antagonism which he did not find to his taste." He took shelter in the less radicalised art world of Sydney, where the publisher and entrepreneur Sydney Ure Smith enrolled Drysdale, Donald Friend, William Dobell and Elaine Haxton into Sydney's Society of Artists, of which Smith was president.
Drysdale had lost an eye early in life and despite several attempts to enlist was deemed unsuitable for military service. Instead, it was through his paintings that he set out to serve his country during the war. By 1941, he embarked on his outback images which have become iconic in Australian art. By the time Drysdale had turned thirty-nine, both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Tate in London had acquired his work, his first London show was a critical and commercial success and his art was in demand throughout Australia.
Klepac explores two very important aspects of Drysdale's artistic practice: his use of drawing and photography. Both were central to his art and neither had previously received serious attention. He was a very deliberate painter who worked on themes and motifs and sought to resolve the formal aspects of the work. Long periods of inactivity were interspersed with short intense periods of creativity. Klepac quotes Drysdale as saying "Some people paint but don't think very much, whereas I do a lot of thinking." He was also a slow and consistent artist so that in a career stretching from 1935 to 1981 he painted fewer than 500 paintings.
In his assessment of Drysdale, Klepac argues that he "was the first modern Australian painter who saw Australia as one continent. When he painted it, it was the typical rather than the particular which interested him." He writes: "Like all great art, the best of Drysdale's work has metaphysical implications, emphasising the tragic isolation of the spirit of man; it is an intimation of the loneliness of the soul dispossessed of the world and its own home, the body, by 'time'. It is a pessimistic yet moving affirmation of life."
Klepac's Drysdale is one of the finest monographs published on an Australian artist - scholarly, yet devoid of jargon; personal, but free of sentiment. It is wonderful to see it back in print in its new and glorious reincarnation.
Image: Russell Drysdale, Landscape with figures, c.1972, oil on canvas, 76 x 127cm. Private collection.
