Drysdale, Sir Russell

Drysdale, Sir Russell (1912–1981). British-born Australian painter. In spite of his British roots and the fact that he trained partly in Europe, he was one of the most Australian in spirit of his country's major 20th-century artists. He was born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, into a family that had owned land in Australia since the 1820s, and he spent several years of his childhood there. The family settled in Melbourne in 1923 and in the mid-1930s Drysdale gave up farming to study art (first in Melbourne under George Bell, 1935–8, then in Paris and London, and finally for another year with Bell, 1939–40). After moving to Sydney in 1940 he devoted himself full-time to painting. His early work had been bright and decorative, but in the 1940s it became sombre and serious. This change reflected the onset of the Second World War and also Drysdale's experience of the effects of a devastating drought in the Riverina district of New South Wales in 1940 (in 1944 he was commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald to paint pictures of another drought in the state). His work revived the tradition of hardship and melancholy associated with the Australian bush that had been obscured by the much more optimistic tradition developed by the city-based painters of the Heidelberg School. In place of the basically Impressionist style of the Heidelberg painters, Drysdale blended Expressionist and Surrealist features founded on his knowledge of contemporary European painting—‘the expressionistic quality in his colour and figuration; the surrealist in his use of such devices as deep perspective, vacancy and disjunctive images to create absurd, whimsical or disquieting effects’ ( Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1990, 1991). His work in this vein became well known throughout Australia in the 1940s, and in 1949 Kenneth Clark, on a visit to Sydney, encouraged Drysdale to exhibit in London. In 1950 he had a one-man show at the Leicester Galleries, London, and this marked the beginning of a new interest in Australian art in Britain and in Europe—a trend that peaked in the early 1960s. Dobell and Nolan were two other artists whose work became well known in the northern hemisphere in this period and together with Drysdale they represented Australia at the 1954 Venice Biennale.

Of these three artists, Drysdale remained closest to the Australian soil. In the 1950s he travelled widely in the vast tract of Northern Australia, which he described as ‘magnificent in dimension, old as time, curious, strange, and compelling'. As well as the landscape, he painted the life of the aborigines and was indeed ‘the first to make the Australian aborigine a major theme of his art, while neither elevating him into a romantic stalking horse nor degrading him into a figure of fun. He approached aboriginal myth and legend sympathetically, as a mysterious complex of religious and poetic forces … in his northern paintings … aborigines share the landscape on equal terms with white settlers … they are pervaded by a moving dignity as human beings’ ( Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia, 1970). In 1957–8 Drysdale lived in London, and in 1960 he had a major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. During the early 1960s he experienced periods of depression accentuated by the death of his son and his wife. He was knighted in 1969.