Russell Drysdale

Painter, born in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, S England, UK. His family settled in Melbourne in 1923, and he studied at the George Bell Art School, Melbourne, in London, and in Paris, where he was influenced by Surrealism. His powerful scenes of the outback were a major contribution to modern art in Australia. He was knighted in 1969, and became a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1980.

Sir George Russell Drysdale (7 February 1912-29 June 1981) was an Australian artist.

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.

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.

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.

Maturity

Drysdale's to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s as he explored remote Australia and its inhabitants.

Assessments

Drysdale's output of paintings was surprisingly small - only fifteen solo exhibitions, all between 1938 and 1973. 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.

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.