RUSSELL DRYSDALE

Macquarie Gallery, Sydney
Fine Australian and International Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 2 May 2000, lot 29
Bensons Collection, Melbourne
Australian and International Fine Art, Deutscher-Menzies, 16 June 2004, lot 26
Private collection; purchased from the above

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 1-13 November 1961, cat. 4
Australian Art: McCubbin to Whiteley, Bundoora Homestead Federation Centre for the Arts, Melbourne, 11 April - 1 June 2003

Geoffrey Dutton, Russell Drysdale, Thames and Hudson, London, 1964, cat. 122, p. 151, illus

Good condition. Slight deformation of canvas to upper stretcher bar. This work is sealed on the reverse.
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Irritated by reports of his paintings being sold on the secondary market by 'a few snide characters' for very high prices, in 1961 Russell Drysdale staged an exhibition at Macquarie Galleries for 'the main purpose of letting people know what they can expect to pay and know if they are being cheated if asked some stupid price.'¹ The Macquarie Galleries show of November 1961 was therefore something of a deliberately mixed offering: ten oil paintings, from a small 8'' by 10'' Study for Birders to the six-foot Mangula, together with twenty-four drawings.  The works also ranged widely in subject matter: from bush characters like Happy Jack to dense and potent Melville Island Tiwi portraits to scenes of muttonbirding on the Bass Strait islands.

The two dozen drawings were the set which Drysdale had made on commission for Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Mirror: illustrations for three articles by Keith Newman, the same journalist with whom the artist had worked years previously in recording the 1944 drought.  Titled 'Dark Heritage', this series examined the economic and social situation of Aboriginal Australians in the reserves, fringe camps and towns of western New South Wales, and Drysdale and Newman travelled to Condobolin, Moree and Wilcannia observing, interviewing and sketching.

The present work is an oil painting, but is also a direct outcome of that 1961 outback trip.  The young mother and her chubby three year old are clearly the same as those in one of the sketches published in the Mirror, as well as in a more finished contemporary drawing.²

The image of the bush Madonna is one of Drysdale's most powerful inventions.  His oeuvre is full of sad, silent, stoical women, nursing or standing beside their shy offspring, often in a characteristically bare and forbidding landscape.  Mothers and children feature in works from the early, Bell School style Sunday Evening (1941, Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Mother and Child (1942, private collection), through The Football Game (1945, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery) and Mother and Child, North Queensland (also known as Street in Cairns, 1949-50, private collection) to Mt. White (1953, private collection) and other 1950s images of Cape York Aboriginal families, to the powerful Ceremony at the Rockface (1963, National Gallery of Australia), even in The Gatekeeper's Wife (1965, Art Gallery of Western Australia).

The idea of family is closely allied to that of race, and it should come as no surprise to find this Madonna emerging from Drysdale's ongoing engagement with Aboriginal communities.  The work was painted some years before the 1967 referendum, before Aboriginal Australians attained full legal and civil rights; this paintings' broadly empty background and its loose skeins of wristy, cursive brushstrokes describe a somewhat tenuous identity.  Mother and Child could be described in the words Lou Klepac uses for the closely contemporary birding island subjects, as containing 'figures like ghosts, undefined and transparent, merging together in a strange crepuscular atmosphere.'³

Although mother and child are bound together by red blood and by their cocoon of white drapery, the painting also conveys a subliminal tragic sense of passivity, of disconnection.  The mother's hands sit loosely between her thighs, palm downwards, supporting but somehow not actively embracing her little boy.  Working (as ever) in the space between naturalism and myth, Drysdale here creates a powerful archetype of womanhood, of procreation and loss, an image which is sat once Madonna and Child and Pièta.

1. Russell Drysdale, letter to George Bell, 9 November 1961, in June Helmer (ed.), Russell Drysdale to George Bell: Letters 1945 - 1965, the author, Melbourne, 1982, letter 39
2. 'Marginal Men', Sunday Mirror, 19 March 1961, p. 18. Mother and child, ink on paper, exhibited The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 15-30 August 1967, cat. no. 34, illus. Interestingly, the heavy baby reappears in a later Mother and Child (1963, private collection) which is also a reprise of Drysdale's Mt. White composition.
3.  Lou Klepac, The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale (rev. ed.), Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996, p. 162