RUSSELL DRYSDALE

Property of the Late Hugh McClure Smith CVO, United Kingdom; thence by descent
Private collection, Sydney

Russell Drysdale, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 21 November-3 December 1945, cat. 6, ('Kindly lent by H.A. McClure-Smith Esq.')
Russell Drysdale Retrospective 1937-1960, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, October 5-November 6 1960, cat. 43

Geoffrey Dutton, Russell Drysdale, Thames and Hudson: London, 1964, p.261, plate 75 (illus)
Lou Klepac, The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale (rev. ed.), Sydney: Murdoch books, 1996, p.261, pl. 75 (illus)
Geoffrey Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912-81, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1997, p. 95

This work has no visible defects and is in good original condition.
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Russell Drysdale's paintings of the late 1940s have a pivotal significance in the history of Australian modernist art. These iconic images – such as The drover's wife (1945, National Gallery of Australia), The rabbiters (1947, National Gallery of Victoria), Sofala (1947, Art Gallery of New South Wales) and The cricketers (1948, private collection) – integrate the post-impressionism of George Bell's teachings, a regional flavour which originates both in Australian social mythology and the artist's own country upbringing, and a stranger, darker, surrealist mood. This latter element comes partly from the example of contemporary British artists – the pierced and bone-like bodies of Henry Moore, John Piper's London Blitz ruinscapes, the tortured tree forms of Graham Sutherland – but it also owes a great deal to the artist's experience of the 'Western Inferno,'¹ the devastating wartime drought in the back districts of New South Wales.

In November 1944 Drysdale was invited by Warwick Fairfax and Hugh McLure Smith, the chairman and editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, to accompany investigative journalist Keith Newman on an extended tour of the far west of the state, to report on the impact of the appalling World War II Drought (1937-1945). It was, as Lou Klepac has written. 'a brilliant decision both for the paper and for Australian painting.'²

Bearing the initial headline ''An Artist's Journey into Australia's "Lost World"', the three feature articles were illustrated with nineteen of Drysdale's field studies both in ink and ink and wash, and their patchwork of pictures – images of abandoned homesteads, skeletal trees and gaunt yet determined 'bushies' – captured and conveyed the social geography of the drought-stricken western plains more effectively than any folio of photographs could have done. For the artist himself, the experience was at once disturbing, confusing and profound. As he explained it to his friend and fellow artist Donald Friend: 'The Herald ran great pages with the drawings which people tell me are good but which I feel to be 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.'³

The drought provided inspiration which had to be proven in the studio, on the painted surface, and over the following year Drysdale worked up a compelling and extended series of drought pictures. The overall coherence and integrity of the group was recognised by the artist himself; in July 1945 he wrote again to Friend: 'all these pictures seem to have a definite link about them – I mean they have an evenness which is rather exciting and stimulating.'⁴ 

The power of this 'unforgettable series of paintings'⁵ was immediately recognised by Drysdale's public; by the time the Macquarie Galleries opened its show of seventeen paintings in November 1945, eight of them were already sold: to The Herald, Fairfax, McLure Smith and their newspaper rival Sir Keith Murdoch, amongst others. The commercial success of the 1945 exhibition was enhanced by curatorial and critical endorsement: the newly-appointed Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hal Missingham, spent almost his entire annual acquisition allowance of £250 on Walls of China, Gol Gol (1945, Art Gallery of New South Wales), while the Herald's art critic, Paul Haefliger, called the show 'an amazing advance in this artist's development.' Haefliger noted how 'from his former appreciation of the loneliness of the Australian countryside, 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 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.'⁶

The present work is a fine example of Drysdale's drought series, and typifies its harsh beauty. It has its origin in a drawing made near Moulamein, one of those featured in the original newspaper series.⁷  The fallen tree which is the composition's key motif is weirdly anthropomorphic – a reclining figure or a severed limb; the caption to the drawing reads: 'Talons of the desert grope in miles of drifting sand.' Spikier and more skeletal than the drawing, the finished painting features a second prone tree, and others still clinging to verticality, their exposed roots making them look oddly humanoid, like totemic spirit dancers. Beyond the imagery, however, it is the handling of the paint that gives this work its remarkable presence. Haefliger specifically commented on this maturation in the artist's technique: 'In the past he was inclined to delineate secondary matter with too much care; here he simplifies, not only the spaces, but also the salient points in his dramatic interpretation. Once he attempted to enrich his paintings with too diverse a colour scheme; now he has learned that richness does not lie in brightness, but in the subtlest modulation of textures and of colours beneath the neutral tones. These, with the briefest allusions and placements of only occasional notes of primary colours, may glow into the most startling life.'⁸

The simultaneously rich and sombre surface of the present work reflects the impressions of the sun-dried and eroded landscape so compellingly described by Keith Newman: 'The dust-laden air plays eerie tricks with light. The sky appears leaden, like a snow sky in Europe, or is crossed by great bands of black, red and grey ... at first the country seems an enormous monotone – an unending ashen grey, dotted with fragments of charcoal ... After a while the apparent monotone assumes tonal values: beds of watercourses and areas near them are a darker grey than the acres powdered with their dust. As the sandhills close in, their distant white glare gives way to light pinks and yellows, and  ... the sun creates an illusion of pale golden streamers...'⁹

Small landscape was formerly in the collection of journalist, editor and diplomat (ambassador to Egypt, the Netherlands and Italy), Hugh McLure Smith. McLure Smith was a devotee of the theatre and ballet, a discriminating collector of Australian painting and a friend and consistent patron of Russell Drysdale. Not only did he facilitate the Herald commission which generated the present work, but he also acquired several paintings: Mother and child (1942, private collection), Head of a boy (1949, private collection) and the present work. He later purchased The Crucifixion (1945, Art Gallery of New South Wales) from Neil McEachern, the picture that his wife and daughter presented to the AGNSW in his memory in 1963.

1.  Headline, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1944, p. 5
2.  Lou Klepac, The life and work of Russell Drysdale (rev. ed.), Sydney: Murdoch Books, 1996, p. 79
3.  Letter, Russell Drysdale to Donald Friend, December 1944, quoted ibid., p. 81
4.  Letter, Russell Drysdale to Donald Friend, 4 July 1944, quoted ibid.
5.  ibid.
6.  Paul Haefliger, 'R. Drysdale's pictures of erosion belt', Sydney Morning Herald, 21 November 1945, p. 9
7.  Keith Newman, 'An artist's journey into Australia's "lost world"', Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1944, p. 5
8.  Haefliger, op. cit.
9.  Newman, op. cit.