18 Facts About Russell Drysdale

Sir George Russell Drysdale, known as Tass Drysdale, was an Australian artist.

Russell Drysdale won the prestigious Wynne Prize for Sofala in 1947, and represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954.

Russell Drysdale was influenced by abstract and surrealist art, and "created a new vision of the Australian scene as revolutionary and influential as that of Tom Roberts".

George Russell Drysdale was born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, to an Anglo-Australian pastoralist family, which settled in Melbourne, Australia in 1923.

Russell Drysdale had poor eyesight all his life, and was virtually blind in his left eye from age 17 due to a detached retina.

Russell Drysdale showed Drysdale's drawings to artist and critic Daryl Lindsay who suggested the possibility of a career as an artist and introduced him to modernist artist, teacher and founder of the Contemporary Art Society, George Bell.

Russell Drysdale's 1942 solo exhibition in Sydney 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.

Russell Drysdale's 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; Russell 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.

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

In 1969, Russell Drysdale was knighted for his services to art, and in 1980, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia.

At his request, Sir Russell Drysdale's cremated remains were placed in the shade of a tree by the church in the burial ground beside historic St Paul's Anglican Church, Kincumber.

Russell Drysdale was married twice, and had a son, Tim, and a daughter, Lynne.

In 1964 Russell Drysdale married Maisie Purves Smith, an old friend.

Russell Drysdale dedicated works to Russell Drysdale and to the memory of Bonnie Drysdale.

Australian art scholar and gallery director Ron Radford argues that, towards the end of World War II, Russell Drysdale triggered "'a general reddening' of Australian landscape art".

Russell Drysdale's Australia was "hot, red, isolated, desolate and subtly threatening".

Christine Wallace suggests that Russell Drysdale "was the visual poet of that passive, all-encompassing despair that endless heat and drought induces", but that it was Sidney Nolan who, with a similar view, "most powerfully projected this take on Australia to the outside world".