Art: Home Sweet Homeland

“Australia is the center of our life ” says Painter Sidney Nolan. “The sky there seems ten times higher than it is any where else, and the ants in the dry grass glitter as if they were under a microscope.” This same fierce pride in their heritage burns deep in other Australian artists. Scorning the abstract fashion, they return time and again in their paintings to the myths, people and endless horizons of their sun-scorched homeland. Nowhere is that feeling better expressed than in Sidney Nolan’s lyrical fusion of landscape and legend, William Dobell’s sardonic often cruel portraits, and Russell Drysdale’s stark impressions of the parched outback.

Australia’s finest trio of painters Nolan, Dobell and Drysdale are a sharp and welcome break from the past. Formerly Australian artists tried to express their country in the narrow, borrowed style of 19th century academic art. The English thought their work derivatively colonial and were not far wrong. So Australian painters retreated to familiar subjects; the aborigines, the bush, the wallabies and the koalas. Less painters than patriots, they shut out any emotional life that was not their own. Criticized one painter: “You either have gum trees on each side with sheep in the middle, or sheep on the outside and gums in the middle.” In 1937 the director of Melbourne’s National Gallery proclaimed at an exhibition of modern European painting that as long as he was in charge, no such “rubbish” would ever grace the museum’s permanent collection. Only reluctantly did Australian artists begin to temper their intense nationalism. But it took a lawsuit to unshackle Australian art completely from self-conscious provincialism.

“Call Yourself an Artist?” In 1944 William Dobell won Australia’s top Archibald Prize for a portrait of an artist friend Joshua Smith. On Dobell’s canvas, Smith appeared as an eerily shriveled and bony man who looked, said one critic, like a “seasick skeleton.” The award caused such a row that two academic painters declared that Dobell’s painting was a “caricature,” went to court to get the prize set aside. Dobell won the case, but the thunder was so loud that he refused to leave his house for a year. “I was afraid to go out,” he admits, “because people would shout at me: ‘Call yourself an artist?’ ”

Like Hogarth, Dobell is fascinated by the ugly surface of the world and is just as determined to reveal the play of passions beneath. He stretches the neck, tints the flesh, tortures the entire body. But through all this disfigurement the essential disposition of his subject shines through.

“I like to take a person,” Dobell says, “and re-create him without copying.” His subjects range from a businesslike Helena Rubenstein (“I admire Mr. Dobell, but my portrait is rather too much of a caricature”) to a slightly disdainful portrait of Prime Minister Menzies, about which

Menzies himself has maintained a discreet silence (TIME cover, April 4), to regal Authoress Dame Mary Gilmore (see color), who was bigger about it: “This is a remarkable picture,” she said “one that will live.”

Now 61, Dobell quit school at 14 determined to become a cartoonist, but spent less time drawing than he did washing windows and running errands. He became an architect’s apprentice, later studied art in Sydney; at 29, he won a small traveling grant which he used to study at the University of London’s Slade School of Fine Art. Money was so scarce in Depression London, he recalls, that “I considered myself lucky to get one meal of plain bread every three days.” To help pay his rent, he shared his room with a burglar (“I used the bed at night when he went to work”). Paid as little as $16 a portrait before winning his first Archibald Prize, Dobell recently completed a number of works commissioned by the Duke of Edinburgh to hang in the royal collection at Windsor Castle.

Wonderful Mateship. If Dobell strips away the veneer of personality, Russell Drysdale, 48, skins the desiccated outback to the bone. Astringent portraits of the eroded bush such as Road with Rocks (see color) jolt Australians into sharp awareness of the harsh existence in the interior. His outback is a silent,, lonely world of baking heat and glittering stars; his children are stringy, his aborigines stoic, his trees skeletal. In his dusty frontier towns, iron-roofed shanties with peeling walls rise like castles of desolation. Here a pubkeeper may charge one shilling for any drink in the house because “it makes it bloody easier for adding.”

Admits one city dweller: “Drysdale compels us to see what we want to ignore.” This week, in testimony to his success Sydney’s New South Wales Gallery is opening the biggest Drysdale exhibit ever shown: no paintings since 1937 from collections in three countries.

Drysdale’s affection for the outback comes naturally. Raised on his family’s 5,000-acre sheep station in New South Wales, he quit school at 18 and hired on as a “jackeroo” (apprentice manager) at a sheep station, stalked crocodiles and wild boar, began sketching outback scenes when confined to a hospital in 1932. Three years later, he quit the “wonderful mateship” of sheep raising to enroll in art school, fearful that at 23 he had embarked on an art career too late. In retrospect, Drysdale feels that his late start helped him: “I’d had no close association or interest in art in my early youth, therefore I had no prejudices.”

Leda and the Swan. Unlike Dobell and Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, 43, is an expatriate, headquartered in London. But intellectually and emotionally, he remains attached to Australia, says: “It contains all the sources of one’s energy.” In such landscapes as Greek Harbor (see color) Nolan reveals his obsession with the surrealistic qualities of the outback. “It’s a landscape as old as Genesis,” he says. “It looks like the bottom of the sea.”

Nolan was not content to be a land scape painter. “I suddenly felt the need to fill up my pictures,” he explains. “Australian landscape is very bare and my paintings needed peopling. I dug into the past to find myths that explained the present.” Over the menacing backdrop of the outback, he superimposed folk heroes of the bush—badmen, aborigines and fortune seekers.

In time, Nolan went abroad to find his people and became absorbed in classical mythology while living on the Greek island of Hydra. “I wanted to see if in painting non-Australian myths I could achieve the same relationship between landscape and figures,” he says. Last June, in London’s Matthiesen Gallery, he unveiled 75 new paintings that pursued the legend of Leda and the Swan against the background of the outback. They were a hit of the season in London.

Nolan explains his success by pointing out that storytelling is one of art’s motive forces. The Observer’s John Pringle is inclined to agree. “People are tired of abstract art,” he says. “Nolan has gone back to telling a story. The important thing about him and the other Australian painters is that they have found their own national identity. Unlike painters in most new countries who are struggling for ways to express themselves, they don’t have to ask ‘How shall I be an Australian?’ They are bloody Australians and they can’t be anything else. They are becoming the Mediterraneans of the Anglo-Saxon world.”