Russell Drysdale exhibition in Healesville takes us into the wasteland

RUSSELL Drysdale, the most important artist in shaping our post-war sense of Australia's landscape, is also one of the most in need of rediscovery.

The cricketers (1948). From the exhibition: Russell Drysdale: Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, TarraWarra Museum o...

THERE are so many ways to forget an artist. It is all too easy to allow the whole of an oeuvre to be condensed in our mind into a single vague approximation and - even for someone interested in art - to find ourselves summing up a life and a career in a few facile and repeated formulas.

Our inclination to simplify is a natural habit of the mind. Just as an important part of our system of sense-perception consists in regulating the quantity of sensory information that impinges on consciousness, so at higher cognitive levels the mind seeks to find generalisations that help make sense of complex phenomena. There is nothing wrong with this; but it is also why the process of real thinking, whether philosophically or aesthetically, always starts with dismantling our useful but provisional syntheses.

In the case of artists, our ability to form an idea of an oeuvre and of its development has been immeasurably enhanced by the use of photography in the past 150 years, and now by the availability of most of the principal works of almost any artist of importance on the internet. But, needless to say, this gain conceals a loss. Photographic reproduction, in books and slides, already had the disadvantage of flattening pictures and of reducing everything to the same scale - and a random scale at that, when a tiny illumination could be blown up to a full page and a huge altarpiece reduced to a quarter of a page.

The internet, which has improved access, inevitably has aggravated these problems and even, with the brilliance of the illuminated screen, created a new illusion of aesthetic presence. The works seem to be there, at the touch of a key, leaping out towards us; yet they are reduced to the disembodied and insubstantial quality of the image. We can forget, like people reading translations of another language, that this is not the real thing but a mere shadow, a simulacrum.

One needs to see pictures in their physical form to understand they are objects, not images. We discover even the most thinly or finely painted picture has texture, that colours have subtleties that defy reproduction, and that scale determines the way in which the work addresses us: a reproduction is like the transcript of a speech without the tone of voice, the rhythm and the volume of the original delivery, let alone its setting and context.

But one or two pictures encountered here and there are not enough to shake us out of our habits, and this is why we need to rediscover even, and perhaps most of all, the artists with whom we think we are familiar. Russell Drysdale, the most important artist in determining our post-war sense of the Australian landscape, is also one of the most in need of rediscovery because it is all too easy to reduce him to memorable compositions such as The Drover's Wife (1945) or Shopping Day (1953).

To look anew at an artist does not, of course, mean gimmicky or ideological juxtapositions with aesthetically incompatible material or distracting display effects. The exhibition at TarraWarra comes dangerously close to doing this in the way it appends a display devoted to Aboriginal themes to the end of the enfilade of rooms devoted to Drysdale.

In the end, however, the conjunction works for two reasons. One is that the importance of Aboriginal themes in Drysdale's late paintings makes the transition a natural one, and the other is the chromatic compatibility of Tom Nicholson's installation with the colour scheme dominant in the paintings. The work consists of an installation of bricks that fills the end of the gallery, rising up towards the glass window that looks out over the Yarra Valley.

The bricks are meant to represent those of the chimney of the house of John Batman, the man who signed - or claimed to have signed - a treaty with the Wurundjeri people and founded the original village of Melbourne. Wall texts all around allude to this event, to the life of Barak, the Aboriginal artist who witnessed the meeting as a child, and to the melancholy story of the later Aboriginal settlement at Coranderrk. Aesthetically, the work is striking because the bricks - all old colonial ones from the Yarra Valley - have been taken out of the structures to which they belonged originally but have been drawn into a new one, flowing as though under the impulse of some inner teleological force towards the open country.

Drysdale's work, as already mentioned, is presented in a sequence of smaller rooms set up within the central hall of the gallery, allowing for an intimate encounter with the pictures, but also, in Christopher Heathcote's judicious selection and presentation, for a clearer understanding of the successive phases of the artist's development.

The first works we meet with are a sequence of three early pictures from 1941: Man Feeding His Dogs, Man Reading a Newspaper and The Crow Trap. The benefit of seeing these pictures in the flesh, as it were, but also brought together again - for the first time since they were displayed and sold - is immediately apparent. We are struck by their physical reality, including colour, texture and scale, so important because it determines the way the work addresses the viewer; but we can also ponder the closely related themes, the stage-like construction of space and the similarities of physical types and attitudes.

But Drysdale was clearly concerned to deal in a more serious way with the drama of the war and, inspired by Henry Moore's drawings of Londoners huddled in underground air-raid shelters, he began to draw soldiers at Albury railway station. Three drawings follow his rapid development from a first rather awkward attempt at the subject to an impressive gouache in which the textural effects - of which he became increasingly a master - are used to evoke the livid glare of lamplight in the gloom of night.

At the end of the war, Drysdale, who had already evoked the arid outback in the earlier pictures, returned to the theme in the dramatic and memorable Bush Fire (1944); this little picture, painted on inexpensive masonite, is so intense in theme, in composition and in colour that it is impossible not to reflect on the pitiful vacuity of the endless large and expensive pictures that are produced today on Belgian linen, as their galleries inform us in much the same spirit that overwritten menus insist on the provenance of their pork cutlets.

It was this painting that earned him a commission from The Sydney Morning Herald to travel to the outback and document the drought that had coincided with the war. The pages of the newspaper (December 1944) are reproduced on the wall and are of interest for the way the drawings are associated with texts and captions and for demonstrating how many of the motifs sketched out in the parched land were later adapted into compositions that now hang nearby.

One of the most valuable parts of Heathcote's catalogue essay is his discussion of the influence of contemporary British art, particularly the trio of Moore - already mentioned - Graham Sutherland and John Piper. Drysdale's interest in these artists is well-known, but Heathcote draws our attention to the way that Sutherland in turn, in common with other British artists and writers, was affected by the war in North Africa. Indirectly, then, it was a painterly reflection on the experience of war in the Libyan desert that contributed to forming a pictorial idiom for the representation of the Australian outback.

Other influences and experiences, as Heathcote points out, also can be discerned in these pictures painted in the immediate post-war years, including the revelation of the atrocities in Japanese prisoner of war camps and the even more horrifying discoveries of the Nazi extermination camps, as well as a reflection on the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The nightmare world of the drought-stricken outback thus becomes, in the years that follow the end of the war, a natural setting for images that seem to ponder inhumanity, cruelty and sterility. Trees are not only dead but uprooted: perched on exposed and desiccated roots and with emaciated, outstretched branches they become almost inevitably anthropomorphic images - an association that remains implicit in the paintings but is given full rein in a sheet of pen and ink drawings.

There is greater serenity and detachment in the work of the next phase of Drysdale's career, although the uprooted tree motif makes what is perhaps its most memorable appearance in The Rabbiters (1947) where it is inverted, roots tangled in the air, among the rocks. These are the years when, together with Donald Friend, Drysdale discovered the abandoned NSW gold rush towns of Hill End and Sofala, which become natural settings for his vision of humanity in the outback.

No picture better epitomises that vision than The Cricketers (1948), rarely seen because in a private collection. In a vast dusty space in an otherwise deserted country town, two boys are playing cricket: the one in the foreground is bowling, and the silence is heightened by the anticipation of the hollow thwack of the ball against the bat.

Australian landscape painting has always been metaphorical of a certain relation to the land we inhabit, from Eugene von Guerard's vision of the sublime to Tom Roberts's and Arthur Streeton's picturing of a land made familiar by labour; in Hans Heysen, the gum tree becomes heroic and yet melancholy as we realise our alienation from the land, and Fred Williams sees Australian nature from a distance, trees reduced to graphic ciphers in a haze of colour.

Drysdale discovers not just the aridity of Australia but the vast emptiness of uninhabited space in which even outback townships are marooned. His later pictures of Aborigines are particularly interesting in this regard; in some, where figures are confused with rocks and burial poles, space, the dimension of separation, disappears altogether. When the Aboriginal figures are dressed in modern clothes, as in the monumental Mullaloonah Tank (1953), they too are cut off from the space behind.

Two of the most interesting pictures, from this point of view, are a pair hung together: Road with Rocks (1949) and Broken Mountain (1950), in the first of which a small figure stands, looking inwards as beholder. The space is arid and further damaged by signs of human quarrying; but there is an unexpected sense of balance and poise in the geometric arrangement of space and the stopping of recession by the hills in the background: under the unexpected auspices of Poussin and Cezanne, Drysdale finds a momentary sense of resolution in the wasteland.

Russell Drysdale: Defining the Modern Australian Landscape, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, to February 9