"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."