This week a new exhibition opens at Carrick Hill: Russell Drysdale: the drawings. Lou Klepac, the curator of the exhibition, gave a terrific talk to the volunteer guides on Drysdale and informed us all about the man behind the art and the many influences that impacted on his life and work. I got a bonus when Lou explained that the two drawings in the show from our collection relate to a painting once in the collection. It was burnt in a fire that destroyed the library and several other paintings in the Hayward's collection including a William Dobell (portrait of Joshua Smith) and a Gainsborough sketch.
A Woman Yawning by Drysdale was also destroyed but what I found out was that it had once been owned by Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch. This kind of fact is held in the huge data bank of knowledge that a consumate curator like Lou Klepac has researched and accumulated. He knew the artist and has has studied most of the artist's known works. In particular he has investigated Drysdale's use of drawing and how he used it to plan his paintings. Lou has written about both the paintings and drawings of this important 20th Century artist who together with Sydney Nolan changed the way Australians saw and understood the interior of our country. These two artists and later Arthur Boyd swept away the romanticism of Arthur Streeton and the other Australian impressionist and brought the outback and the harshness of the interior into our psyche.
This drawing is all that remains as a record of the Hayward's painting A Woman Yawning lost in the 1958 fire. It was sent to them together with a letter containg another sketch from Drysdale after he had moved to Boudi in NSW with his second wife Maisie, during the mid 1960s.
The ones that got away.......
The provenance of A Woman Yawning got me thinking about other works lost from the Hayward's collection including those given away to friends and family, those destroyed by fire and occasionally works sold through the auction houses. The loss of major paintings like Portrait of Joshua Smith by William Dobell is major moment in Australian art history. The Archibald prize winning painting went on to be contested in the courts questioning the artist's intention in depicting the subject. Jane Hylton, Carrick Hill's collection adviser, explored the paintings and its demise as a burnt canvas in a book published by Wakefield Press in 2003 and still available in the Gift Shop as well as seven others in the monograph series which have accompanied Carrick Hill exhibitions.
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| Chris Orchard, artist and drawing master, was the special guest who opened the Drysdale Drawings exhibiton on April 5th. He spoke of the insight that drawings give to the viewer, of how the artist was working out a composition or the exploring the material via the eye, mind and hand. |
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