Clifton Pugh was an Australian artist and three-time winner of Australia’s Archibald Prize. One of Australia’s most renowned and successful painters, Pugh was strongly influenced by German Expressionism, and was known for his landscapes and portraiture. Important early group exhibitions include The Antipodeans, the exhibition for which Bernard Smith drafted a manifesto in support of Australian figurative painting, an exhibition in which Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Charles Blackman showed; a joint exhibition with Barry Humphries, in which the two responded to Dadaism; and Group of Four at the Victorian Artists Society Gallery with Pugh, John Howley, Don Laycock and Lawrence Daws.
Pugh was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1985 for service to Australian Art. In 1990 he was appointed as the Australian War Memorial’s official artist at the 75th anniversary celebrations of the Gallipoli landing.
Close observation of nature and its cyclical and savage rhythms became a constant theme in Pugh’s painting.
Pugh held his first solo show in 1957 at the Victorian Artists Society Gallery, where he displayed landscapes and portraits. The show was well received by critics. Col. Aubrey Gibson, chairman of the National Gallery, was an early patron, as were a group of businessmen led by David Yencken and the businessman Andrew Grimwade. Pugh joined the stable of the Sydney art dealer Rudy Komon. Komon paid his artists a stipend, balanced against sales of their work, and this generosity made them very loyal, as it gave them stability and freedom from daily money worries.
Pugh had consistent official support in the crucial early stages of his career. His inclusion in the 1961 Whitechapel and 1963 Tate exhibitions of Australian art gave him international exposure. In 1966 Komon arranged a one-man show for Pugh at the Artists’ Guild Gallery in St Louis in the United States; The Commonwealth Institute staged a retrospective of his work in 1970. He was represented in London by Andre Kalman, who showed him in 1975, 1976, 1977 and 1979, and with the Athol Gallery on the Isle of Man.
Pugh’s fame as an artist grew in the 1970s following the print publication of two radio plays by Ivan Smith: Death of a Wombat and Dingo King, both of which featured Pugh’s drawings and paintings.
