An Art Lover’s Artist

Murray Bail gives us, after many years of further researches into the work and life of Scottish-born Australian artist Ian Fairweather (1891–1974), a new and superbly produced book, simply titled Fairweather, which builds on and augments his impressive study published in 1981. Casual browsers in bookstores please note: the large format and the generous colour reproductions of a very wide range of the artist’s works do not make this in any sense an art book of the mere “coffee table” variety. It is a work of detailed and serious scholarship and is, therefore, now the definitive book on the artist and indispensable to all those studying him and to all collectors of his work. Bail is the pre-eminent authority on Fairweather, and this tome is the fruit of some decades devoted to study of the works and of sources on the life.

Fairweather is something of an “artist’s artist”, but to say so perhaps gives the wrong impression. His works were and are highly esteemed and sought after, not only indeed by many Australian artists who collect, but by a strong band of serious connoisseurs amongst private collectors in Australia and internationally, all of whom appreciate the deeply sonorous images which he made. Even in the absence, for most of his life, of the level of public celebrity enjoyed by others (and perhaps precisely because of that and his retiring nature) Fairweather was a unique talent, with a strong claim to be the most interesting of twentieth-century Australian artists and the one among them of the greatest international significance. Not all would agree with that assessment, but the work itself supports it. Bail’s book provides ample material justifying such an assessment. He traces Fairweather’s rather isolated development as an artist and the major themes which his works, especially the later ones, came to embody.

One can detect in Fairweather certain influences, such as most if not all painters have from their early pictorial training. For example, Dr Henry Tonks’s methods for rendering the human figure as he taught at the Slade School, where Tonks spotted the artist’s talent early and encouraged him. Yet Ian Fairweather’s work is in no sense merely derivative or imitative.

Despite some superficial resemblances to elements seen in works by various overseas painters of the “modern” or “international” style, Fairweather’s works have a meditative character and an imaginative quality which distinguishes them immediately from works such as, for instance, those of Jackson Pollock and other New York school painters. Especially in the mature and late works, there is a special quality evoked in and by the best Fairweathers, for which it is hard to improve on “magic”, overworked though that word is in art criticism. It is often a matter of great subtlety in colour and sheer “painterly” effect and in the placement of elements.

Perhaps the greatest examples can be seen in Fairweather’s masterwork Monastery, where close inspection reveals certain delicate touches of pinks, reds and gold amongst the predominant greys suggestive of the carved rock of an oriental temple, with figures therein. There lay behind this something of the Scottish Colourist influence, of which William Frater (1890–1974) was another exponent here in Australia. However, Fairweather’s art involved a more delicate “tracery” of line deriving from Chinese art and very often a multiple “layering” of images, quite different from Frater’s adaption of the Cezannesque “peach palette” and architectural blocks of colours to render masses and shapes.

Some idea of this can be seen in a comparison of certain of Fairweather’s exquisite pictures from his periods in China and Bali, for example, with later works such as Monastery (1960), Shalimar and Monsoon (both 1961–62). In the China, Bali and Manila pictures, such as Children on Waterbuffalo (1933), Chinese Mountain (c.1933) and Mara (1934) certain colours and elements of the drawing can remind one of those seen in some “post-impressionist” works from the Bell–Frater School in Melbourne; and Fairweather was very briefly associated with some artists of George Bell’s School at Melbourne during the winter of 1934. Frater, almost his exact contemporary and also Scottish-born, obtained for Fairweather a commission for a mural, which he was unable to complete; and he left Melbourne for Davao, and thence to Shanghai.

The later work takes us to another level and into another world of images, upon which Fairweather has very intensely meditated. It often, but not always, has certain “oriental” themes evoking the Far East, which had a special psychic appeal and significance for Fairweather; yet it also typically embraces a universalising spirit or a set of archetypical images. This becomes more and more obvious in the progression through the later works. Fairweather then refined his art to a very high degree of subtlety. Bail brings out all of these refinements in his discussion and illustrations.

The works are very far from the Tachiste, or the spirit of mere exuberant gesture. They are, more than anything else, deeply contemplative works. Fairweather is by no means unique amongst Australian painters in that regard; but by and large, most of our major pictorial artists, at least in Fairweather’s generation, had tended to the more blatantly stated and strongly rendered images or representations, as opposed to the realm of the contemplative or meditative. That is not to say that Fairweather’s art is in any sense effete or weak; on the contrary, it is typically a very compact and concentrated statement of images with which he presents us. It has both an austerity and a lyrical or ruminative quality, reminiscent of Chinese art. Also, often notable in his work is an element of the “calligraphic”; Fairweather took a considerable interest in Chinese calligraphy. In 1965, the University of Queensland Press published Fairweather’s illustrated translation of The Drunken Buddha.

On the Far East, Bail identifies the abortive raft voyage from Darwin in 1952 as the key watershed; and he makes it now even clearer that the effect on Fairweather’s subsequent work was decisive. The raft incident has had for the Fairweather “legend” a significance much like that of the youthful Churchill’s capture and escape in the Boer War. Yet likewise, Fairweather’s raft attempt was no mere whim or publicity stunt. It represented something deep within the artist and a desire to escape Australia and to return to the Far East and to realms which he found sympathetic and inspiring and conducive to his imagination as a painter.

Many rate Fairweather’s Peking paintings of 1935 as amongst his finest. His China, Bali and Philippines interludes remained of deep significance. Bail draws on many previously unpublished paintings, photographs and letters to provide a more complete and rounded study of his subject. Particularly notable parts in this book are the chapters on the Slade School (including a photograph of Tonks, with his statement “I shall resign if this talk about Cubism doesn’t cease”); China and Bali; Brisbane, Cairns, Calcutta; Melbourne and Lina Bryans (Bail’s dedicatee, whose centenary is this year); Darwin—the raft; Bribie Island, the Aboriginal influence; and chapters on Monastery and last paintings.

Monastery was by no means Ian Fairweather’s only religious painting. Others included Flight into Egypt (1960), Christmas and Epiphany. In his summation, “Fairweather’s Achievement”, Bail says of the works of the artist’s great period 1957–63: “There is nothing like these paintings in Australian art—or anywhere else” and he concludes:

Fairweather is the least parochial of Australian painters, an artist of exceptional force and originality. Due to the nature of things, reticence and distance on Fairweather’s part, the rest of the world scarcely knew, or even knows now, of his existence.

Existence is a good final word, for simple survival and endurance of hardships were Fairweather’s lot all his life and are intimately tied up with the physical fabric, and the subjects, of his art.

Bail has rendered an enormous service to Australian art scholarship in his studies of Fairweather. This book brings us a detailed and carefully considered view into the artist’s life, personality and development as a painter, and shows why he became an embodiment of artistic quality and integrity. Terry Ingram once noted that the acquisition of one of Fairweather’s pictures showed that a collector had become serious about contemporary art and works of major significance. Bail also points towards Fairweather’s influence on a generation and more of Australian “Contemporary” painters. He shows us Fairweather’s reclusive and unusual personality, which gave rise to an intensity and delicacy in his works which is immediately apparent upon viewing them. We are all indebted to Bail for persevering as he has for so long with his researches, to produce such a fine book on Fairweather for our delectation and further enlightenment about this artist and his international stature.

In the late 1970s, Fairweather’s masterpiece Monastery, which now hangs in the National Gallery of Australia, was one in a small series of art prints of Australian works sold by the AGPS bookshops. The prints were in large format, on heavy stock, with colour reproduction of good quality, and modestly priced at $3. For many years, one of those prints of Monastery has hung in my offices. I often view the original at Canberra. It is a great, subtle and evocative work. Fairweather signed it, at the lower right, with the Chinese ideogram for “Auspicious Day” placed next to his monogram initials. Familiarity with that great picture gives rise to one criticism of this otherwise very well-produced book of generous physical dimensions. Its publishers give us a wealth of faithful colour reproductions including several gatefolds of larger works. Yet Monastery gets no gatefold and it is cruelly split across two pages. No doubt there are production reasons for this, but I think it is regrettable. Yet that is but a minor point; this book will repay you its price for years.

Douglas Hassall wrote on Ursula Hoff and the Melbourne Poussin in the April issue.