IAN FAIRWEATHER

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label on reverse)
Private collection, Sydney
Australian and International Fine Art, Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 2 September 2003, lot 34
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Ian Fairweather, Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne, 23 April - 3 May 1956, cat. 2 (17 g.)
Ian Fairweather, Museum of Modern Art of Australia, 19 - 29 August 1958, cat. 7 (22 g.)
Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 19 November - 1 December, 1958

Reverse is sealed and the work is framed under non-reflecting glass. Extensive craquelure, especially towards margins.
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Ian Fairweather's childhood was one of bleak estrangement and alienation. Left behind in Scotland when his mother and Surgeon-General father returned to India to join his father's regiment, he spent his early years being cared for by a succession of aunts, and was to recall wistfully in old age: 'I never met my mother until I was ten years old.'¹  Drusilla Modjeska has suggested that this maternal deprivation 'was a wound that was to determine the shape of his life; and if it did not determine the shape of his art, that wound at least gave familiar outline to the figures he drew.'²

Indeed, in his definitive study of the artist, Murray Bail remarks that 'aside from umbrellas, Fairweather's most common motif is the mother and child. Alert Freudians would doubtless be tempted to sieze on this, pointing to the artist's long early absence from, and severe difficulties with, his own mother. A mother holding her child appears in many of the 1930s landscapes; there was as well the early Mother and Child, 1935, The New Baby, 1935; babies on the hip are conspicuous in the figure studies throughout the 1950s; they have their lips glued in Mother and Child, 1954; baby is raised high and lips glued again circa 1956; we see a child clinging to its mother... in the left-most figure in Candle Mass.'³ To Bail's extensive list and numerous illustrations⁴ can be added the present work, an image of cuddling mother and infant facing a separate, solitary third figure, possibly the child's father.

However, notwithstanding any personal-emotional tensions which might underlie the subject, the mother and child is a primal and universal image of joyful affirmation, celebrated across all peoples and cultures. Fairweather himself acknowledges as much in his choice of titles for two maternity subjects from this period – the Euro-Catholic Ave Maria (title in Latin 'Hail Mary') and the Filipino-animist Anak bayan (title in Tagalog 'Son of the country'). Moreover, the family group also provides a convenient (because familiar) figurative structure on which the artist can develop his artistic explorations.

The present work was one of the remarkable group of gouaches - amongst them Kite Flying (1958, private collection), Glasshouse Mountains (1958, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Last Supper (1958, collection Daniel Thomas) – that Fairweather sent for exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in 1958, and which were greeted with universal acclaim  by contemporary critics. Laurie Thomas described the exhibition as demonstrating Fairweather's 'strange genius', while the Sydney Morning Herald critic praised the works' 'new and magnificent power', asserting that Fairweather 'reaches world heights in the ever-important realisation of man in his time and place. He not only establishes his own style but also by his perception, courage and intellect, points the way towards the fusion of geography, of religious and political and artistic expression, that he as an artist, at his greatest, sometimes achieves.'⁵

The third commercial exhibition following the sexagenarian wanderer's final settlement on Bribie Island, this show was the herald of his remarkable late period, with its masterly synthesis of European modernism, Chinese calligraphy and Aboriginal bark and body painting. Of particular note is the influence of early cubist figuration. In the present work the figure on the right, with its dislocated eyes, cinched waist and horizontal hatchings is distinctly reminiscent of Picasso's paintings of 1907-08, particularly the Demoiselles d'Avignon and its studies and related works.⁶ In terms of the artist's own history, Family Group has the distinctive, ideographic quality which characterises the Bribie Island paintings of the mid-1950s, and in its structure of conjoined mother and child on the left and distinct, separated (father?) figure right, it reprises an earlier gouache, Pied-à-terre (circa 1950, collection J.E.A. Walkley).

This is a significant painting from an important period of Fairweather's development, and well illustrates the paradoxical nature of the man and his art. It displays both transparent artistic borrowing and great originality, graphic rawness and fluid layering, in a composition which is at once tense and hopeful.

1. ABC radio interview, broadcast 16 June 1973, cited in Drusilla Modjeska, 'Painting Mother', in Murray Bail (ed.), Fairweather, Art & Australia Books/Queensland Art Gallery, 1994, p. 45
2. Modjeska, op. cit.
3. Murray Bail, Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, pp. 134,136
4. ibid., pp. 134-143
5. Laurie Thomas, 'Strange Genius Evident', The Sun, 19 November 1958, p. 40; 'Ian Fairweather Shows his Unique Position', Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 1958, p. 2
6. Fairweather would have been familiar with a number of these works from reproduction, particularly in Alfred H. Barr's Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1946)