IAN FAIRWEATHER

Australian Pictures and Sculpture, Christie's, Melbourne, 11 April 1990, lot 111
Philip Bacon Galleries, Queensland
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1991

Ian Fairweather, Cynthia Reed's Gallery, Melbourne, March 1934

Good condition. This work is under glass and full examination was not possible.
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Three heads, Bali belongs to that highly creative period Ian Fairweather spent painting at Buleleng in Bali during 1933. Other significant paintings from this time include Bathing scene, Bali 1933, acquired by the Contemporary Art Society in 1934 for the Tate Gallery, London; and Procession in Bali 1933, purchased by the Leicester Museums and Art Gallery, UK in 1936. The National Gallery of Victoria is also fortunate to own the gouache, Head of a woman 1933, presented by Dr and Mrs Clive Stephen in 1948. Faces at the window 1933, alternatively titled Four heads, a companion painting to Three heads, Bali, was purchased by the Queensland Art Gallery in 1972.

On his way to Australia aboard MV Gorgon, Fairweather's sojourn in Bali was seemingly accidental, as Murray Bail describes: 'At Buleleng, north Bali, he idly stepped ashore; and stayed on the island almost nine months. For a while he lived in Singaradja in a Chinese hotel, but most of the time seems to have been spent at Buleleng in a house on a beach owned by some Americans.' ¹

Living in Bali from about March, Fairweather returned to full time painting, enjoying the natural environment, capturing the Balinese people at play and at work, children riding on water buffalo, women with goats, and numerous studies of heads. He described Bali as 'somewhere near to heaven.'²  Both Bathing scene, Bali and Procession in Bali are major paintings, among the largest he ever painted, capturing the beauty of the islanders bodies in rhythmic groups that occupy or progress across their picture surfaces, mural-like in their classicism and monumentality of forms. In the several head studies, including Three heads, Bali, Fairweather combined a seemingly casualness of presentation with sophistication of style, of describing line and painterly form. The freedom of execution with its sketchy notations of figures and flowers has a masterly touch, showing a fine balance between immediacy of impression and sufficiency. When he eventually arrived in Melbourne in early 1934, William Frater introduced Fairweather to Cynthia Reed, his March exhibition at her shop in Little Collins Street being his first solo show. Three heads, Bali was one of the twenty or so works exhibited. George Bell, as art critic for The Sun News-Pictorial, was enthusiastic, referring to the 'magnificently drawn heads', and describing Fairweather's work as being 'of such delicate sensitivity of form and colour, and such power over his means of expression as ensures him a high place among the artists of today.'³

1. Murray Bail, Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 21
2. Letter to H. S. Ede, late 1933, quoted in Bail, op. cit, p. 21
3. George Bell, 'The Sun news Pictorial', 5 March 1934, quoted in Bail, op. cit, p. 27