IAN FAIRWEATHER

Macquairie Galleries, King Street, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne since 1975
Fine Australian and European Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 19 August 1996, lot 174
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Brisbane
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in March 2001

At the Macquarie Galleries; A posthumous exhibition of painting and drawings, Macquairie Galleries, King Street, Sydney, 3 - 15 September 1975, cat. 10
Spring Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 14-30 October 1975, cat. 55, illus.

The work is framed in a light timber frame. Paint and surface support loss approx 10mm against frame upper right. Minor triangular hole upper centre top edge - appears intrinsic to the work. Overall good stable condition.
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When Ian Fairweather visited London for a few weeks in late 1966, there was a Georges Rouault retrospective showing at the Tate Gallery.  Murray Bail speculates: 'Although there is no record, it is likely that Fairweather visited it.  If so, Rouault may well have accelerated Fairweather into the brooding heads which confront the viewer after 1967-68.'¹  Whether inspired by the great French expressionist or a reprise of Fairweather's own works from the mid-1950s, this late sequence of figure-and-faces compositions was to occupy the septuagenarian artist until he finally relinquished the brush early in 1972. 

In such paintings, stringy clumps or friezes of humanity are described in overlapping, looping lines: black calligraphic sweeps wrist-stroked over tachiste beds of white and cream, with notes of Harrison red or Brahmin blue.  Bail notes that they appear to have no particular historical or visual referent: 'As his memory ... clouded ... he created faces, universal heads and figures, which required no precise memory.  They are meant to float through all time.'² 

Clearly, the present work must be located within this group, and dated to Fairweather's final, 'tenuous period.'³ Indeed, it could reasonably be described as one of the artist's very last major paintings - it was shown for the first time in his posthumous exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in 1975.  Certainly the dimensions of the support, the bead curtain of paint drips (Fairweather by now had difficulty standing for long periods, and was painting vertically on nailed-up boards rather than horizontally over his work table), the dynamic of the curves, the opal-flashes of bright colour, align the work closely with the well-known Triple Portrait (1970-1, Art Gallery of New South Wales).

Bail's comments on the later work are applicable here, too, particularly his reference to 'the ... way the loosely painted overlapping lines ... which varied and informed each head, multiplied the gazing images...' and to 'the way the lines both form and camouflage the faces (or the single face?). Ambiguity endows the painting with a rain-like richness.  Fairweather shared Giacometti's proposition that reality is unsharable.'⁴

1. Murray Bail, Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 207
2. ibid p. 213
3. ibid
4. ibid