The Life, Career, and Artistic Legacy of Fred
Williams OBE
Frederick Ronald Williams OBE (23
January 1927 – 22 April 1982) was
the major landscape artist, Australia’s
most important
painter and printmaker. He had the exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art in New
York in
1977—'Landscapes of a Continent'
and seventy solo exhibitions during his career in Australian galleries.
Awards
 1963 Williams received a Helena
Rubinstein Travelling
Art Scholarship.
1966 Williams won the Wynne
Prize for
landscape painting Upwey
1976 he was named an Officer of the Order
of the British Empire (OBE),
1976 Williams won the Wynne
Prize for
landscape painting Mt. Kosciusko
1980 awarded a Doctorate of Law (Honoris
Causa) by Monash
University.
From 1943 to 1947 he studied at the National
Gallery School,
Melbourne, at first part-time and then full-time from 1945 at the age of 18. The
Gallery School was traditional and academic, with a long and prestigious
history. He also began lessons under George
Bell the
following year, who had his own art school in Melbourne. This continued until
1950. Bell was a conservative modern artist but a very influential teacher.
Between 1952 and 1956, Williams
studied part-time at the Chelsea School of Art, London (now Chelsea
College of Art and Design)
and in 1954 he did an etching course at the Central
School of Arts and Crafts.
Williams returned to Melbourne in 1956.
Williams work was included in an
exhibition at the Whitechapel
Gallery,
London, and 'Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionism, Modern' at the Tate
Gallery.
As an artist concerned with form
over subjectivity, Williams approach struck a jarring note against the unity of
many of his close associates such as John
Brack, Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman,
the authors of the famous ‘Antipodean’ manifesto of 1959. William’s work was excluded from
their major exhibition.
As heirs to the expressionist tradition,
the Antipodeans lauded a spontaneous, improvised approach to painting and saw
the function of art as vested in its expressive potential. They had little time
for - and, in fact, denounced - the 'new' art emerging from Europe, the
influences which were increasingly informing Williams' development.
On his return to Australia, Williams
saw the aesthetic potential
of the Australian bush in its inherent plasticity. His interest in finding an
aesthetic 'language' with which to express the very un-European Australian landscape.
This was grounded in establishing a pictorial equivalent to the overwhelmingly
vast, primarily flat landscape, in which the traditional European relationship
of foreground to background breaks down, necessitating a complete re-imagining
of compositional space.
In this, Williams looked to the approach taken by Australian
Aboriginal artists.
Williams did this by tilting the
landscape up against the picture
plane,
so that frequently the only indicator of horizontal recession is the presence of
a horizon line,
or where clumps of trees huddle closer together towards the horizon, suggesting
recession. Where no horizon is visible, the landscape runs fully parallel to the
picture plane, as in the major You
Yangs series
of the mid-1960s. Here, calligraphic knots of pigment indicate the presence of
single trees against the earth, as if seen from the air.
In 1960, Williams was invited to
enter for the Helena
Rubenstein Travelling
Art Scholarship, the richest and most prestigious art prize at the time with an
award of £1000 plus £300 travel expenses aimed at giving the winner overseas
experience.
Five paintings were required for his
entry and he selected Landscape with a steep road (1957),
Landscape with a building I (c.
1957–58), The forest pond (c. 1959–60), Sherbrooke Forest (1960) and The St
George River (1960).
Williams won in 1963 and it proved
to be a turning point in his career which, according to fellow artist Jan
Senbergs, brought Williams wide acclaim, especially from many influential
curators and critics.
Sydney art dealer Rudy
Komon took
Williams on as one of his key artists which enabled Williams to discontinue his
part-time work with a Melbourne picture-framer and paint full-time.
In 1969, Williams started using a
horizontal strip format in his landscape paintings in order to present different
aspects of one scene on the same sheet.
In 1970, Williams produced a group
of four large strip format gouache-on-paper paintings called the West Gate
Bridge series showing the half-constructed West
Gate Bridge over
the Yarra
River in Melbourne.
A section of the bridge collapsed on
15 October 1970, while it was still under construction, killing thirty-five
workers. In his Beachscape with bathers Queenscliff I-IV series from 1971,
Williams painted from the top of a cliff overlooking the beach during a seaside
holiday. By 1971 he had developed the technique extensively, moving from a
vertical format to a horizontal format.
In March 1974, Williams travelled
to Erith
Island in Bass
Strait with
the historians Stephen
Murray-Smith and Ian
Turner,
and fellow painter Clifton
Pugh. Poor
weather prevented Williams and his friends from leaving the island when they had
intended. When the weather broke Williams painted a number of gouaches,
including Beachscape, Erith Island I and II which employ the horizontal strip
format.
The Beachscape, Erith
Island pictures show the point where the sea joins the land depicted as if
looking down from above in the form of four strips.
Williams recorded the event in his
diary from 27–28 March 1974, "I do 'strip' paintings of the beach using sand
glued on – but the wind has worn me to a 'frazzle' … My final half doz. strip
paintings are my best."
In May 1976, while Williams and his
wife Lyn were visiting Paris and Bologna, many of Williams's paintings and all
gouaches stored at the Barrett Malt Factory in Richmond were damaged by a fire.
In 1976, Williams flew over the
Northern Territory at night on his way to an art fair in Bologna, Italy.
He saw lines of bushfires burning and later that year produced the
twelve-sheeted gouache series, Bushfire in Northern Territory.
In February 1979, Williams visited
the Lal Lal Falls on the Moorabool
River to
the west of Melbourne near Ballarat and
painted the Lal Lal polyptych, a four panel painting that he regarded as a
single work.
The successive canvases of the
polyptych depict the changes in light on the waterfall and the surrounding
landscape. Williams painted the last of his
major landscapes, the four panel Waterfall polyptych (oil on canvas, each
183.0 cm x 152.5 cm), in his studio in 1979 based on the Lal Lal polyptych.
He described the studio painting as
"a major effort on my part" and it is regarded as one of the most important
works of his career. Williams said that his "enthusiasm was fired" by Eugene
von Guérard's Waterfall,
Strath Creek from
1862.
In the last years of his career,
Williams produced landscape series with strong themes, his last being the Pilbara series
(1979–81), which remained intact as it was acquired by Con-Zinc Rio
Tinto Group,
the mining company that had invited him to explore the arid north-west region of
Australia. His work is also represented in
William Splatt's 100 Masterpieces of Australian Landscape Painting.
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