Menzies Art Brands

24. Fred Williams

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After spending five years in London, Fred Williams returned to Australia in December 1956 as a 29-year-old with fresh eyes for his homeland. The Australian landscape struck him as peculiar after so long abroad, and he became determined to capture this peculiarity. To paint the Australian landscape is to engage in a historical convention that has existed for thousands of years. Landscape painting has dominated Australian art, particularly since European settlement, as artists have attempted to capture our distinctive geography and vegetation. When Williams expressed his decision to take on this challenge, his friend John Brack protested, You cant do that. Everybodys done that, to which Williams replied, Well its just what Im going to do.1 This conviction and commitment to his chosen subject resonates throughout Williams career and saw him fundamentally reinvent Australian landscape painting.

From this moment of inspiration, Williams embarked on his vision of the Australian landscape. This was a vision to which all Australians can relate: the absence of the picturesque and of any focal point, the overall scrubby monotony, the boundless sense of space.2 Williams precise, calligraphic mark-making on sparse, tonal backgrounds offered a concise visual shorthand for the Australian bush. These paintings were a departure from the landscapes associated with renowned artists such as Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen. Instead of grandeur and detail they offered a new perspective, a humble distillation of the landscape to its fundamental components. These pared-back scenes revealed something elemental about the local environment that had not been captured before.

The You Yangs are an outcrop of granite hills that rise abruptly from their surrounding plains, south-west of Melbourne. Anyone who has driven the Princes Freeway between Melbourne and Geelong will be familiar with their intriguing, distant presence out the car window. Williams began to visit the You Yangs in the winter of 1962 on drawing excursions with James Mollison. The plein air drawings and gouaches he produced in the You Yangs sparked a significant series of paintings and prints that ensued over the next four years. The first You Yangs series of 1963 was quickly followed by the second You Yangs series of 1965-66 (after his return from Europe for the Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship in 1964). Together, the You Yangs works cemented Williams unique visual language. Williams biographer, Patrick McCaughey, defines the You Yangs paintings as:
Breakthrough paintings [which] came to be regarded as the quintessence of Williams, a touchstone by which all his other landscape styles and modes were to be judged Their spots, dabs and dashes became the hallmark of his style and made his art instantly recognizable.3

Williams depicted the You Yangs from two perspectives: looking towards the hills themselves and looking outwards from their peaks across the sparsely vegetated plains. The latter works, including You Yangs Landscape (Second Series), have high horizon lines indicating the artists elevated vantage point. The flat land is stippled with carefully crafted splotches of paint, abstracted yet unmistakable as vegetation viewed from a distance. This is a marked difference from his earlier depictions of rocks, trees, and gullies at close range. Despite this abstraction, these strokes and dots come together to create a whole that is lively and organic rather than mechanical or patterned.4

The second You Yangs series was the crescendo of this type of landscape painting, as the artist worked the style through to its conclusion. Patrick McCaughey characterises them as an almost complete distillation into the decorative:

As Williams refines the style, eliminating the unnecessary to reveal the bones of his conception, concentrating exclusively on formal properties and attributes, removed from a revisiting or a revisioning of the motif, the paintings become increasingly decorative. Yet his relation to the decorative is intricate; the greater the austerity, the greater the decorative effect.5

Williams arrived at a semi-abstract, minimalist depiction of the bush immediately, as evidenced by the vertical lines representing trees in his late 50s and early 60s Mittagong paintings. The mid-60s, when You Yangs Landscape (Second Series) was painted, saw the artist perfect this practice and brought him great critical acclaim. The subsequent and exceedingly sparse Australian Landscape series of 1969-70 was the closest Williams came to pure abstraction (a natural progression from the decorative aspects of the second You Yangs series). However, not willing to sacrifice his commitment to landscape painting nor conform to the dictates of fashion, Williams turned to more expressive, colourful works in the 70s, such as Kew Billabong 1976 (Lot 26). Headstrong and unique in his vision, Williams did what he set out to do and found a new way to paint the peculiar Australian landscape. Appearing at auction for the first time, You Yangs Landscape (Second Series) is a consummate example of an artist realising his vision.

Footnotes
1. As remembered by Hal Hattam, quoted in Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p.35
2. Neil MacGregor, then Director of the British Museum, quoted in Zdanowicz, I.
& Coppel, S., Fred Williams: An Australian Vision, The British Museum Press, London, 2003, p.7
3. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927-1982, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2008, 5th edition, p.153
4. Zdanowicz, I. & Coppel, S., op. cit., p.26
5. McCaughey, P., op. cit., pp.167-168

Asta Cameron

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