What I would like to see…

Curiously, on researching the NGV website using the word ‘Constable’ there is a link to an essay in the NGV ‘Art Journal’ number 23 from 2014. The essay titled ‘Tribute to Fred Williams: National Gallery of Victoria, 12 May 1982’ is by Margaret Plant who was Professor of Visual Arts at Monash University at the time.

However, in the article there is only one brief mention of Constable in which his romantic and sentimental views of sky and country are contrasted with Williams hostile and existential visions of the landscape.  In the essay, Plant locates Fred Williams in the historical context of impressionist and modernist painters, but also notes how his works are: ‘more than a sum of the art movements of the 20th century, more than an abstracted update of the Heidelberg school … [Williams] gives a view of man in the landscape that is negative. Man is, in fact, absent, dwarfed out of recognition’.  For Plant, Williams’ art is concerned with ‘the knowledge of the austere, of the uninhabited earth’. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/tribute-to-fred-williams-national-gallery-of-victoria-12-may-1982/

I was wondering, when I read the essay, whether Williams’ existential approach to our environment (with its contemporary resonance) prompted Mary Hoffmann to write the following:

Works I would like to see…

We, NGV Voluntary Guides, are living through strange times. Our National Galley of Victoria, full of works we cannot see ‘in the flesh,’ is waiting for us to return. As it doesn’t look like we will see travelling exhibitions from overseas any time soon, could now be the time for the NGV to start preparing some big exhibitions of Australian art? Maybe they are?

I used to joke with friends who are guides, about works owned by the NGV that I would like to see before I die. Black humour at the time – but a bit too serious now. Instead I suggest there are many works I and others would like to see again someday soon. So, what to choose?

My choice is a series of works by Fred Williams (1927 – 1982). The ‘Pilbara works’, are a monumental series of paintings gifted to the Gallery by Rio Tinto in 2001.  They were first exhibited together in 2002 at the opening of the Ian Potter Centre, NGVA. The bequest, one of the most significant corporate gifts, comprises 18 gouaches and 13 paintings.

Sir Roderick Carnegie Chairman of CRA Limited, now Rio Tinto, invited Fred Williams and his wife Lyn to visit the Pilbara area in 1979. Flying over the Pilbara, with its magnificent colour, Williams was inspired by the landscape and the unique possibilities it presented. On his return to Melbourne he produced the paintings over a short period of only three months.

Kirsty Grant, writing for the NGV’s Art Forum in June 2014, notes: “The paintings adopt close-up and aerial perspectives, propelling the viewer into and across the landscape, and often incorporate compositional devices familiar from Williams’s earlier work. Large in scale and striking in colour, they are powerfully evocative of the Pilbara and, in many ways, operate as both symbolic and representational depictions of inland Australia.” Grant continues: “Having been kept intact, this group of works possesses the unique ability to illustrate both Williams’ more immediate response to the landscape and the process through which he developed a distilled and enduring visual interpretation of it.”

The NGV has over 1900 works by Fred Williams in the collection. Most of the works are works on paper (lithographs, etchings, engravings, gouaches and linocuts) and depict his fascination with the landscape but also with performers and performance. The Pilbara Series is one of the most popular and treasured collections of landscape paintings ever produced by an Australian artist. It is one of the few significant series of paintings to remain intact and its importance is further emphasised by the fact that these paintings were among the last works Williams painted before his death in 1982.

Thank you, Mary, for reminding us of the beauty of Williams’ art and for posing the question: ‘What would you like to see someday in a monumental exhibition of Treasures of the NGV?’