Title

Fred Williams: An Australian vision.

Collective title

Zdanowicz, Irena ; Coppel, Stephen.

Venues

British Museum (11 December 2003 – 25 April 2004)

Date

(2003 – 2004)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: England. Prints, Drawings.

Documentation

catalogue

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

"It is just over twenty years since the Australian painter and etcher Fred Williams died in 1982 at the age of 55, depriving Australia of arguably its most important landscape artist since the Second World War. A household name in his native country, Williams is represented in all the major public collections there, notably the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. He has been the subject of two pioneering monographs, both written by distinguished former museum directors: James Mollison's A SINGULAR VISION: THE ART OF FRED WILLIAMS (1989), and Patrick McCaughey's FRED WILLIAMS 192 7 1982, first published under the title FRED WILLIAMS in 1980 and now in its third revised edition. Williams has also been the subject of many museum exhibitions in Australia, most comprehensively the retrospective of 400 works held at the National Gallery of Australia in 1987. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Fred Williams has remained little known, despite the inclusion of his work in the groundbreaking exhibition RECENT AUSTRALIAN PAINTING at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961, and more recently a solo show of his late landscapes at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988. Yet this country played an important part in the development of Williams's career, for it was during the five years he spent in London in the 1950s that he learnt to etch at the Central School and went on to study at first hand the rich collection of Rembrandt and Goya etchings in the British Museum's Print Room. The present exhibition is entirely due to the outstanding generosity of the artist's widow, Lyn Williams, who has recently presented some seventy etchings and nine major drawings, gouaches and watercolours to the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings. This astonishing gift ranges from his first etchings on the theme of the London music hall to the development of his personal vision of the Australian landscape that began on his return to Melbourne in 1957. I believe that Fred Williams would be pleased to know that his works will now join Rembrandt and Goya in the Print Room of the British Museum, to be studied and enjoyed by all those who, like him, come here to look at great art at close quarters. Williams's vision of the landscape is one recognized and related to by all Australians and indeed all new arrivals, the absence of the picturesque and of any focal point, the overall scrubby monotony, the boundless sense of space and open expanse. To express this very non European visual experience, Williams devised his own formal language of mark making and spatial configurations which he explored simultaneously in his painting and his printmaking. How this developed is lucidly and beautifully explained in the essay written by Irena Zdanowicz " ( Neil MacGregor Director of the British Museum ).