Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Estate of the Artist, Melbourne
Christie's, Melbourne, 3 May 1988, lot 299
Private collection, Sydney


Crooked Tree, You Yangs, was painted in 1978 during a time of great transition in the work of Fred Williams, particularly with regard to palette, perspective and approach to his subject matter. As the decade opened, the artist found a new form of expressiveness, which would transform his art. Patrick McCaughey notes, 'The 1974 landscapes mark the turning-point. The difficulties, the great challenge in method, colour and subject matter, were confronted in the studio and absorbed into Williams's new grand manner.'1

His refined minimalist landscapes of the 1960s gave way to a new expressionism with paint applied in richly-coloured daubs, each brush stroke swirled with lavish, exotic colours. Notably, the late 70s were dominated by four major overlapping series of paintings and gouaches. The Kew Billabong series from 1975-77; The Kosciusko and Guthega series of 1975-78, The Gorge series from 1975-1978 and the Waterfall series of 1979, each with their own pictorial language.

This new direction in Williams' oeuvre was applauded, winning the Wynne prize for landscape painting with his masterpiece, Mt Kosciusko, in 1976, exactly 10 years after he first won in 1966. With the success came an ambitious exhibition schedule, including a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1977 - the first Australian to be given such an honour - along with a national travelling exhibition in Australia in 1978. As respite for his heavy workload, Williams often turned to portraiture, whilst also revisiting favoured locations such as the You Yangs which had provided a pivotal backdrop for his paintings of the 1960s, many of which remained unseen until after his death.

'The You Yangs presented the artist with a number of challenges. Painting from the You Yangs, he looked out across an extensive landscape, flat and featureless. Trees, rocks and forests seen in close-up had previously been the order of the day. Now he chose a landscape seen from a high vantage point, without any distinct pictorial focus. The You Yangs as a motif, however, presented him with quite a dramatic landscape; rocky outcrops and the clean-cut profiles of stubbly bush against the sky.'2

The present work is a masterly tripartite vision, invigorated by colour and texture. The foreground echoes his early 60's expressive placement of coloured daubs on a flat plane, accentuating the focus on the distant hill with its thick impastoed boulders and rock formations. The horizon line scattered with darkened tree trunks contrasting against the flat pearly luminous sky showcases Williams' painterly evolution. Whilst it bears no direct correlation to his series' of the time, Williams' delivery and confident handling makes the present works so successful, clearly demonstrating an artist taking solace and his connection with the landscape.

Alex Clark

1. Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996 (revised edition), p. 263
2. Ibid., p. 153