PECULIAR BUT GRAND

By ROBERT HUGHES

By now, you would think, all the first-rate Western artists of our fading century are known and labeled. Not necessarily. Consider Ian Fairweather, a Scot by birth, who, after a long life in China, Bali and Australia, died in 1974 at age 83. Totally unknown in America and Europe, he was the best abstract painter-though "abstract" does no justice to the imagistic subtlety of his work-that Australia ever harbored, and one of the very few modern artists to make a convincing bridge between Eastern calligraphic traditions and Western drawing. He was also-suspect though the term has become in our time of New Age cant-a deeply spiritual artist.

In recent months a retrospective of Fairweather's work, selected by the Australian writer Murray Bail, has been touring Australian museums. Its last stop (through May 7) is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. It contains only 64 paintings. Fairweather's output was tiny; he destroyed or lost much of his work, and in the end about 500 pieces have survived, including drawings-not much for a man who began to paint in the early 1920s. And since he was a very uneven artist, their quality varies widely. He cared absolutely nothing for permanence; he used cheap powder colors on cardboard most of the time, thus bequeathing a nightmare to museum conservators. Only the actual process of painting, of resolving the image and getting it to stand alone in its own space, mattered to him, and after that was done he would often leave the picture to be attacked by mildew or chewed by rats.

Fairweather was born in Scotland in 1891. He was the unloved ninth child of a British army surgeon-general and a mother whom he learned to hate: when he was a baby they left him with foster parents, went to India and did not see him again until he was 10. By then, the form had set: he would grow up solitary, without close emotional connections to anyone, a natural exile. Tellingly, the most common recurrent image in his work until the end of the '50s was of the mother and child-the denied paradise of union with the breast, with the mother appearing sometimes as a figure of nurture but also as dominating, threatening, all-ab-sorbing. The sense of a voracious emotional need that beats behind some of Fairweather's coolest and most "classical" friezelike paintings is nothing other than the desire for integration, resolved in art as formal harmony-but imperiled and sometimes overset, because it bore the print of a harsher, more primal necessity.

He enlisted in the British army in World War I and was taken prisoner on the Marne. The horrors of the trenches made him want to flee Europe altogether. In prison camp, he found books on Eastern civilization by Ernest Fenollosa and Lafcadio Hearn; at war's end, he enrolled at the Slade School in London and took classes in Japanese and Mandarin. In 1929, penniless, he managed to reach Shanghai. For the next few years he was able to study Chinese art and writing at first hand, painting landscapes and street scenes (none of which survive), getting by.

For Fairweather, the great revelation was that, in Chinese tradition, there was no aesthetic split between painting and writing. Pierre Ryckmans, the scholar of Chinese culture who writes under the name Simon Leys, suggests in an excellent catalog essay that Fairweather became permeated with the classical Chinese view of the exalted, careless amateur as the best kind of artist: professionals are tradesmen, mired in mere competence, but to the amateur art may be a spiritual discipline.

Fairweather learned to value accident, roughness, drips-all ways in which ch'i, vital energy, manifests itself in brush writing and painting. The stylistic effect that Chinese art had on him can be judged from paintings like Lake Hangchow, 1941, with its rhythmic, seemingly casual red outlines of distant mountains holding together the Fauve splotches of intense blue. But the deeper effects would not show until after 1955, when he began to find his late style.

By then, he was in Australia. He first went there, via Bali, in 1934. After World War II, which he passed in Hong Kong and India-the details of his wanderings over this time are vague, and the Australian catalog, which supplies no chron-ology or potted biography, is little help-he settled there, with one interruption, until his death. But that interruption was crucial; it was the dividing line of his life and art, the near death that focused his existence.

Fairweather, who had no money for tickets, became obsessed with the idea of returning to London to find some missing paintings. Half-mad with anxiety, he built himself a raft on the beach of Darwin, in northern Australia. It was 10 ft. long, made of scavenged timber fixed over some junked aircraft-wing tanks, with a flimsy sail. In April 1952 he set off north on this cockleshell, with 8 gal. of water and a cheap compass. He was 60 years old and knew nothing of navigation. London lay 13,000 miles away.

Blinded by salt sores, hallucinating in fierce monsoonal storms, unable to steer, he was washed up-by the merest fluke-half-dead on the shore of Timor, whose Indonesian authorities promptly imprisoned him and, by some accounts, paraded him through villages in a cage, bespattered with filth, in the belief that he was spying for the Dutch. (Fairweather, whose grasp of postcolonial politics was vague, thought he was being execrated as a homosexual.) Finally, the Indonesians repatriated him-back to England, where his first act was to burn the paintings he had gone to find. They had been ruined by careless storage. He raised the fare back to Australia by digging ditches, the only job he could get.

This nightmarish experience seems to have transformed Fairweather from a minor Orientalizing artist into something altogether grander and more peculiar. Or it marked his transition from one to the other, perhaps by showing him that he had nothing to lose. All his best work was produced after 1953.

It is clear that Fairweather was deeply affected by Cubism as well as Chinese art. "I suppose it all began with Cazanne ... I've been rather like a weathercock," he remarked in one of his few and laconic interviews. Most of his mature paintings share a cellular structure-cubicles of form held together by a gestural calligraphy, sometimes wobbly but often very precise. The colors are muted: grays, sandy browns, black, occasionally lit by a flash of red, as in Glasshouse Mountains, 1958; forms are pressed into a flat dense surface (stamped there, you feel, as by a Chinese seal), but the space also folds in and out, shallow and buckling, like a screen. Sometimes the brushstrokes are languid and creamy, but they are interspersed with a stuttering, rough calligraphy that might have been drawn with a twig. The broken grid half-conceals figures and friezes remembered from China, India and Bali, mixed with recollections of marketplaces, rituals and washing days.

In his climactic paintings of the early '60s, like Monastery, 1961, and Monsoon, 1961-62, abstractness prevails more, but there are still traces of figures within the cells of Monastery; a kind of prayer hum seems to emanate from its gray congested surface, suggesting collectivity through the soft friction of forms. Monsoon encases a memory of the nightmare raft trip, with a disjointed white calligraphy playing, slower than lightning, over the darkness behind it. Its movements seem just on the point of incoherence, as though an already indeterminate Cubist space had been subject to unbearable stress. But it doesn't fall apart, and its precarious unity is one of the great moments in Fairweather's art.

By then, he was secure-not that he wanted much. For the last 20 years of his life, Fairweather lived in a grass-thatch shanty he built for himself on Bribie Island off the coast of Queensland-no tropical paradise, but flat, mosquito-plagued and covered with ti-tree scrub. He had a scraggy beard and bright, China-blue eyes. His manners were polite and distant. He wasn't engaged in some Gauguin-based fantasy. He was simply living the way that suited him best, free from attachment. The locals thought he was a bum, a castaway, but his talent made him a queer and upright old aristocrat.

His distance from the Australian art world-which, by the early '60s, had begun to see him as a talisman of integrity-was only outwardly bohemian; its ori-gins lay in the sort of calm, fanatical pride that cannot bear the distraction of company. One thinks of him scratching around between studio and sea like Shakespeare's exiled misanthrope Timon on the beach: "Come not to me again, but say to Athens/ Timon hath pitched his everlasting mansion/ Upon the beachEd verge of that salt flood ..."