Title
You Yangs landscape
1963
Artist
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Details
- Date
- 1963
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- oil on hardboard
- Dimensions
- 119.5 x 152.0 cm board; 133.3 x 165.2 x 4.0 cm frame
- Signature & date
Signed l.r. corner, black oil "Fred Williams". Not dated.
- Credit
- Purchased 1980
- Location
- South Building, ground level, 20th-century galleries
- Accession number
- 207.1980
- Copyright
- © Estate of Fred Williams
- Wynne Prize
- - 1963
- Artist information
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Fred Williams
Works in the collection
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About
Fred Williams was born and trained in Melbourne, at the National Gallery School and the George Bell Art School during the 1940s. At the end of 1951 he left for London and further study, returning to Australia in 1957. During these formative years he focused on depictions of the figure in his art. However, when he returned to Melbourne he redirected his attention to the Australian environment, exploring this subject as a platform for formal invention in his practice. With this as his creative directive, Williams embarked on a seminal series of paintings in the 1960s that changed the way many people viewed the Australian landscape.
Williams first visited the You Yangs – the landscape of granite ridges situated between Melbourne and Geelong in Victoria – in the winter of 1962. Working in situ, he began painting his observations in watercolour, developing these studies in his studio into a series of radically abstracted paintings. ‘You Yangs landscape’ 1963 is one of his great achievements in this group of works. It exemplifies Williams’s distinct vision of the landscape that combines a feel for its expanse with suggestions of its nuanced forms.
‘You Yangs landscape’ demonstrates how Williams negated the horizon line in his work (which, historically, had been key to Western landscape painting) and offered instead a more spatially ambiguous ordering of the countryside. The picture plane is tilted and imaged as an unstructured space, where gestural abstract markings and dotted areas of intricate paint work are used to invoke the landscape’s scattering of trees, rocks and fencing in abbreviated form.
In the traditions of 20th century Australian landscape painting, Williams positioned himself as ‘a link between Nolan and Drysdale: Nolan the irrational, Drysdale the formal’.1 He had derived his model of abstraction from studying the structural order of cubist painting as well as the work of Paul Cézanne. Yet as ‘You Yangs landscape’ demonstrates, Williams used this formal approach to imply the experience of place; where his aesthetic of dots and dashes act like memory’s truncated visual mapping of landscapes and evokes a sense of being immersed in its forms.
This work was exhibited in the 1963 Wynne Prize.
1 Fred Williams quoted in Craig McGragor, Qantas Airways, March/April 1985, p20
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Exhibition history
Shown in 11 exhibitions
Archibald, Wynne and Sulman (1963), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 Jan 1964–16 Feb 1964
Spring exhibition 1980, Joseph Brown Gallery, Australia, 01 Sep 1980–10 Sep 1980
Three years on: acquisitions 1978-81, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Oct 1981–01 Dec 1981
Project 41: The mosaic -The grid (1983), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 25 Mar 1983–24 Apr 1983
Twentieth century Australian masterworks from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Fred Williams Pilbara series from the collection of CRA Limited, Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, , 04 Oct 1985–06 Nov 1985
Australian Painters Seeing Cézanne, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 Nov 1998–17 Jan 1999
Australian icons: twenty artists from the collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 04 Aug 2000–03 Dec 2000
Fred Williams: infinite horizons, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 12 Aug 2011–06 Nov 2011
Fred Williams: infinite horizons, Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, 07 Apr 2012–05 Aug 2012
Fred Williams: infinite horizons, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 31 Aug 2012–04 Nov 2012
Fred Williams in the You Yangs, Geelong Gallery, Geelong, 19 Aug 2017–05 Nov 2017
20th-Century galleries, ground level (rehang), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 20 Aug 2022–2023
The Adelaide Festival of Arts 1964: Selected entries from the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman competitions, National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
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Bibliography
Referenced in 18 publications
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Jaynie Anderson, The Cambridge companion to Australian Art, 'Cross-cultural encounters: introduction', pg. 1-10, Port Melbourne, 2011, 8, 346. fig.no. 1.10 (colour illus.), between pg. 44 and 45.
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Edmund Capon AM, OBE and Jan Meek (Editors), Portrait of a Gallery, 'Australian 20th Century Art', pg. 71-89, Sydney, 1984, 71 (colour illus.).
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Deborah Hart, Fred Williams: infinite horizons, 'Classic Williams', pg. 60-79, Canberra, 2011, 63 (colour illus.), 64, 226.
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Joseph Brown Gallery (Organiser), Spring exhibition 1980, Melbourne, 1980, cat.no. 192. n.p. (colour illus.) as 'You-Yangs landscape'. catalogue for the exhibition held 1-10 September 1980
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Hendrik Kolenberg, Look, 'Celebrating Fred Williams', pg. 24-25, Sydney, Nov 2004, 24.
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Ewen McDonald, AGNSW Collections, 'From Colonialism to late Modernism', pg. 7-106, Sydney, 1994, 68, 69 (colour illus.).
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Maudie Palmer (Editor), Encounters with Australian modern art, South Yarra, 2008, 84 (colour illus.). NOTE: Related work reproduced. Titled 'You Yangs III, 1963, private collection.
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Barry Pearce, Southern reflections: 10 contemporary Australian artists, 'An Introduction to Australian Art', pg. 34-42, Sydney, 1998, 40 (colour illus.). fig.no. 12
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Barry Pearce, Australian art: in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 'Landscape and gesture', pg. 239-240, Sydney, 2000, 252 (colour illus.), 302.
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Barry Pearce, Art Gallery of New South Wales handbook, 'Australian', pg. 13-35, Sydney, 1988, 33 (illus.), 34.
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Barry Pearce and Patrick McCaughey, Twentieth century Australian masterworks from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Fred Williams Pilbara Series, Tokyo, 1985, 47 (colour illus.). cat.no. 28
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Barry Pearce, Three years on: a selection of acquisitions 1978-1981, 'Australian Art', pg. 5-26, Sydney, 1981, 6, 26 (colour illus.). cat.no. 47
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Ursula Prunster, Aspects of Australian art, Sydney, 2000, (colour illus.). card no. 12: Fred Williams 'You Yangs landscape' 1963
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Ursula Prunster (Curator), Australian painters; Seeing Cézanne, Sydney, 1998, 31. cat.no. 58
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Anne Ryan, Fred Williams: from music hall to landscape, drawings and prints, 'Drawing exposes all', pg. 9-13, Sydney, 2001, 12 (colour illus.). illus.no. 1
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Project 41 - the mosaic, the grid, Sydney, 1983. cat.no. 10
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Archibald, Wynne and Sulman (1963), 1964, cat.no. 72 as 'You Yang landscape'. catalogue for the exhibition held 18 Jan–16 Feb 1964
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The Adelaide Festival of Arts 1964: souvenir catalogue of special exhibitions, 1964, cat.no. 35. n.p. index of 'Wynne competition'. 'Selected entries from the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman competitions'
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