A R D Fairburn, June 2022

29.06.22 – 09.07.22 A R D Fairburn: Master of Modernism

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn, untitled, linocut on cotton, 1/1, signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left, 680 × 540mm, price $1,250

Exhibition

Exhibition A R D Fairburn: Master of Modernism 29 June – 9 July 2022

wellington Adrienne (AD) Schierning Head of Art ad@webbs.co.nz +64 27 929 5609

23 Marion Street Te Aro Wellington, 6011 04 555 6001

Webb's

June

David Maskill Specialist, Art david@webbs.co.nz +64 27 256 0900

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A R D Fairburn

Although better known as a poet and writer, Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn (1904-1957), made a significant contribution to this country’s visual arts. Fairburn belonged to the first generation of New Zealand-born writers and artists who sought to celebrate Aotearoa’s unique cultural condition.

Along with writers such as R.A.K Mason and Frank Sargeson, and artists Eric-Lee Johnson and Denis Knight Turner, Fairburn believed in the power of art and letters – a passion that led to his national significance and peripatetic approach to writing and visual art.

Fairburn grew up in post-World-War-I Auckland, raised in a cultured family milieu of music and writing. From 1918 to 1920, he attended Auckland Grammar School where his literary talent was first noticed. Following a period of employment as a clerk at the New Zealand Insurance Company, Fairburn travelled to England in 1930 determined to further his aspirations to be a writer. He found the bohemian literary scene in London not to his liking, although he met and admired the modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein and the New Zealand expatriate painter Frances Hodgkins whose modernist aesthetic Fairburn shared.

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2022

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references Damian Skinner, Theo Schoon. A Biography, Auckland, Massey University Press, 2018, 117-120.

A.R.D. Fairburn, ‘Polynesian Cave Drawings’, Home & Building, June-July 1949, 60-65.

A.R.D. Fairburn, ‘Some Aspects of N.Z. Art and Letters’, Art in New Zealand, June 1934, 213-218.

Webb's

Fairburn returned to New Zealand with his English wife Jocelyn Mays and their young daughter in 1932 and settled in New Lynn in Auckland. By then, New Zealand was in the midst of the Great Depression. Fairburn found labouring work where he could, and the experience confirmed his left-leaning politics and respect for the worker. After a period as secretary to the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Farmers’ Union, Fairburn was conscripted in 1942 and seconded to the National Broadcasting Service where he worked as a script writer and broadcaster until the end of the war.

In 1947, Fairburn was contacted by letter by the expatriate Dutch/Indonesian artist Theo Schoon to share the Māori rock drawings he was recording in the South Island.

Schoon hoped that Fairburn would write about them or in some way publicize their importance. For Schoon, these drawings were reminiscent of recently discovered Lascaux cave paintings in southern France.

Schoon believed that indigenous drawings could inspire modern artists and sent Fairburn photographs and tracings of the rock drawings that sparked Fairburn’s interest. But instead of just writing about them, Fairburn saw the potential to use these distinctive designs in the manufacture of oneoff, handmade artworks. In this, he may have been inspired

by Frances Hodgkins who provided modernist designs for textiles in Manchester in the 1920s. The medium Fairburn chose was linocut on calico or linen. Working alongside printmaker May Smith, they made linocut versions of the motifs in the rock drawings, applied to them a variety of coloured inks and then printed them by hand on the fabric.

The arrangement of the linocut drawings was entirely an artistic decision and bore little if any relation to the original arrangement on the cave walls.

Fairburn’s artworks were picked up by Helen Hitchings, who established the first modernist art dealer gallery in New Zealand in Wellington’s Bond Street in 1949. There, she showed Fairburn’s works mounted on screens, alongside paintings by Toss Woollaston, Rita Angus and Colin McCahon, furniture by Ernst Plischke and ceramics by Len Castle.

Fairburn (and Schoon) were drawn to indigenous rock drawings because of their mutual and genuine, if naïve, desire to capture something uniquely New Zealand.

Their collaboration was, in this way, an advancement within the traditional hegemony of Western, especially British, artistic norms.

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Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 680 × 540mm price

Webb's

$1,250

2022

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Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 540 × 680mm price

$1,250

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 540 × 680mm price

$1,250

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 610 × 760mm price

Webb's

$1,500

June

6

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 630 × 750mm price

$1,500

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 620 × 750mm price

$1,500

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 620 × 750mm price

Webb's

$1,500

2022

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Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 600 × 730mm price

$1,500

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 460 × 580mm price

$1,250

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 620 × 750mm price

Webb's

$1,500

June

8

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 610 × 770mm price

$1,500

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 610 × 750mm price

$1,500

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 650 × 920mm price

Webb's

$1,750

2022

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Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower edge 640 × 850mm price

$1,750

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed HSF in brushpoint lower right 730 × 1000mm price

$1,850

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed HSF in brushpoint lower right 730 × 600mm price

Webb's

$1,500

June

10

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 450 × 600mm price

$1,250

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 450 × 600mm price

$1,250

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 610 × 900mm price

Webb's

$1,750

2022

11

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 660 × 850mm price

$1,750

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 600 × 900mm price

$1,750

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed Fairburn in brushpoint lower right 660 × 850mm price

Webb's

$1,750

June

12

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed Fairburn in brushpoint upper right 660 × 850mm price

$1,750

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower left 650 × 900mm price

$1,750

Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn untitled linocut on cotton, 1/1 signed FAIRBURN in brushpoint lower right 600 × 830mm price

Webb's

$1,750

2022

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Programme

Preview Wednesday 29 June

6pm – 8pm

Viewing Thursday 30 June – Friday 1 July

10am – 5pm

Saturday 2 July

11am – 3pm

Monday 4 July – Friday 8 July

10am – 5pm

Saturday 9 July

11am – 3pm

wellington Adrienne (AD) Schierning Head of Art ad@webbs.co.nz +64 27 929 5609

23 Marion Street Te Aro Wellington, 6011 04 555 6001

Webb's

June

David Maskill Specialist, Art david@webbs.co.nz +64 27 256 0900

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Auctions Private Sales Valuations 33a Normanby Road, Mount Eden, Auckland 1024, New Zealand 23 Marion Street Te Aro, Wellington, 6011, New Zealand webbs.co.nz