User:CWH/Wilma Cannon Fairbank

CWH/Wilma Cannon Fairbank
Occupation	Scholar
Known for	Chinese art history
Spouse	John King Fairbank
Children	Laura King Fairbank Haynes (1949-2023), Holly Fairbank Tuck
Academic background
Alma mater	Radcliffe College
Academic work
Discipline	Art History

Wilma Denio Cannon Fairbank (Chinese: 费慰梅 Fei Meiwei (b. 23 April 1909 Cambridge, Massachusetts -- d. 4 April 2002 Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American artist, scholar of Chinese art and architecture, and diplomat. Her scholarship on the Han dynasty Wu Liang tombs starting in the was pioneering and influential in emphasizing artistic and architectural rather than literary approaches. Following World War Two she served as cultural officer in the American Embassy in China, and in the 1950s she continued research and published articles, reviews, and translations. She was an organizer and founding member of the Far Eastern Association, which became the Association for Asian Studies.

Her husband, John King Fairbank, was an historian of modern China. Their daughters were Laura King Fairbank Haynes (1949-2023), a registered nurse, and Holly Fairbank Tuck, a dance and arts executive. In 2002 she died in the Cambridge house where she had lived for more than fifty years, a fifteen-minute walk from the Cambridge house where she was born.

Early life and career

Wilma Denio Cannon Fairbank was the eldest child of Dr. Walter Bradford Cannon, a professor of physiology at Harvard Medical School, who saw medicine as a profession of social service, and Cornelia James Cannon, a Radcliffe graduate, feminist activist, writer, and novelist who travelled the country to support progressive causes, especially women's rights. She was sister of Dr. Bradford Cannon, Linda Cannon Burgess, Marian Cannon Schlesinger, and Helen Bond. Her parents, together with her mother's sisters, Bernice Cannon, and Ida Maud Cannon, maintained the family house at 2 Divinity Avenue (later the site of the Harvard-Yenching Library), which became a center for progressive intellectual and social activism. Ida was Chief of Social Service at Massachusetts General Hospital and a community activist. in 1929-1930, Her mother took the family on a three-month tour of Europe.

Fairbank was already a serious painter when she entered Radcliffe College and began to study fine arts. During her second year of college she took a course on Chinese art offered by the French sinologist Paul Pelliot and in her senior year a course on the arts of China and Japan given by Langdon Warner. Warner showed rubbings taken from portrait stones in the Wu Family Temple of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Jiaxiang, Shandong. Later she read Mission Archéologique dans la Chine Septentrionale (Paris, 1913) by Édouard Chavannes, which presented the existing scholarship on the temples and which she referred to as the bible of Chinese art. She later recalled that "Pelliot's bookish erudition and Warner's artistic sensibility together kindled my own enthusiastic interest in Chinese art."

On Valentine's Day, 1929 she met John Fairbank, then a senior at Harvard College, who would become a prominent historian of China. After his graduation, John went to begin his professional study of China in England on a Rhodes Scholarship, but since the scholarship did not allow recipents to be married, the couple carried on a long-distance courtship. After graduating from Radcliffe with a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts in 1931, Wilma went to Mexico, where she worked with the avant-garde painter Diego Rivera, whose bold forms and use of color she studied and adapted to great effect in her own paintings.

Life in China

In 1932, she sailed to China, where she and John were married in July. The Japanese Army had established control of Northeast China, but Beiping, as Beijing, the former capital, was then known, was relatively safe. The couple lived in an old-style courtyard house in a neighborhood that was home to Chinese intellectuals, Western graduate students, and scholars of Chinese culture and history. They found the old culture still vibrant but eager to change. Wilma filled the house with her paintings and drawings. Fortunately, their neighbors included Chinese progressive intellectuals and many Western future scholars and journalists. Their many visitors included Wilma's sister Marion.Among their neighbors were Lin Huiyin, the first woman in modern China to become an architect, and her husband, Liang Sicheng, a pioneering historian of Chinese architecture, whose late father, Liang Qichao, had been one of China's best-known intellectual reformers. Wilma struck up a quick and deep friendship with Huiyin and Sicheng gave Wilma and John Chinese names. John's was Fei Zhengqing, "Fei" being a common family name, and "Zhengqing", meaning "upright and clear". Hers was "Weimei", which means "comforting plum."

The former capital was full of shops, museums, and art dealers, but ink rubbings were still the least expensive way for a student to acquire art. She found rubbings of the murals in the Wuliang shrines that Warner had introduced her to in his undergraduate lectures. She and other scholars had known the murals only through the rubbings, which were studied as illustrations of ancient mythology. By 1934 Wilma's spoken Chinese was good enough that she and a friend could visit the site of the tombs. The mural slabs had been excavated in the eighteenth century and placed in no particular order inside a small building, some engraved on one side only, some front and back, some front and side. It was not until she returned to Cambridge and made a concentrated study that she realized that the slabs did not represent an art exhibit but a building.

Scholarship and return to Cambridge

After the couple returned to Cambridge in 1936, John joined the Harvard Department of History and she developed the research she had begun in China. She also helped to organize the Far Eastern Association, which later became the Association for Asian Studies.

The Wuliang Shrines

武梁祠第二石

Wilma began her work by assembling a full set of rubbings, had high quality photographs made of them at a uniform scale, and moved them around on a table like a jigsaw puzzle. Senior scholars had warned that her reconstructions would be clearer and more complete than the originals, which turned out to be true, since the stones had been repeatedly soaked in ink and worn away over the centuries. Local entrepreneurs and literati treated them as "lithographic stones," from which prints were taken for sale. What her "desk-bound colleagues," as she later called them, called them did not realize was that the tablets were architectural elements on which engravings had been made. Using her paper reproductions, she reconstructed the original configuration of the temple. At John's urging, she put her findings into an article, which she submitted the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Her first effort was published there in 1941, and over the next few years she published several more there.

In addition she pointed out that the walls of tombs were constructed of bricks, which influenced the pictorial methods. Potters could stamp a design on any number of bricks and assemble elaborate patterns. This procedure led to superimposed friezes and division into panels, rather than creating an illusion of continuous pictorial space.

武梁祠前石室第十一石

Wartime government service

In 1941 the couple moved to Washington, D.C. to participate in the war effort. Mortimer Graves of The American Council of Learned Societies commissioned her to write a report that was published as "Organizations in America Concerned with China". She became the first employee in the China section of the State Department's Cultural Relations Division, and supervised programs in cultural and academic exchange. In May 1945, she returned to China to spend two years as the Chief Cultural Officer in the American Embassy in Chongqing, and later in Nanjing. In Chongqing she re-united with the Liangs, although their poverty was shocking and Huiyin suffered from tuberculosis. At that time she investigated more than a dozen Han dynasty cliff tombs along the Min river, in Sichuan, in collaboration with Wolfgang Franke, the German sinologist, who made a set of careful rubbings.

Postwar career

After returning to Cambridge in 1947, she continued to publish articles, and continued her volunteer work with the Far Eastern Association. She and John adopted two daughters: Laura King in 1950 and Holly in 1953. Although she did not have a faculty position, she continued to publish well-reviewed scholarship and write reviews.

When the Fairbanks visited Japan in 1952, she collaborated with Masao Kitano, a scholar at Kyoto University, who had investigated Eastern Han tomb murals in Beiyuan, Liaoyang, in Liaoning. Since she did not speak Japanese and Kitano did not Speak English, they communicated in Chinese.

In the 1960s she turned her attention to Shang and Zhou dynasty ritual bronzes and casting technology. Since the 1930s, the consensus had been that the Shang artisans had used the so-called lost wax process. This technique involved carving a wax model, which is covered with clay, forming a mold. When the mold is baked, the wax melts out, to be filled with molten metal. But a review of the field said “the observation that turned the tide against lost-wax casting” was Fairbank’s 1962 “short paper of fundamental importance” arguing that the pieces were cast in pieces, then assembled and fired. She pointed out that “that the Shang moldmaker's technique is openly announced by his designs.” Technique and design go together.

In the 1950s. the Fairbank home at 41 Winthrop Street, just south of Harvard Square, became a center for colleagues, students, and visiting scholars, especially Thursday afternoon teas at which Lipton's tea and cucumber sandwiches were featured.

Influence and reception

At her death in 2002, Wu Hung, a specialist in the area, wrote of her 1941 article on the Wu Liangci offering shrines "revolutionized the study of Han pictorial art by redefining the subject and 'frame' of observation and interpretation". He went on that "Combining an artist's eye and instincts with the extraordinary analytical mind of a scholar, she reexamined other major issues in early Chinese art history, devising an approach that still guides some major research projects on ancient Chinese bronzes."

The 1972 volume, Adventures In Retrieval: Han Murals And Shang Bronze Molds reprinted her articles, with an extensive preface. Reviewers commented on their pioneering originality, though noting that the field had developed since they were first published. The British art historian William Watson wrote that "Mrs. Fairbank brings to her task the customary and intermittently fruitful concern of American scholarship with aesthetic analysis, complementing Chavanne’s elucidation of the literary and mythological content”. Watson went on that she made a number of points "that were original at the time and are still acceptable."

Her wartime service was the basis of the America’s Cultural Experiment In China, 1942-1949, published by the State Department in 1976, which described and evaluated the programs run by the American State Department. The historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham, who had known her during the war, wrote that "in this book the distinguished expert on Han art, Wilma Fairbank", presents "a valuable history from which there is a great deal to learn" though adding that it does not discuss parallel British efforts.

Her 1992 biography of the Liangs, Liang And Lin: Partners In Exploring China's Architectural Past, was quickly translated into Chinese. The New York Times review wrote "In her modest and straightforward way, Wilma Fairbank, who is the only person alive who could have written this story, has created an affecting portrait of the final years of an epoch, when Old China faded away and New China took its place." He added, however, that "for one brief moment her portait is too ideal," for only in passing does she mention Liang's support for the anti-Rightist campaigns of the 1957.

Selected publications

Articles

• (1941) "The Offering Shrines of Wu Liang Tz’u, " Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 6.1: 1–36.
• (1942) "A Structural Key to Han Mural Art," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7.1:52–88.
• (1951) "Han Tomb Art of West China. A Collection of First- and Second-Century Reliefs." Journal of the American Oriental Society 71/ 4: 282–284.
• (1953) with Fujieda, A. "Current Trends in Japanese Studies of China and Adjacent Areas." The Far Eastern Quarterly 13/1, 37–47.
• ---(1954) Kitano, Masao. "Han Mural Paintings in the Pei-Yuan Tomb at Liao-Yang, South Manchuria," Artibus Asiae 17.3/4:238–264.https://doi.org/10.2307/3249057
• Wilma Fairbank, "Piece-Mold Craftsmanship and Shang Bronze Design," Arch. Chinese Art Soc. Amer 16 (1962): 8-15.
• (1962) Fairbank, Wilma, "Bronze Casting and Bronze Alloys in Ancient China", Technology and Culture, 3 (2): 178–180
• (1989) "Laurence Chalfant Stevens Sickman: 1906-1988," Archives of Asian Art 42:82–84.
• (1989) "Foreword," Wu, Hung (1989). The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804715297.

Reports

• Organizations in America Concerned with China, American Council of Learned Societies
• Chinese Educational Needs and Programs of U.S-Located Agencies to Meet Them, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

Books

• (1972) Fairbank, Wilma (1972), Adventures In Retrieval: Han Murals And Shang Bronze Molds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Available online] at Internet Archive
• (1976) America’s Cultural Experiment in China 1942-1949. Washington: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Forword by Jonathan Spence. Text available online at Internet Archive.
• Fairbank, Wilma (1994). Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China's Architectural Past. forword by Jonathan Spence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 081223278X. Text available and borrowable online at Internet Archive. Translated as 费慰梅, 梁思成和林徽因─一对探索中国建筑的伴侣（美）费慰梅 曲莹璞 关超等译 (Translated by Qu Yingpu, Guan Chao) Chinese Wenlian 中国文联出版公司 ISBN 7-5059-2674-8

Translation

• (1984) Liang, Sicheng, A Pictorial History Of Chinese Architecture: A Study Of The Development Of Its Structural System And The Evolution Of Its Types. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. A translation of

Major reviews

• (1962). [Review of Bronze Casting and Bronze Alloys in Ancient China, by N. Barnard]. Technology and Culture, 3(2), 178–180. https://doi.org/10.2307/3101442
• (1970) (Review) "The Freer Chinese Bronzes" Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 30:240–243.
• (1976) (Review) "The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. By E. J. Kahn Jr. (New York: Viking Press, 1975). The China Quarterly 67: 635–636.

References

• Cohen, Paul A. and Merle Goldman (1992). Fairbank Remembered. Cambridge, Mass.: John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research Harvard University; Distributed by Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674291530..

• Evans, Paul M. (1988). John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China. New York: Blackwell. ISBN 0631158537.
• Fairbank, John King (1982). Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0060390050.
• Valerie C. Doran, "Visual History: A Portrait of Wilma Fairbank," Orientations 28.8 (1997): 93-102.
• Honan, William H. (13 April 2002), "Wilma Fairbank, 92, Historian of Chinese Art", New York Times: A 18
• 郑, 岩 Zhen Yan (January 13, 2018), 费慰梅与中国艺术史研究 Fei Meiwei yu Zhongguo Ishushi yanjiu (Wilma Fairbank and Chinese art history Includes photos from the 1930s.
• Biographical note on Wilma Cannon Fairbank, Harvard Library
• Watson, William (1976), "(Review)", T’oung Pao, 62 (4/5): 345. Accessed =9 Sept. 2024.

• Wu, Hung (1989). The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art. Foreword by Wilma Fairbank. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804715297.
• Wu, Hung (2002), "Obituary: Wilma Cannon Fairbank (1909-2002)", Orientations, 33 (7)

External links

• Wilma Cannon Fairbank personal archive Harvard Library.
• Friendship with John and Wilma Fairbank couple NPC & CPPCCC Sessions December 17, 2011.
• Wilma Denio Fairbank (Cannon) (1909 - 2002) - Genealogy (geni.com)

• Barbieri, Anthony (2019). Virtual Tour of Wuzhai Shan Site, 2nd Century CE (v. 2.0). University of California, Santa Barbara.