Weaver Hawkins

(1893-1977)

Broken things 1945

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The collection of the artist
Private collection, 1979
Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1989

EXHIBITED
H.F. Weaver Hawkins, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 17 - 29 March 1976, cat. no. 9
A Selection of 19th & 20th Century Australian Art, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 23 November – 8 December 1989, cat. no. 66

LITERATURE
A Selection of 19th & 20th Century Australian Art, exh. cat., Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1989, cat. no. 66 (illus.)


1945 began poorly for Weaver Hawkins. Illness at the start of the year prevented him from painting and without the daily stimulus he got from art, he was feeling restless and middle-aged. Although he believed his creative and intellectual powers were at their height, there was a lessening of physical powers. The old injuries he had received at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, which saw both of his arms virtually blown off only to be reconstructed by surgeons in a series of endless operations, were giving him trouble. A poem he wrote at the time — 'Thoughts from a sick-bed' — is full of musings about the fragility of human life.1 When strong enough to work again, this still life was one of the first works he created. A seemingly simple image of discarded objects in the studio, it can also be read as a self portrait.

Despite their imperfections, Weaver's broken things pulsate with colour and life. His image is intentionally ambiguous. Is this work a reflection on the vanity of our transitory lives, as the broken mirror might suggest? The apple, with its long history in Western art as a symbol of discord, tempting Eve and launching the Trojan wars, also points in this direction. Or is this painting a celebration of brokeness? The formal qualities of the still life, its design and palette, suggest that this is a cheerful work. There is a playfullness in the way the artist has handled the tricky composition, using the device of a mirror, which he had employed two years earlier in Puppet rehearsal. He characteristically surrounds each broken object with an aura of complementary colour, a technique he had learned from van Gogh.2

All those who knew Weaver Hawkins remember him as a remarkably optimistic person. His was a familiar voice in the press throughout the 1940s and 1950s, arguing for the centrality of art to national life and in support of new forms of expression. His belief in the power of art to transform lives had a quasi-religious quality to it. Yet his optimism was tempered by realism. Experience had taught him that the treasures of human goodness and creativity are held — using St Paul — in earthen vessels.

Steven Miller

1 'Thoughts from a sick-bed' (January 1945) from Book of poems 1942–. MS1994.3 Weaver Hawkins archive, AGNSW Research Library and Archive, Sydney.
2 Vincent van Gogh, Herbages dans le Jardin de l'Hospice Saint-Paul 1890. National Gallery, London.