Sali Herman

(1898-1993)

Portrait of Warwick Fairfax, Esquire, 1941

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Collection of the late Sir Warwick and Lady Fairfax, Sydney

EXHIBITED
Third Annual Exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society, David Jones' Gallery, Sydney, 9 September - 4 October 1941, cat. 104 N.F.S, as 'Portrait' (partial label attached lower left of frame moulding)

In a 1940 article in Smith's Weekly, in an obvious reference to the Herald proprietor and Managing Director, Warwick Fairfax, the editor George Godard satirised what he called 'The Fairfax Face', the chief characteristics of which were its length and gravity. If a journalist stayed too long at the Herald, Godard joked, they would eventually take on these features and have to grow a beard to disguise themselves.

For at least ten years before, Warwick Fairfax had been a topic of much interest to the Australian popular press. Young, tall, Oxford-educated, and rather rich, Warwick lived an almost Gatsbyian way of life in 1930s' Sydney. He and his glamorous wife Betty lived in Barford, a Georgian Revival house in Bellevue Hill he built in 1931; he visited his mother at his childhood home at Double Bay, Fairwater; drove his Riley motorcar very fast to the family country house in Leura, (once in 1933 he was fined £8 for doing 60 m.p.h. up the Parramatta Road, his speed only checked by a flock of sheep); and when not sailing or playing golf, travelled abroad, often and luxuriantly.

However, all was perhaps not as free and easy as it seemed and with the unexpected deaths of both his father and uncle while he was still in his twenties, this privileged lifestyle came at a cost. Contemporary accounts describe a young man who was sensitive, intellectual and slightly neurotic. An only child, doted on by his strict but adoring parents, along with a number of childless aunts and uncles, he was sent to Warden House Preparatory School for Boys in Kent, England at a very young age, followed by Geelong Grammar in Victoria. As he grew he had the family values of 'unremitting service to the public' drummed into him and this, along with the rigours of a boarding school education, probably contributed to the shy and somewhat grave face he presented to the public. At first studying Latin and Greek at the University of Sydney, he was then sent to his father's alma mater, Balliol College at Oxford University, where he gained a Bachelor's degree in 'PPE' – politics, philosophy and economics. He never lost his love of literature and later in life wrote poetry, three complete plays and many articles on a wide variety of topics from the arts to foreign affairs. Perhaps he felt destined to continue as a journalist and writer rather than a businessman but this option was denied him. His father and uncle had guided the Herald to be the most important daily newspaper in Sydney and their sudden absence created a terrible vacuum. Running the family business under such public scrutiny was a not light burden, especially given the severe economic depression Australia experienced in the late 1920s. By 1934 Warwick's health had deteriorated to such a degree there was open speculation about whether he would continue in the business.

He did, and he did very well. By the time of this portrait in 1941, he had been at the helm of the Herald for eleven years, through good times and bad, always trying to achieve a balance of views and policies that he earnestly felt were in the public good (he clashed with both Prime Minister Robert Menzies and the leader of the ALP, Arthur Calwell). Although he was forty when the portrait was painted, it shows him as a grave, even somewhat timorous, young man dressed in the sober dress of the business executive, save for the addition of a dashing blue and white spotted silk cravat. His piercing blue eyes (so described by one of his editors, J.D. Pringle) and wavy hair (in Warwick's case a natural curl but one called a Marcel wave that fashionable women achieved with curling tongs) set the painting perfectly in the period. But it is the composition of the face below that is especially striking; for here is the geometric language Modigliani made his signature style: the wave of the hairline, the curve of the eyebrows, the firm vertical of the nose and horizontal curl of the lip that compel the viewer.

Sali Herman was a Swiss-born Jewish artist who had fled to Australia from Nazi Europe only a few years before. Undoubtedly, he saw the two Modigliani canvases - Female Nude, 1916, now in the Courtauld Institute, and Portrait of Morgan Russell, 1919, in a private collection, in November - December 1939 when they were exhibited at the David Jones Art Gallery as part of the Herald art exhibition, though presumably he would have already been familiar with the Modigliani's work.

Taking his cue from the painting of Russell, Herman uses the same dark maroon red for Warwick's tie though he chooses a background colour of palest blue which has the effect of intensifying the colour of Warwick's piercing blue eyes. Herman too would have seen in the same exhibition Chaim Soutine's Portrait of Madeleine Castaing, c.1929, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, while Expressionist in its looser brush work and exuberant use of texture, is nevertheless distinctive in tone and surely had a bearing on the Herman's portrait. In their dismal parochialism many conservatives, artists such as Sid Long and critics Howard Ashton and J.S. MacDonald conflated the morality of the artist with their work (in spite of denying they did so), for example denouncing Modigliani's work because he was a 'dipsomaniac' who lived and died in poverty. (Six months before, in July 1939, a book of contemporary art illustrating other nudes by Modigliani had been seized by Australian customs officers, causing Long to scoff that the works were more humorous than salacious because of the way Modigliani distorted the human figure.)

In spite of having a dig at Fairfax, Godard ended his article by suggesting he was preferable to other 'press magnates' (meaning Murdoch), saying:

'We really have a genuine admiration for its (SMH) sober management, its measured statements, its quiet authority, and complete absence of flashiness. All these excellences derive from the Fairfaxes themselves and their care in whom they employ. You never see anyone last very long in the organisation who doesn't fit into its pattern of dignity.'

Presumably these words had a positive effect on the still young Warwick Oswald Fairfax for over the decades to come he worked hard and took care to employ the best people (notably Rupert Henderson), and thus expanded John Fairfax and Sons Ltd into one of the most important media companies of its day with interests in print, television and radio.