User:CWH/Wilma Cannon Fairbank

Wilma Cannon Fairbank 费慰梅 Fei Meiwei (b. 23 April 1909 Cambridge, Massachussetts -- d. 4 April 2002) was an American artist, scholar of Chinese art and architecture, and diplomat.

Fairbank graduated from Radcliffe College in 1929, then went to Mexico, where she studied with . In 1931 she travelled to China, where she married John King Fairbank, who would become a leading historian of China. She established friendships with prominent Chinese intellectuals and scholars, and travelled widely in China to find and record Zhou and Han dynasty art. After returning to Cambridge in 1936, she published pioneering articles on ancient Chinese art and helped to organize the Far Eastern Association, which later became the Association for Asian Studies. During World War II she served as cultural officer in the Chongqing American Embassy.

After the war, because she did not have a doctoral degree and because of university anti-nepotism rules, she did not have a faculty position. She did, however, continue to publish well-regarded scholarship on Chinese art, a history of American cultural activities in China during World War Two, and a biography of Liang Sicheng

Family

Wilma Denio Cannon Fairbank was the eldest of the children of Dr. Walter Bradford Cannon, a professor of physiology at Harvard Medical School, and Cornelia James Cannon, a feminist activist, writer, and novelist. She was sister of Dr. Bradford Cannon, Linda Cannon Burgess, and Marian Cannon Schlesinger, and Helen Bond. Her husband was John King Fairbank, and her daughters were Laura King Fairbank Haynes (1949-2023), a registered nurse, and Holly Fairbank Tuck, a dance and arts executive.

Education and early career

Fairbank was already a serious painter when she was introduced to Asian art as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College. She took a course offered by Langdon Warner, in which the French sinologist Paul Pelliot delivered a guest lecture. This was the first time she saw portrait stone of Wu's Temple in the Eastern Han Dynasty in Jiaxiang, Shandong. She also read Mission Archéologique dans la Chine Septentrionale (Paris, 1913) by Édouard Chavannes, which became the bible in her mind.

On Valentine's Day, 1929 met John Fairbank, who would become a leading historian of China. Upon graduation, he went to England to study on a Rhodes Scholarship, and the couple carried on a long-distance courtship, since the Rhodes Scholarship did not allow marriage. In 1929, she went to Mexico, where she worked with the avant-garde painter Diego Rivera, whose bold forms and use of color she studied and adaoted to great effect in her own paintings. In 1931, she sailed to China, where she married John. The couple lived in an old-style courtyard house in an neighborhood where many Chinese intellectuals, Western graduate students, and scholars of Chinese culture and history lived. Wilma filled their house with her paintings and drawings.

Wilma struck up a quick and deep friendship with Lin Huiyin, the first woman to become an architect in modern China, and her husband, Liang Sicheng, a pioneering historian of Chinese architecture, whose father, Liang Qichao, was a leader of intellectual reform.

She published studies of XXX and YYY.

Wartime government service

In 1941 she joined government service, becoming the first staff member of the China section of the State Department's Department of Cultural Relations. When John went to China, she remained in Washington until 1945, when she went as cultural officer in the Chongqing American Embassy. In Chongqing she was re-united with the Liangs, although they lived in poverty 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 she helped to organize academic association. In addition the couple adopted two daughters: Laura King in 1950 and Holly in 1953.

During World War Two she served in Chongqing, China's wartime capital, as an XX. After the war, because she did not have a doctoral degree and because of university anti-nepotism rules, she did not have a faculty position. She did, however, publish well-regarded scholarship and a memoir of the Liangs.

When the Fairbanks visited Japan in 1952, she worked with Masao Kitano, a scholar at the Kyoto, 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. Their research was published in XXX.

Her next scholarly projects turned to the problems of bronze casting in the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

The Fairbank home at 41 Winthrop Street, just off the Harvard Yard, became a center for scholars in Chinese studies, especially Thursday afternoon teas at which cucumber sandwiches were featured.

Influence and reception

Wilma Fairbank's articles on the Wu Liang shrines are considered pioneering scholarship and are widely cited. When they were collected in the volume, reviewers commented on their originality, though noting the advances in the field since their original publication, and later works on the shrines discussed them.

Her service was the basis of the America’S Cultural Experiment In China, 1942-1949, published by the State Department in XX. The historian of science, Joseph Needham, who had known Fairbank dujring 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.

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) with Kitano, M. "Han Mural Paintings in the Pei-Yuan Tomb at Liao-Yang, South Manchuria," Artibus Asiae 17.3/4:238–264.
• (1962) "Bronze Casting and Bronze Alloys in Ancient China," Technology and Culture 3,2:178–180. https://doi-org/10.2307/2718774
• (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.

Books

• (1972) Adventures In Retrieval: Han Murals And Shang Bronze Molds. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Text available and borrowable 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. Text available online at Internet Archive.
• (1994) Liang And Lin: Partners In Exploring China's Architectural Past. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. 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 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

• (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.: Published by the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research Harvard University : Distributed by Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674291530 (pbk.). {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)

• 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.
• 郑, 岩 (January 13, 2018), 费慰梅与中国艺术史研究
• Biographical note on Wilma Cannon Fairbank, Harvard Library
• 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.

External links

• Wilma Cannon Fairbank personal archive Harvard Library.
• https://cctv.cntv.cn/lm/journeysintime/20110617/107761.shtml