User:CWH/Wilma Cannon Fairbank

CWH/Wilma Cannon Fairbank
Occupation	Scholar
Known for	Chinese art history
Spouse	John King Fairbank
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. In the early 1930s, she lived and travelled widely in China to discover and help to preserve Chinese archeological sites. Her studies on the Han dynasty Wu Liang tombs. Following World War II she served as cultural officer in the American Embassy, and in the 1950s she continued to publish articles, reviews, 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. Her 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 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 feminist activist, writer, and novelist. She was sister of Dr. Bradford Cannon, Linda Cannon Burgess, Marian Cannon Schlesinger, and Helen Bond.

Her father, together with her mother's sisters, Bernice Cannon, and Ida Maud Cannon, rented a family home at 2 Divinity Avenue (later the site of the Harvard-Yenching Library), which became a center for intellectual and social activism. Ida was Chief of Social Service at Massachusetts General Hospital and a community activist. Her mother, a Radcliffe graduate, travelled the country to support progressive causes, especially women's rights, and took the family on a three-month tour of Europe in 1929-1930, Fairbank entered and Radcliffe College began to study Asian art as a senior. She was already a serious painter when she took a course offered by Langdon Warner, which was the only course at Harvard devoted to China. The French sinologist Paul Pelliot delivered a guest lecture, which was the first time she saw portrait stone of Wu's Temple in the Eastern Han Dynasty in Jiaxiang, Shandong, and was introduced to Mission Archéologique dans la Chine Septentrionale (Paris, 1913) by Édouard Chavannes, which she referred to as the bible of 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 graduation, John went to begin his professional study of China in England on a Rhodes Scholarship, which did not allow married students, and the couple carried on a long-distance courtship. After graduating, 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. In 1932, she sailed to China, where she and John were married in July. The Japanese Army had turned Northeast China into the puppet state of Manchukuo, but Beiping, as Beijing, the former capital, was now known, was relatively safe. The couple lived in an old-style courtyard house in a neighborhood that was home to many Chinese intellectuals, Western graduate students, and scholars of Chinese culture and history, and they found a traditional culture that was still vibrant but eager to change. Wilma filled the house with her paintings and drawings. Among their neighbors were Lin Huiyin, the first woman architect in modern China, and her husband, Liang Sicheng, a pioneering historian of Chinese architecture, whose late father, Liang Qichao, had been one of China's best-known leaders of intellectual reform. Wilma struck up a quick and deep friendship with Huiyin. Sicheng gave Wilma and John Chinese names, his was Fei Zhengqing, "Fei" "Zhengqing" Fei Weimei, which means "comforting plum." The community of Chinese progressive intellectuals and Western students included ZZZ, . Their many visitors included Wilma's sister MarionThe city was full of shops, museums, etc. rubbings were still the best way for a student to acquire art, and she returned to the study of the Wuliang rubbings. In the spring of 1934, she and XXX took a week-long journey to visit the site of the wuliang stones she and other scholars had known only through the rubbings. She had been 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 over the centuries. What her "desk-bound colleagues," as she later called them, did not realize was that the stones were }}

After she and John returned to Cambridge in 1936, he joined the Department of History and she helped to organize the Far Eastern Association, which later became the Association for Asian Studies. At John's urging, she published XXX .

Wartime government service

In 1941 the couple moved to Washington, D.C.

American Council of Learned Societies commissioned her to write a report on 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 she helped to organize academic association. She and John adopted two daughters: Laura King in 1950 and Holly in 1953. She did not have a faculty position, she did, however, continue to publish well-reviewed scholarship

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.

She next turned to the problems of bronze casting in the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

The Fairbank home at 41 Winthrop Street, just south of Harvard Square, became a center for colleagues, studentsm and visiting scholars in Chinese studies, especially Thursday afternoon teas at which 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 "The Offering Shrines of Wu Liang Tz'u", "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 their original publication.

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 to XX. 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.

Reviewers praised her 1992 biography of the Liangs, Liang And Lin: Partners In Exploring China's Architectural Past.which was quickly translated into Chinese.

Wilma and John caught the interest of those in China who looked to history for parallels to the late century periond of opening and reform.

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.

Rports

• 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) 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. Forword by Jonathan Spence. 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 (Translated by Fei Weimei, 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

• (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.
• 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
• 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, "Obituary: Wilma Cannon Fairbank (1909-2002)," Orientations 33.7 (2002):

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)