Wilma Cannon Fairbank
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.
Her father was a professor of physiology at Harvard Medical School, who saw medicine as a profession of social service,[6] and her mother a Radcliffe graduate, feminist activist, writer, and novelist who travelled the country to support progressive causes, especially women's rights.
She was intrigued when Warner showed the rubbings taken from portrait stones in the Wu Family Temple of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Jiaxiang, Shandong.
Only later, however, did 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 recalled that "Pelliot's bookish erudition and Warner's artistic sensibility together kindled my own enthusiastic interest in Chinese art.
After graduating from Radcliffe with a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts in 1931, she went to Mexico, where she worked with the avant-garde painter Diego Rivera, whose bold forms and use of color she adapted to great effect in her own paintings.
She struck up a quick and deep friendship with Huiyin and Sicheng, who gave Wilma and John Chinese names.
[22][17] Fairbank began her study by assembling a full set of rubbings, then 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 a reconstruction 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 rubbed away over the centuries.
Potters could stamp a design on any number of bricks and assemble elaborate patterns, which led to superimposed friezes and division into panels, rather than creating an illusion of continuous pictorial space.
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".
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.
During this time, she also researched and wrote papers on Chinese education and technical training of Asian students in the United States; served as secretary for the newly founded Far Eastern Association in 1948 and 1949; and organized and conducted a weekly radio program, “The World and You,” sponsored by the Boston World Affairs Council from 1950 to 1952.
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.
She pointed out that “the Shang moldmaker's technique is openly announced by his designs.” [29] The Fairbank university home at 41 Winthrop Street, just south of Harvard Square, became a center for colleagues, students, and visiting scholars.
[32] Her 1972 volume, Adventures In Retrieval: Han Murals And Shang Bronze Molds reprinted her articles, with an extensive preface.
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”.
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 did not discuss parallel British efforts.
