Brett Whiteley

Biography

In 1978 three annual prizes, among the most prestigious in the country, were presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in all three cases the winner was the same man. Brett Whiteley received the Archibald Prize for the canvas “Art, Life and the other thing”, the Sulman Prize for “Yellow nude” and the Wynne Prize for “Summer at Carcoar”.

No one had won all three in a single year before, and no one has since.

He was born on 7 April 1939 in Sydney and grew up in the suburb of Longueville. He went to the Scots School in Bathurst and the Scots College in Sydney, started drawing very early, and as a teenager spent weekends painting in the Central West of New South Wales and in Canberra. From 1956 to 1959 he attended drawing classes at the National Art School in East Sydney, and he also took evening classes at the Julian Ashton school. While still at school he saw a one-man exhibition of the landscape painter Lloyd Rees at the Macquarie Galleries. Much later, in 1988, he wrote to Rees that those landscapes had shown him for the first time how a picture can reveal the decisions and revisions made while it was being painted; poetry, in his words, is born where the pace of a painting changes. Rees became his friend and mentor for many years.

In 1959 Whiteley won an Italian government scholarship, with Russell Drysdale on the judging panel, and on 23 January 1960 he left for Europe. In Italy he looked at Duccio and Piero della Francesca.

London took to him quickly. Bryan Robertson, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, included him in the 1961 group show “Recent Australian Painting”, and the Tate bought his untitled red painting. No living artist younger than Whiteley has had a work acquired by the Tate since. His early London pieces, brownish abstract forms, show the influence of William Scott and Roger Hilton. It was abstraction that made his name, but from 1963 he turned towards figuration. His farewell to abstraction was “Summer at Sigean”, a record of his honeymoon in France with his wife Wendy. It was she, seen from behind in the bath, whom he painted in “Woman in bath” (1963). Then came the series. In 1964 he became absorbed in the story of the murderer John Christie, who had committed his crimes near Ladbroke Grove, where Whiteley himself was living; the result included “Head of Christie”. He wanted to convey the violence of what had happened without crossing the line beyond which the viewer turns away. At the same time he was drawing the animals at London Zoo, for instance “Two Indonesian giraffes”, and admitted that animals have to be drawn at full stretch because they never stop moving. The Marlborough gallery in London showed his work, and in 1964 he took part in documenta III in Kassel.

In 1967 a Harkness Fellowship took him to New York. He settled at the Hotel Chelsea, where he became friends with Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. His first impressions of the city went into the painting “First sensation of New York City”: fast cars, street signs, hot dog vendors, tall buildings. But his main New York project was “The American dream”. Whiteley believed that if he painted one enormous picture in the cause of peace, the Americans would withdraw their troops from Vietnam. For about a year he worked on eighteen wooden panels with a total length of almost twenty-two metres, using paint, collage, photography and even flashing lights. At one end is a calm, almost dreamlike ocean; at the other, explosions, red and chaos. His gallery, Marlborough-Gerson, refused to show it, and Whiteley, utterly dejected, left for Fiji.

In “The night café” (1971–1972) he took Van Gogh’s painting and pulled the lines of the room towards a single vanishing point, so that the interior seems to rush at the viewer. “Alchemy” (1972–1973), again on eighteen panels, opens with an exploding sun taken from an unfinished portrait of Yukio Mishima; feathers, part of a bird’s nest, a glass eye and pieces of shell are worked into it. It is regarded as a self-portrait. Part of the work later appeared on the cover of the live album “Alchemy” by Dire Straits.

Back in Sydney, he settled at Lavender Bay and in the 1970s painted the harbour from his window again and again: “Henri’s Armchair” (1974), “The balcony 2” (1975), “Interior with time past” (1976). The room passes through open windows into a bay full of boats. He painted his friend Patrick White as a rock in “Headland”, because White had said that in his next life he would like to come back as a stone. In 1976 “Self portrait in the studio” brought him his first Archibald Prize: everything is in deep blue, with the artist’s own reflection in a mirror at the bottom and a piece of the harbour on the left. I think his love of Matisse and of ultramarine shows here with particular clarity. In 1984 he won the Wynne Prize once more, for “The South Coast after rain”.

Whiteley called painting a “difficult pleasure”; that is also the title of a documentary about him made for Australian television in 1989. For him a picture was an argument between what a thing looks like and what it means.

In 1985 he bought a large warehouse in Sydney and turned it into a studio with an exhibition space, and in his last years he lived there too, in Raper Street, Surry Hills. In June 1991 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia. Brett Whiteley died on 15 June 1992 in Thirroul, north of Wollongong, at the age of fifty-three. His home and studio are now a museum run by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in 1999 his mother founded a travelling art scholarship in his name to honour his memory.