Brett Whiteley, AO (7 April 1939 – 15 June 1992) was an Australian artist. One of the best-known Australian painters of the 20th century, he is collected in most Australian galleries. He had many shows in his career, and travelled extensively around the world.

Early Years

Educated at The Scots School, Bathurst and The Scots College, Bellevue Hill, Brett Whiteley started drawing very early in life. While a teenager, he painted on weekends at Bathurst and Canberra with such works as The Soup Kitchen (1958). In 1960, Whiteley left Australia on a Travelling Art Scholarship (judged by Sir Russell Drysdale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales). One of the works he submitted to win the scholarship was Sofala, which he had painted in 1956; it was done in images which were slightly abstracted in brownish colours. After winning the scholarship he travelled around Europe, visiting Italy, France and England. He arrived in England at a time when many Australian artists were becoming popular in England. During this period, there was a fascination with Australian art there, and Australian artists are looked on favourably by the English public. Australian artists Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale had become well known and were exhibiting in London, as well as many other Australian artists who were also there.

After meeting the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, he was included in the group show 'Survey of Recent Australian Painting' where his Untitled Red painting was bought by the Tate Gallery. This made him the youngest artist ever to have been bought by the Tate, and it was this fact which helped him to have even more success, such as when he won the first prize for Australia at the Biennale de la Jeunesse in Paris. During the next few years he had much contact with artists in England and in travels to other parts of the world, and it was these friendships and contacts which helped him to become an accepted artist.

London

In 1962, he married Wendy Julius and their only child, daughter Arkie Whiteley, was born in London in 1964. While in London, Whiteley painted works in several different series: bathing, the zoo and the Christies. His paintings during these years were influenced by the modernist British art of the sixties - particularly the works of William Scott and Roger Hilton - and were of brownish abstract forms. It was these abstracted works which recognized him as an artist, right at the time when many other Australian artists were exhibiting in London. He painted Woman in Bath as part of a series of works he was doing of bathroom pictures. It has primarily black on one side and an image of his wife Wendy in a bathtub from behind. Another in the series was a more abstracted Woman in the Bath II, which owed a debt to his yellow and red abstract paintings of the early sixties.

In 1964, while in London, Whiteley was mesmerized by the murderer John Christie, who had committed murders in the area near where Whiteley was staying at Ladbroke Grove. He painted a series of paintings based on these events, including Head of Christie. Whiteley's intention was to portray the violence of the events, but not to go too far in showing something which people would not want to see. During this time, Whiteley painted works based on the animals at the London Zoo, such as Two Indonesian Giraffes, which he found sometimes difficult because of how much the animals would move. As he said: "To draw animals, one has to work at white heat because they move so much, and partly because it is sometimes painful to feel what one guesses the animal 'feels' from inside." (Whiteley 1979: 1) Whiteley also made images of the beach, such as in his yellowish painting and collage work The Beach II, which he painted on a brief visit to Australia before his return to London and his winning of a fellowship to America.

Whiteley appears as a character in the book Falling Towards England by Clive James under the name Dibbs Buckley. Wendy appears as "Delish."

New York

In 1967 Whiteley won a Harkness Fellowship Scholarship to study and work in New York. He met other artists and musicians while he lived at the Hotel Chelsea. His first impression of New York was shown in the painting First Sensation of New York City, which showed streets with fast moving cars, street signs, hot dog vendors, and tall buildings. The Hotel Chelsea displays several of Whiteley's paintings from the period when he lived there including Portrait of New York which hangs behind the reception desk.

One way that America influenced him is the scale of his works. He was very much influenced by the peace movement at the time and came to believe that if he painted one huge painting which would advocate peace, then the Americans would withdraw their troops from Vietnam. Still fairly young, Whiteley was idealistic and caught up in the great peace movements of the 1960s, with the protests against America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. The work was called The American Dream, it was an enormous work that used painting and collage and anything else he could find to put on the 18 wooden panels. It took up a great deal of his time and effort, taking up about a year of working on the piece full time. It started with a peaceful dreamlike serene ocean scene on one side, that worked its way to destruction and chaos in a mass of lighting, red colours and explosions on the other side. It was his comment on the direction the world would be headed and his response to a seemingly pointless war which could end in a nuclear holocaust. Many of the ideas from the work may have come from his experiences with alcohol, marijuana and other drugs. He believed that many of his ideas have come from these experiences, and he often used drugs as a way of bringing the ideas from his subconscious. He sometimes took more than his body could handle, and had to be admitted to hospital for alcohol poisoning twice. Around him at the Hotel Chelsea, other artists and musicians took heroin, which Whiteley did not take at that time. The painting which was finally produced was made of many different elements, using collage, photography and even flashing lights, with a total length of nearly 22 metres. However Marlborough-Gerson, his gallery, refused to show this work which he had been working on for about a year, and he was so distraught that he decided to leave New York, and he 'fled' to Fiji.

Fiji

Whiteley made paintings in Fiji of the people, similar to the way that Paul Gauguin had travelled to Tahiti to paint native people and culture in the nineteenth century. Whiteley painted the native people of Fiji, such as in Fiji Head - to a creole lady which incorporates text as well as a downward looking portrait. During his time in Fiji, he started painting birds, which were a source of great beauty for him, and which he enjoyed painting. Whiteley had experience in painting animals from his zoo series in London. A stylised image of a bird he painted, "Orange Fruit Dove Fiji", shows the bird looking towards fruit on a plant, while it is sitting on its nest with eggs shown below.

Appropriations

One image which uses van Gogh's style in a unique way is Night Cafe. He took the van Gogh painting and stretched the lines of the room to a single vanishing point, creating an image which appears fast moving and extremely vibrant and dynamic. Another work where imagery is borrowed from the art of another artist is in Rembrandt, where he painted a large somewhat gloomy looking portrait of the Dutch master.

Alchemy

Part of his work Alchemy was featured on the cover of the Dire Straits live album Alchemy although it had the addition of a guitar with lips held by a hand. The original painting, done between 1972 and 1973 was composed of many different elements and on many different panels, similar to The American Dream. While the idea of the massive work on many different panels had developed in America, this new work was Australian. It had many curved and illustrious shapes, sexual imagery and giant letters IT on one of the panels. Just looking at the elements from which he composed the work shows the wide variety in materials he used; everything from feathers and part of a birds nest to a glass eye, shell, plugs and 'brain'. It has been regarded as a self-portrait, a giant outpouring of energy and ideas brought forth over a long period of time. He did not even know what it would look like when it was finished. Many of the panels are golden, referring to the process of alchemy. Others are full of tiny drawings and little details showing forms, many of which are based on the human figure, such as ears, hands, body parts and sexual imagery. The work refers to transformation, such as with the mythical transformation of ordinary metal to gold.

Sydney Harbour and landscapes

Whiteley loved painting Sydney Harbour views in the 1970s such in his painting Interior with time past, which shows an interior and exterior view starting with a room that leads through open windows to the harbour full of boats outside. The table in the front of the room close to the viewer has minutely decorated vases and small objects, while a drawing on the left and a sculpture to the extreme right show how Whiteley often used erotic images in his works. He painted a view of his friend Patrick White as a rock or a headland in Headland; White had told Whiteley that in the next life he would like to come back as a rock. Whiteley painted other images of the Australian landscape, including a view of the south coast of New South Wales after it had been raining called South Coast After the Rain. He did paintings of the areas around Bathurst, Oberon and Marulan, all in New South Wales. He soon settled in Lavender Bay. He painted abstracted images of bush scenes such as The Bush and also images which resulted from experimentation with various drugs, such as alcohol in the humorous Self Portrait after three bottles of wine.

Success with Archibald and other prizes

In the late 1970s Brett Whiteley had great success with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, winning all of their major prizes twice. These were the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes, considered the most prestigious art prizes in Australia.

His wins were:

• 1976
  • Archibald Prize: Self Portrait in the Studio
  • Sulman Prize: Interior with Time Past
• 1977
  • Wynne Prize: The Jacaranda Tree (On Sydney Harbour)
• 1978
  • Archibald Prize: Art, Life and the other thing
  • Sulman Prize: Yellow Nude
  • Wynne Prize: Summer at Carcoar

1978 was the only time that all three prizes have ever gone to the same person.

His first Archibald win, Self Portrait in the Studio shows a view of his studio at Lavender Bay overlooking Sydney Harbour, with his reflection in a mirror shown at the bottom of the picture, while the painting is primarily a look at his studio, shown in deep, bluish tones. As with many of his works, the viewer is led deeper into the picture with minute detail, and a view of Sydney Harbour is on the left which establishes the location of the picture. These paintings along with some of the other works, show Whiteley's love for ultramarine blue, Matisse, for collecting objects and for a love of Sydney Harbour.

His second Archibald win, Art, Life and the other thing, again shows his willingness to experiment with different media such as photography and collage, and his respect for art history, including an image of the famous 1943 William Dobell portrait of Joshua Smith, which won a court case against people who claimed it was a caricature, not a portrait. He also experimented with warping and manipulating a straight self portrait and altering and distorting the image, incorporating his pictorial sense of addiction.

He later won the Wynne Prize again, in 1984, with The South Coast After Rain

Difficult Pleasure

He was the subject of an ABC television documentary called Difficult Pleasure directed by Don Featherstone in 1989, which showed him talking about many of his main works, and his recent works such as ones done on a month long trip to Paris, one of his last overseas trips. He also showed his large T-shirt collection, and talks about his sculpture, which he said is an aspect of his work that many people do not take seriously. Difficult pleasure is how he described painting, or creating art: Art is an argument between what a thing looks like and what it means.

Later years and death

Whiteley became increasingly dependent on alcohol and became addicted to heroin, leading to bouts of schizophrenia . Whiteley's work output began a steep decline, although its market value continued to climb. He made several attempts to dry out and get off drugs completely, all ultimately unsuccessful. In 1989, he and Wendy, whom he had always credited as his 'muse', divorced.

In the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1991, Brett Whiteley was appointed an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia

On 15 June 1992, aged 53, he was found dead from a heroin overdose in a motel room in Thirroul, north of Wollongong. The coroner's verdict was 'death due to self-administered substances'.

In 1999, Whiteley's painting The Jacaranda Tree (1977), which had won the Wynne Prize, sold for $1,982,000, a record for a modern Australian painter. Before this, his previous highest-selling work was The Pond at Bundanon for $649,500. In 2007 his painting The Olgas for Ernest Giles sold for an Australian record of $3.5 million. [38218] On 7 May 2007, Opera House, (which took Whiteley a decade to paint, and which he exchanged with Qantas for a period of free air travel) sold for $2.8 million, in Sydney.

Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship

In 1999, Brett's mother Beryl Whiteley founded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in memory of her son.

See also

• Visual arts of Australia

Notes

1. White, J. Collectors Dossier, Australian Art Collector, July, 1998
2. It's an Honour: AO
3. Australian Government: Culture and Recreation Portal
4. Whiteley painting sells for record price

References

External links

• Brett Whiteley Studio - website of the artist's studio in Sydney, Australia, now preserved as a museum. Website includes biographical details and an image gallery
• Brett Whiteley Profile - Includes a selection of paintings, artist quotations, biography and links to more resources on the artist.
• http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/brettwhiteley/