archives
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
Brett Whiteley's Paris
On view: 11 September – 28 November 1999
After staying for two months in Paris in 1989, Brett Whiteley spoke of that great city as a kind of mistress, weaving its seductive powers on every street corner. His affair with it had begun three decades earlier: in 1960, at the age of 21, he went there as a recipient of the Italian Travelling Scholarship. During this visit, he sought out the haunts of Modigliani, one of his artist heroes, fascinated by the possibility that the genius of the past might somehow be ingrained in the very fabric of the streets and buildings. He wondered if he might gain, by proximity, further understanding of its nature. Paris and genius: these two ideas seemed to him inseparable.
In 1962, Whiteley was the first Australian to win the International Prize at the prestigious Biennale de Jeunes Peintres et Sculpteurs in Paris where he exhibited with Charles Blackman and Lawrence Daws in the Australian pavilion. Just prior to the Biennale, in October 1961, Whiteley attended a meeting of young painters, as the representative of the Australian National Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts. He later reported how painters had come from 30 countries, ranging across the northern and southern hemispheres, living together for one month in Sarcelle, a new Paris suburb about ten miles from the centre, to exchange ideas about art in general and discuss with each other their personal ambitions.
Whiteley made many trips to Paris during his lifetime, many to see important exhibitions, such as that of another hero and mentor Francis Bacon, and his enthusiasm for it remained unabated. During his last visit in 1989, Whiteley wrote that the challenge was to find a new vision of the city, and his text for the exhibition catalogue Paris Regard de Côté following encapsulates at once his unwavering sense of discovery and engagement, and the spirit of the new Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. It could not be more appropriate that these two exhibitions are launched together.
