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1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
Genesis of a painter: the early abstractions of Brett Whiteley
On view: 29 August 1998 – 31 January 1999
Abstraction for Brett was more about learning how to deal with aesthetics and emotion together to come up with something that was a unique vision. He learnt a lot from abstraction about how to bang one form up against another... It didn’t really matter what it was, whether it was figurative or abstract; the important thing was not to leave the canvas empty.
- Wendy Whiteley 1995
The abstract paintings that Brett Whiteley made in Italy and London during 1960-61, and at Sigean in France during 1962, stamped him as a prodigy. Containing an erotic, investigative energy together with a quite powerful solemnity, they declared that a new talent of significance had arrived in the international art world. The impact of these early abstractions was signified by the purchase of one by the Tate Gallery in London in 1961. At the time, Whiteley was the youngest artist represented in its collections.
They were heady days. From the outset of his career, even as an artist working for Lintas in Sydney before he went to Europe in 1960, Whiteley’s mind was in a fast lane to fulfill his ambitions. Yet for one so young, he had an astonishing competence, and some of his later notoriety has perhaps tended to obscure his finer qualities as a painter that were established in those early years. They inform so much of his later work. Some might even say they forgive it.
Today, with the enormous availability of art images, it is easy to forget the feverish desperation of Whiteley’s absorption of limited sources he could find of international contemporary painting in Sydney. There was not much in our Gallery at the time: Graham Sutherland’s semi-abstract Welsh mountains 1937 was about as exciting as it got. Rarity intensified the hunt. Publications and postcards of the current state of art were highly prized, whatever could be found in libraries and bookshops. If we are lucky enough now to track down Michael Seuphor’s illustrated dictionary which encapsulated just about every approach to abstract painting until 1958, combined with Herbert Read’s Contemporary British art, and Marcel Brion’s Art since 1945, we can get a feeling for those particular icons that were seized upon by Whiteley and his contemporaries as points of departure.
In Brion’s book, for example, as part of an essay by Read on British painting, there is a colour plate of one of William Scott’s best paintings of 1957; a squarish still-life abstraction with ochre, white and Prussian blue shapes nuzzling the sides of a canvas suffused with glowing orange. Whiteley loved Scott’s work, and it is interesting to note that the British artist’s abstraction did not entirely abandon the erotic overtones invested in his earlier still-life paintings and drawings. Scott’s table-top conceptions gave Whiteley the clue to raise his landscape horizon to the top edge of his composition, emphasising flatness. The subsequent tension between several shapes and the perimeters of the picture plane was something that Whiteley exploited with an electrifying sexuality.
There were other artists through whose work he was encouraged in his interest towards abstraction including Arshile Gorky especially, Philip Guston, Kenzo Okada, Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko — although Rothko concerned him because of his apparent conclusive simplicity (‘where do you go from here?’ Whiteley said to Michael Johnson) and Roger Hilton, with whom he became good friends in England. Then there was his response to the ambience of Italy and the art he saw in its museums and churches during his travelling scholarship there. But equal to all these readings of the art scene in the late 1950s and early 60s was his ongoing reference to the Australian landscape. Alternate passages of spatial tension and relaxation, honey-warm whites, ochres and browns punctuated by umber greens, deep reds and the occasional flash of shadow-blue; these were straight out of his experience of Australia.
Whiteley’s early abstractions came to an end with his period in Sigean, although he continued to produce paintings from this sojourn of 1962, for a couple more years. On honeymoon there with Wendy after their marriage in London, Whiteley got from Sigean a brief taste of paradise away from the art career highway. There were fruit trees, fish in the lake, which featured in some compositions like a bloated phallus or, obversely, an extended womb, and days of sunshine that seemed eternal. The creamy colours of dry hills were dotted with olive trees, as they appeared in the paintings of Piero della Francesca. But the formalism that had come hard at him for two or three years finally exhausted his fascination. He decided that he must go against the grain, compelled to make the sensuous forms of Wendy’s body that pulsed through the colours and mysterious transitions of edges in his abstractions, far more explicit. This he did in the bathroom series which followed.
Paintings and drawings have been borrowed from the Whiteley estate, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and select private collections for this exhibition. They range from figurative and landscape images made in Sydney just before Whiteley left for Europe, to the works made in Sigean. Signpost qualities for his future development are there to be discovered; warm textures and forms gleaned from Italian painting and architecture; a heightened command of pictorial dynamics developed through intelligent reading of contemporary international painting; and an enduring recollection of the Australian landscape; but above all, a resonant eroticism achieved by combining landscape forms with the naked figure.
Some of the drawings included here have never been exhibited. They reveal a private, experimental side to Whiteley, which is not often glimpsed. Genesis of a painter exposes an indefatigable researcher of both tradition and contemporary idioms out of which Whiteley attempted to fabricate a reputation to match and overtake his inspirations. To a large extent he succeeded, creating some of the most accomplished and beautiful abstractions of his time.
