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1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
Brett Whiteley nudes
On view: 11 December 1999 – 2 April 2000
Brett Whiteley began drawing the nude early in his career, at various night classes and sketch clubs in Sydney in 1956. This was also the year he met Wendy Julius, his future wife, who posed for him in his glasshouse studio in Longueville. Drawing the figure from life, however, was not one of his strengths until the bathroom series in London in 1963, even though he used nude female forms in his early abstractions.
Indeed following their stay in Sigean in the south of France the previous year, the last abstractions that Whiteley worked on showed an increasing preoccupation with the female torso, though seen from a distance and in multiple forms dispersed across a shallow pictorial field. He then began his bathroom series, focusing on the single figure, the naked form of Wendy in the bath, capturing the tactility and tones of her flesh with a scrutiny rarely equalled in his later paintings of the same subject. In the bathroom pictures, Whiteley brought the nude right up to the picture plane, closing in on it as if he might reach out and caress the forms of his beloved while drawing and painting her. There was still a good deal of abstraction in this series, but the figurative ambience was more intimate, as if the artist’s eye got so close he could only see the nude as a sequence of shapes, looking up, down, inside and around it in a way which Tom Rosenthal described in The Listener of November 1965 as ‘a kind of Proustian tour’.
After the bathroom paintings and drawings, Whiteley sharpened his attention more explicitly in a series on the theme of the British necrophile murderer John Christie. Here he boldly explored the macabre territory of sexual arousal and violence manifest through the naked figure, bearing out his statement in the catalogue for the exhibition New Generation: 1964 at the Whitechapel Gallery: ‘All the paintings I have made in the last four years have been concerned one way or another with sex and the desire to record sensual behaviour.' Malevolence and joy, it seemed to him, could be flip sides of the same thing.
Whiteley visited Australia for several months during 1965-66 and discovered further expressive possibilities giving the female nude a natural setting on the clean, dazzling beaches of Australia, recording the pleasures that its curves and contours brought to his draughtsman’s gaze. For the next three decades, nudes, principally inspired by Wendy, appeared consistently in Whiteley’s work in notebooks, easel drawings and large-scale paintings - culminating in an exhibition devoted to the subject in Sydney in 1981. Here he paid homage to Matisse and Picasso, placing the nude in interiors as well as on the sand, although his interpretations were often more frankly erotic, and on occasions more brutal in distortion, than either of those European masters. Whiteley also made a number of drawing studies for nude sculpture, executing them mainly in wood and making use of the natural figurative forms of tree trunks and branches.
Included in the present exhibition are some male nude studies, which reveal that Whiteley’s interest in the sensuous line was not restricted to the female. Moreover his images of the crucified Joel Elenberg, body defeated by terminal illness, are an expression of the ultimate subsidence of that energy of the living flesh that so inspired him. This was in concert with his grief at the loss of one of his dearest friends; and as with the Christie series, Whiteley demonstrated that the nude could equally serve his consciousness of death and pain as the celebration of life and pleasure.
I know that in my work there is a certain sensuality, a sexuality. There is a sort of addiction to the curve, to the carnal, to the rounded, even to lust almost. I see sensuality, sexuality, everywhere: in clouds, in mountains, in fruit... and seemingly most of human motivation is caused by it. It’s a very very deep force… I try as overtly as possible to allow that force to key my painting.
The nude has been predominant really... a very major part of my work. Even when I was painting abstractions, in a way I was painting the nude, but out of focus with no specific definition, and when I broke into figuration... it was the bathroom pictures, it was pictures of my wife in the bath.
The nude can sort of be broken into three groups, either bathroom or showers, people bathing, or Bondi Beach pictures. There’s been a lot of work on the beach, of erotic pictures, actual pictures about lovemaking and much franker works of nudes. A lot of the time I had a particular muse or a particular person in mind and as I say, the pictures are celebrations of my relationship with them.
With the Bondi pictures there is eroticism because of the beach and there is that sort of latent sense of sexuality on the beach… I mean it is a kind of theatre of the sloth in a way... a sort of stupor that happens with the sun, people eye each other off and so on. There is a lot of sensuality or even implied sexuality in the Bondi pictures.
- Quotations from the artist in Don Featherstone’s film A Difficult Pleasure, 1989.
