archives
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
Brett Whiteley's Paris
On view: 4 December 2004 – 8 May 2005
After staying in Paris in 1989, Brett Whiteley spoke of the 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 whilst 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 thirty countries, ranging across the northern and southern hemispheres, living together for one month in Sarcelle, a new suburb in Paris 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’ encapsulates at once his unwavering sense of discovery and engagement:
'How to make images of this city that are not cliché – millions of pictures have been painted – how to find a new vision is the challenge. What one is after is a high-octane visual poetic journalism, brief, essential and above all, fresh. This can best be achieved by drawing, and not by the heavy metier of oil paint. To revive the sketch, to Zen in and out quickly, to stalk the streets with a tiny leopard camera, to try to look at the obvious obscurely, and to introduce into each view the right amount of humour, or irony, or Dada. By adding a new image every day, the aim is to build a symphony of pencil, charcoal, ink, gouache, photography – each image contradicting or confirming the one before it, one bold, one fragile, one more in focus, the next more blurred etc, mass versus line… stylistically changing gear and shifting pace all the time, exciting the viewer by virtuosity, but keeping in mind a collective unity, so that the whole suite is bound together by one ravishing subject – Paris and its cultural heroes.'
