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1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley

Tangier to Byron Bay: Brett Whiteley's travels 1960-92

On view: 6 February – 29 August 1999

I am now in Modigliani’s country. This has been my secret, strange and abnormally mystical ambition to sit alone... and allow my understanding (or maybe its my misunderstanding) of how environment can mould, shape or even stain the personality of genius.

- Breff Whiteley, Paris 1960

There is a general perception of Brett Whiteley as a portrayer of erotic sensuousness, and as an investigator of the persona of the artist, particularly himself. Less so is he thought of as a harvester of memories of places visited, sometimes for short, sometimes for long periods. More often than not these places evoked an association with people he admired: Paris and Modigliani, Harar and Rimbaud, Thirroul and D.H. Lawrence, to name a few. Whiteley travelled widely. He was a traveller in the most creative sense, experiencing not only Europe with its time-worn architecture and terrains long shaped by antiquity, the Middle-East with cultural textures and sexual tensions dissonant with his own, New York where he felt the formidable energy of a modern world imploding, Fiji where he gained a tantalising but elusive glimpse of paradise, but also the diversity of his own country with its towns, deserts, rainforests, rivers, and beaches.

Places per se were just as important to his work as his obsession with the figure, or his observation of the pure forms of nature. They became a serious extension of his mental life. It might be speculated that, on the whole, they represent a kind of Baudelairian topography of Whiteley’s voyage towards happiness, that ineffable quality of elsewhere, or otherness, that drew him in his mind even before his physical departure.

This exhibition includes a selection of paintings and works on paper from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Whiteley estate and some private collections. It begins with Whiteley’s first destination of significance, Sofala. Sofala, together with nearby Hill End an old gold-mining town in western New South Wales, was already made legend by Australian artists such as Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend. In the 1950s Whiteley could not help but follow the trail of his predecessors of the previous decade. Earthy hues, simple shapes of disrupted landscape, and perhaps above all the patina of a history, impacted on him.

Worth noting also are two rarely seen landscape paintings, San Gimignano and Evening in Tuscany from the artist’s visits to Italy; responses to Piero della Francesca country although certainly not the Italian master’s stillness of vision. The restless tremor in these works is Whiteley’s own. However, perhaps the most luxuriantly beautiful of his landscapes here is The green mountain (Fiji), suffused with the feeling of relief of his escape from New York in 1969. This painting symbolises the second part of a characteristic shift from one extreme state of mind to another; from a place of smothering destruction to a place of bliss. Patrick White once owned it, and loved it for its visual evocation of smells damp with decay and the sweeter fragrances of tropical renewal. It also contains one of the artist’s loveliest passages of descriptive writing, bridging word and visual intention with a predilection for the exotic that could almost be French, and an irony that was purely
Australian:

Whiteley’s imagination and wit were activated by many of the places he visited, as he captured colours, forms and the interface between nature and human culture with his own fundamental modus operandi in image and word. Inspired by Italy, France, Tangier, New York, Fiji, Australia and many other locations, he illuminated a journey across actual worlds but seen through the fascinating crystal of an artist’s mind.

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