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1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
9 shades of Whiteley
On view: 2 December – 9 September 2007
Brett Whiteley was one of the greatest Australian artists of the twentieth century, an intense and prolific practitioner who ranged across an impressive spectrum of media. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor and wordsmith, but ultimately flourished best at that which the artist - in the words of Barry Pearce, Head Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW - in his deepest conscience most cared about: being a painter.
This exhibition, held in Whiteley’s last home and studio from 1985-92, is a chronological artistic journey. 9 shades of Whiteley is a mini-retrospective tracing the artist’s life and career from his earliest work in 1955 with Self portrait at 16, to just a few months before his death with Port Douglas, Far North Queensland 1992. The exhibition includes 9 phases of Whiteley’s art: Early Works, Abstraction, Bathroom Series, Christie and London Zoo Series, Lavender Bay, Portraits, Birds, Landscapes and Late Works. It is an astonishing body of work that displays all the dexterity, imagination and ambition of a prodigious talent.
Whiteley's early schooling as a boarder at Scots College, Bathurst, New South Wales, led him on his path, having found a book on van Gogh one Sunday at St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church: ‘I picked the book up and studied it - it completely changed my way of seeing. The immediate effect was a heightening of reality in that everything I looked at took on an intensity…. That morning returning to school by bus, I remember the poplar trees were bare for winter… but it took me years to paint what I saw. I remember having this very, very powerful sense that my destiny was to completely give myself to painting - that I would be a painter and it was a remarkable moment of knowing that.’
His first major prize was the Italian Travelling Scholarship, awarded by Sir Russell Drysdale when Whiteley was just 20 years old. Three of the paintings that Whiteley submitted, Sofala 1958, July painting circa 1959 and Dixon Street 1959, are on display. The scholarship enabled Whiteley to travel to Europe and experience art as opposed to reproductions. His extended period overseas is represented with several works including Woman in Bath 1964, Chimpanzee 1965, Christie 1965 and Fiji 1969.
Inspired by Matisse and his superb The Red Studio 1911, Whiteley produced Self portrait in the studio 1976, which went on to win the Archibald Prize. This was preceded by The balcony 2 1975, where he flattened the picture plane and saturated it with ultramarine blue, shifting the horizon line beyond the edge. This allowed the viewer to experience, with a kind of symphonic expansion, the natural beauty of Sydney harbour, his home at the time.
Whiteley won the prestigious Archibald Prize for portraiture twice with Self portrait in the studio 1976 and, two years later, with his much-admired and confronting Art, life and the other thing 1978, which squarely examines the problem of drug-addiction and the creative process. Both works are included here.
He once said in an interview in 1975: ‘I hardly ever see my paintings around. I don’t have the faintest idea where half of my life’s work is. Sometimes that worries me. We should have a museum specially built for retrospectives. It would be ten feet wide and a mile long, like a railway tunnel, and you could walk down someone’s life chronologically…’