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Brett
Whiteley Biography
1939 - 1992
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Brett Whiteley
AO
(7 April 1939 – 15 June 1992) an
Australian
artist
is one of the most famous Australian painters of
the twentieth century.
Whiteley is known
for his skill as a great draughtsman, had many
shows in his career, and travelled extensively
around the world. Brett Whiteley is represented
in all Australian National galleries.
He
is one of the most important and
best loved
Australian
artists,
Whiteley painting sells
for record price,
his
original paintings have sold for many millions
dollars.
Famous Works: The Soup Kitchen 1958, Red
Painting 1960, Alchemy 1972-73, Self Portrait
the Studio 1976, The Jacaranda Tree (Sydney
Harbour) 1977
Visible Influences:
Francis Bacon, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Chinese Calligraphy.
Movements & Styles:
Whiteley is known
for his skill as a great draughtsman. Surrealism in majority of his work
and abstraction in his early career. Whiteley produced mostly
landscapes, nudes and still lives, portraits, cityscapes, and erotic
works also abstract works in early in his career.
hiteley born in 1939 in Sydney, New South Wales, grew up in Longueville,
a harbourside suburb in north Sydney. By the age of seven had won his
first art competition. He was sent to boarding school at Scots College,
Bathurst and in 1956 was awarded first prize in the Young Painters'
section of the Bathurst Show. He left school mid-year and took night
classes in drawing at the
Julian Ashton Art School
in Sydney while holding down a job at an advertising agency.
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Brett Whiteley is now one of the most famous
Australian painters of the twentieth century.
Whiteley painting
sells for record price.
Brett Whiteley
died 15th of June 1992, is the most famous for
semi-surreal landscapes, gardens with views of
Sydney and nudes.
Whiteley's topics also included
portraits, still lifes, birds and abstracts. The
Sydney based
artist created paintings, drawings and
sculpture. Brett Whiteley was inspired by
singers like Bob Dylan and lived the lifestyle
of a rock star. He was married to the beautiful
Wendy Whiteley who was his "Muse" for a number
of years though he lived fast and hard. Whiteley
searched for a muse in drugs, just as many rock
stars had done before him, but ultimately it was
this lifestyle that shortened his life and
career.
Awards:
1961 Dyason Bequest, AGNSW;
1961 International Prix at the 2nd Bienalle,
Paris
1964 International Drawing Prize, Darmstadt,
Germany
1964 Perth Festival Art Prize, Australia
1975 Sir William Anglis Memorial Prize,
Melbourne
1976 Archibald Prize for 'Self Portrait in the
Studio'
1976 Sulman Prize for 'Interior with Time Past'
1977 Wynne Prize for 'The Jacaranda Tree'
1978 Wynne Prize for 'Summer at Carcoar'
1978 Sulman Prize for 'Yellow Nude'
1978 Archibald Prize for 'Art, Life and the
Other Thing'
1984 Wynne Prize for 'South Coast After the
Rain'
1991 Awarded the Order of Australia (OA)
Educated at
The Scots
School, Bathurst
and
The Scots
College,
Bellevue
Hill, Brett Whiteley
started drawing very early in
life. While a teenager, he
painted on weekends at
Bathurst
and Sydney with such works as
The Soup Kitchen (1958). In
1960, Whiteley left Australia on
a Travelling Art Scholarship
(judged by Sir
Russell
Drysdale at the
Art
Gallery of New South Wales).
One of the works he submitted to
win the scholarship was
Sofala, which he had painted
in 1956; it was done in images
which were slightly abstracted
in brownish colours. After
winning the scholarship he
travelled around Europe,
visiting
Italy,
France
and
England.
He arrived in London at a time
when many Australian artists
were becoming popular in
England. During this period,
there was a fascination with
Australian art there, and
Australian artists were looked
on favourably by the English
public. Australian artists
Arthur
Boyd,
Sidney
Nolan and Russell
Drysdale had become well known
and were exhibiting in London,
as well as many other Australian
artists who were also there.
After meeting the director of
the
Whitechapel Gallery,
he was included in the group
show 'Survey of Recent
Australian Painting' where his
Untitled Red painting was
bought by the
Tate
Gallery. This made
him the youngest artist ever to
have been bought by the Tate,
and it was this fact which
helped him to have even more
success, such as when he won the
first prize for Australia at the
Biennale
de la Jeunesse in
Paris.
During the next few years he had
much contact with artists in
London and in travels to other
parts of the world, and it was
these friendships and contacts
which helped him to become an
accepted artist.
In 1960, aged 21, Whiteley left
Australia on a
Travelling Art Scholarship (judged by
Sir Russell Drysdale at the
Art Gallery of New South Wales), and by
1961 had settled in London where
his work was shown at the
Whitechapel and Marlborough galleries.
In London he met many other
painters, including fellow
Australians,
Arthur Boyd and John Passmore.
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In 1962, he married
Wendy Julius
and their only child, daughter
Arkie Whiteley,
was born in London in 1964. While in London,
Whiteley painted works in several different
series: bathing, the zoo and the Christies. His
paintings during these years were influenced by
the modernist British art of the sixties -
particularly the works of
William Scott
and
Roger Hilton
- and were of brownish abstract forms. It was
these abstracted works which established him as
an artist, right at the time when many other
Australian artists were exhibiting in London. He
painted Woman in Bath as part of a series
of works he was doing of bathroom pictures. It
has primarily black on one side and an image of
his wife Wendy in a bathtub from behind. Another
in the series was a more abstracted Woman in
the Bath II, which owed a debt to his yellow
and red abstract paintings of the early sixties.
In 1964, while in London,
Whiteley was fascinated by the murderer
John Christie,
who had committed murders in the area near where
Whiteley was staying at Ladbroke Grove. He
painted a series of paintings based on these
events, including Head of Christie.
Whiteley's intention was to portray the violence
of the events, but not to go too far in showing
something which people would not want to see.
During this time, Whiteley painted works based
on the animals at the London Zoo, such as Two
Indonesian Giraffes, which he found
sometimes difficult because of how much the
animals would move. As he said: "To draw
animals, one has to work at white heat because
they move so much, and partly because it is
sometimes painful to feel what one guesses the
animal 'feels' from inside." (Whiteley 1979: 1)
Whiteley also made images of the beach, such as
in his yellowish painting and collage work
The Beach II, which he painted on a brief
visit to Australia before his return to London
and his winning of a fellowship to America.
Whiteley appears as a
character in the book Falling Towards England
by
Clive James
under the name Dibbs Buckley. Wendy appears as
"Delish."
When
in 1967 Whiteley won a
Harkness Fellowship Scholarship to
study and work in New York he met other artists and musicians while he
lived at the
Hotel Chelsea. His first impression of
New York was shown in the painting First Sensation of New York City,
which showed streets with fast moving cars, street signs, hot dog
vendors, and tall buildings. One way that America influenced him is the
scale of his works. He was very much influenced by the
peace movement at the time and came to
believe that if he painted one huge painting which would advocate peace,
then the Americans would withdraw their troops from
Vietnam. Still fairly young, Whiteley
was idealistic and caught up in the great peace movements of the 1960s,
with the protests against America's involvement in the war in Vietnam.
The work was called The American Dream, it was an enormous work
that used painting and collage and anything else he could find to put on
the 18 wooden panels. It took up a great deal of his time and effort,
taking up about a year of working on the piece full time. It started
with a peaceful dreamlike serene ocean scene on one side, that worked
its way to destruction and chaos in a mass of lighting, red colours and
explosions on the other side. It was his comment on the direction the
world would be headed and his response to a seemingly pointless war
which could end in a nuclear holocaust. Many of the ideas from the work
may have come from his experiences with
alcohol,
marijuana and other drugs. He believed
that many of his ideas have come from these experiences, and he often
used drugs as a way of bringing the ideas from his subconscious. He
sometimes took more than his body could handle, and had to be admitted
to hospital for alcohol poisoning twice. Around him at the Hotel
Chelsea, other artists and musicians took
heroin, which Whiteley did not take at
that time. The painting which was finally produced was made of many
different elements, using collage, photography and even flashing lights,
with a total length of nearly 22 meters. However Marlborough-Gerson, his
gallery, refused to show this work which he had been working on for
about a year, and he was so distraught that he decided to leave New
York, and he 'fled' to
Fiji.
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  Brett
Whiteley
Art
Awards:
1961 Dyason Bequest, AGNSW;
1961 International Prix at the 2nd Bienalle,
Paris
1964 International Drawing Prize, Darmstadt,
Germany
1964 Perth Festival Art Prize, Australia
1975 Sir William Anglis Memorial Prize, Melbourne
1976 Archibald Prize for 'Self Portrait in the Studio'
1976 Sulman Prize for 'Interior with Time Past'
1977 Wynne Prize for 'The Jacaranda Tree'
(On Sydney Harbour)
1978 Wynne Prize for 'Summer at Carcoar'
1978 Sulman Prize for 'Yellow Nude'
1978 Archibald
Prize for 'Art,
Art, Life and the other thing
1978 - Sulman Prize:
Yellow Nude
1978 - Wynne Prize:
Summer at Carcoar -
It was the first time ever that all prices went to the one and
the same artist.
Whiteley
(named a genius) was
the only artist who won all three prizes in one year.
1984 Wynne Prize for 'South Coast After the Rain'
1991 Awarded the Order of Australia (OA)
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Whiteley
was awarded the Wynne Prize again in 1984, and the
following year purchased an old
T-shirt factory in Surry Hills,
Sydney and converted it into a
studio. Further
renovations followed and in later years the downstairs gallery area was
repainted and now houses changing
exhibitions. In
1991 he was awarded the Order of Australia (General Division). In the
last years of his life Whiteley travelled far and wide, taking in
England, Bali, Tokyo, and spending two months in Paris in an apartment
on Rue de Tournon. On 15 June 1992 he was found dead from a heroin
overdose in a motel room in Thirroul on the NSW coast. The coroner's
verdict was 'death due to self-administered substances'. He was 53 years
old.
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Collections represented
All public state galleries, regional
Australian galleries including
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In the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1991, Brett
Whiteley was appointed an Officer (AO) of the
Order of
Australia. On 15 June 1992, aged
53, he was found dead from a heroin overdose in a motel room in
Thirroul,
north of
Wollongong.
The coroner's verdict was 'death due to self-administered substances'.
In 1999, Brett's mother Beryl Whiteley founded the
Brett Whiteley
Travelling Art Scholarship in
memory of her son.
In 1999, Whiteley's painting The Jacaranda Tree (1977), which had won the Wynne Prize, sold for $1,982,000, a record for a modern Australian painter.
In 2007 his painting The Olgas sold for an
Australian record of $3.5 million. On 7 May 2007, Opera House, (which
took Whiteley a decade to paint, and which he exchanged with
Qantas
for a period of free air travel) sold for $2.8 million, in Sydney.
Brett Whiteley
is one of
Australia's most
revered artists. His
lyrical
expressionism and
lack of inhibition
placed him at the
forefront of
Australia's
avant-garde art
movement. He won
many prizes and
awards and his work
hangs in numerous
galleries, including
the
National Gallery of Australia
in Canberra, the
Tate Gallery in
London and the
Museum of Modern Art
in New York.
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ABC-TV
Stateline segment
Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship
view
now
Selected Awards
1961 Dyason Bequest, AGNSW
1961 International Prix at the 2nd
Bienalle, Paris
1964 International Drawing Prize,
Darmstadt, Germany
1964 Perth Festival Art Prize, Australia
1975 Sir William Anglis Memorial Prize,
Melbourne
1976 Archibald Prize for 'Self Portrait
in the Studio'
1976 Sulman Prize for 'Interior with
Time Past'
1977 Wynne Prize for 'The Jacaranda
Tree'
1978 Wynne Prize for 'Summer at Carcoar'
1978 Sulman Prize for 'Yellow Nude'
1978 Archibald Prize for 'Art, Life and
the Other Thing'
1984 Wynne Prize for 'South Coast After
the Rain'
1991 Awarded the Order of Australia (OA)
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