Brett Whiteley

Brett Whiteley AO (7 April 1939 – 15 June 1992) was an Australian artist. He is represented in the collections of all the large Australian galleries, and was twice winner of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes. He held many exhibitions, and lived and painted in Australia as well as Italy, England, Fiji and the United States. Early years Growing up in , a suburb of Sydney, Whiteley was educated at Scots School, Bathurst and Scots College, Bellevue Hill. He started drawing at a very early age. While he was a teenager, he painted on weekends in the Central West of New South Wales and Canberra with such works as The soup kitchen (1958). Throughout 1956 to 1959 at the National Art School in East Sydney, Whiteley attended drawing classes. In 1959 he won an art scholarship sponsored by the Italian government and judged by Russell Drysdale. He left Australia for Europe on 23 January 1960. London After meeting Bryan Robertson, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Whiteley was included in the 1961 group show 'Recent Australian Painting,' where his Untitled red painting was bought by the Tate Gallery. He was the youngest living artist to have work purchased by the Tate, a record that still stands. In 1962, Whiteley married Wendy Julius. 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 abstract works which led to him being recognised as an artist, at a time when many other Australian artists were exhibiting in London, but from 1963 he moved away from abstraction towards figuration. His farewell to abstraction, Summer at Sigean, was a record of his honeymoon in France. He painted Woman in bath (1963) as part of a series of works he was doing of bathroom pictures. It has primarily black on one side and has an image of his wife Wendy in a bathtub, seen 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 became fascinated by the murderer John Christie, who had committed murders in the area near where Whiteley was staying in Ladbroke Grove.