BRETT WHITELEY Australian, 1939-1992

Elwyn Lynn, 'Whiteley mystery burns bright', The Australian Weekend Magazine, 9-10 July 1988

For an interview with the artist at the time of this exhibition, see The Age, Weekend, 20 July 1988, p. 14

Born in Sydney and intent on a career as an artist from boyhood, Brett Whiteley achieved recognition in Britain, Europe and the United States before returning permanently to Australia in 1969. In 1976 he won both the Archibald and the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and the following year the Wynne Prize for landscape with his great Jacaranda Tree (On Sydney Harbour). He is regarded as one of this country’s most important twentieth - century artists, represented in all major Australian public collections.

Frangipani and Hummingbird, one of Whiteley’s most monumental canvases, is by far the largest work seen in the market since the great Jacaranda Tree was sold seven years ago. It was purchased by the present owners from the artist’s special studio exhibition in 1988. Doves, seagulls, birds of paradise, owls, wrens, honey-eaters and hummingbirds are just a few of the species he portrayed in painting and sculpture. As his biographer Barry Pearce observes, his paintings of birds are ‘joyous responses to an optical world without pain’. Indeed it is not fanciful to think sometimes of Whiteley’s bird paintings as self portraits. He had loved birds since his childhood and in his last phase of work they became symbols of both domesticity and freedom. ‘It is not surprising that he held special exhibitions dedicated to the theme’.¹

Art critic Alan McCulloch once commented that, as observer and delineator of the kingdoms of animal and bird life, Whiteley was a remarkable artist, ‘perhaps because in these relatively uncontaminated domains he is motivated more by love than despair’. ² The poet Robert Gray has also written perceptively of Whiteley’s bird paintings, with their ‘dewy brightness of colour’ and ‘of such freshness they exude a palpable scent… They are to me his best work. I like in the bird-shapes that clarity; that classical haptic shapeliness; that calm – those clear perfect lines of a Chinese vase. The breasts of his birds swell with the most attractive emotion in his work: it is bold, vulnerable and tender’. ³

In Frangipani and Hummingbird the delicacy of flower and feathered creature, small in reality but here seen as though in a most intimate close-up view, contrasts with the dramatic scale and palette of the work. Whiteley had previously painted a number of views of Sydney Harbour that included frangipani trees, with their distinctive silhouette and heavily scented white-and-gold blossoms. However here it is almost as though, in viewing the painting, we zoom in alongside the tiny bird seeking nectar from a single bloom. Tropical warmth, the sweet perfume of frangipani, even the suggestion of sound – the humming of tiny wings – are all evoked with great subtlety whilst, in masterly counterpoise, the sense of movement is kaleidoscopic and the colour is almost explosive in its brilliance.

Not long after completing Frangipani and Hummingbird, Whiteley wrote of his desire to paint with even more colour: ‘I am determined to crush a coloured picture from that area within me that is game and wild and intoxicated’. ⁴ He had converted an old T-shirt factory in Surry Hills into a large studio – ideal for both the creation and exhibition of paintings such as this. Although his personal life had been in disarray, the high-velocity nature of his talent filled him with energy and a new relationship rekindled his intense perception of the sensuousness in all things. Whiteley dedicated his 1988 exhibition to the 'spirit of Japan', he told one reviewer, 'I am going to Japan for the first time in a few weeks'. ⁵ Frangipani and Hummingbird was painted during one of the last interludes of phenomenal creativity in a career that was all too soon tragically curtailed.

1. Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley, Art & Life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, p. 37; and see pp. 196ff. for ‘Birds & Landscapes’.
2. In ‘Letter from Australia’, Art International, October 1970, quoted by Pearce, op. cit., p. 33.
3. ‘A few takes on Brett Whiteley’, Art and Australia, 24, 2, Summer 1986, p. 220ff.
4. Artist’s notebook 25, 3 March 1989 quoted in full by Pearce, op. cit., p. 41, n. 81.
5. The Age, 20 July 1988, p. 14.