BRETT WHITELEY Australian, 1939-1992

Marlborough Gallery, London (label on the reverse); purchased by the present owner

Private collection, Melbourne

Brett Whiteley, Marlborough New London Gallery, London, Autumn 1965, cat. 26, illus.

Whiteley probably first heard about the Christie murders when he was first in London in November 1961.  He was then living and working, by chance and not for long, at 129 Ladbroke Grove W11, within walking distance of number 10 Rillington Place, Ladbroke Grove – a house made notorious as the place where the necrophile serial murderer John Reginald Halliday Christie had lived and where he had killed a number of women during the 1950s. It was while drinking in the local pub, from which Christie had lured at least one of his victims, that Whiteley first determined that ‘he might do something about it’.¹

In 1964 Whiteley had completed his now famous ‘Bathroom Series’. This new imaginative excursion, he said, came about in part because he felt ‘obliged show life in its completeness, that it would be a lie to show just the good things in life’. He was also, as his first biographer Sandra McGrath explains, influenced by the overwhelming presence in British art at the time of Francis Bacon: ‘The new boy in town… had to decide that if he were going to make his mark as a figurative artist he would have to take the challenge straight into the older painter’s territory and beat the master art his own game. For if Bacon had been taunting his public with images of evil, showing evil as a general malaise of the human condition, Whiteley would go one step further and give it a name, a place, a face – as well as showing the victims’.²

As he conceived his ‘Christie Series’, Whiteley read police files and old newspaper accounts of the crimes and subsequent trial. He visited the Murderers’ Room at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum to study the likeness of Christie himself, the details of his victims and his murderous paraphernalia. Rita Nelson, a twenty-five year old prostitute from Belfast and probably the third victim, was apparently not even missed after her death in January 1953. Christie lured her to Rillington Place, like most of the others, by posing as a doctor and offering to help with an ailment or an abortion. Here her head-and-shoulders ‘portrait’ is probably loosely inspired by newspaper photographs. She wears a crucifix – little protection, in the event, against annihilation. However the violence of her death by strangulation is implied through Whiteley’s technique and through innuendo – rather than explicitly.

As McGrath writes of the series as a whole, ‘While any sensitive viewer would have to experience some sense of shock at the images, this is balanced by the sheer beauty with which Whiteley uses paint, the extraordinary sexual vibrancy of the paintings and the boldness of the concept’. Christie himself was clearly a Jekyll-and-Hyde character, bullied as a boy, gassed in the First World War and virtually unemployable. As Whiteley came vicariously to know Christie the man, while working on the series, he gradually began to see him in a broader context – not just as a ruthless murderer, but as a symbol of twentieth-century isolation and alienation.³ The murdered woman Rita Nelson, equally, is pitiable not only for the circumstances of her death but for the lonely, faceless anonymity of her brutally short life.

The exhibition in which Rita Nelson was first shown, at the Marlborough New London Gallery in 1965, made Whiteley something of an instant sensation. Some reviewers were simply shocked. However, as Robert Hughes wrote at the time, ‘The fact that Whiteley could take a subject so loaded with journalistic associations, and turn it into art, is the measure of his power for transformation’.⁴ Christie and Kathleen Maloney, Christie with Hectorina McLennan and Small Christie Painting No. 1 are all now in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Head of Christie was formerly in the Harold E. Mertz Collection, along with Cheetah in Rillington Place and the charcoal Christie and Kathleen Maloney.


1. McGrath, S., Brett Whiteley, Bay Books, Sydney, rev. edn 1992, p. 51; and see chapter 3, ‘Getting away with murder’, pp. 50-61 for a discussion of other important works in the Christie series. The chronology of Whiteley’s studio addresses is here taken from Barry Pearce in Brett Whiteley, Art & Life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, pp. 238-9.
2. McGrath, op. cit., p. 54.
3. Op. cit., pp. 52, 58.
4. Hughes, R., ‘The Shirley Temple of Australian art; Brett Whiteley’s splash at the mainstream’, The Bulletin, 18 December 1965, p. 41.