BRETT WHITELEY

Bonython Galleries
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Winter Exhibition: Recent acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, July 28 - August 12 1975, cat. 81

Mervyn Horton, Australian Painters of the 70s, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1975, p. 63 (illus.)

Work in very good, original condition.
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Brett Whiteley's Fijian fruit doves are amongst the most loved and admired of his many images of bird life. The present work is one of the earliest, richest and most significant of the series. 

Following his phenomenal success as colonial enfant terrible in London in the early 1960s, Whiteley and his wife Wendy (and infant daughter Arkie) travelled to New York on a Harkness Fellowship at the end of 1967. The experience of the dynamic, even frenetic urban pop culture of New York City and the fierce antiestablishment politics of the Vietnam War years left a strong mark on the artist's psyche and on his work: the excessive, chaotic visual polemic The American Dream (1969, Art Gallery of Western Australia) shows how deeply ambivalent was his response to living in the USA. Reacting against this 'period of fantastic turmoil and unsureness' Whiteley longed to return to an art 'based on the idea of extraordinary escapism... to build a world external from the quagmire.' ¹  He achieved this dream by resorting to the old Romantic strategy of travel - this time to Fiji in 1969. There, in the small village of Navutulevu, on the south coast of Viti Levu, the artist and his family found delight and refreshment, a literal and figurative Pacific refuge. As Barry Pearce has observed, 'the rustic simplicity of the lifestyle was for the Whiteleys a universe away from New York. It was Gauguin's Tahiti, Donald Friend's Bali.'²  Regrettably, after only five months of this idyllic respite, the artist was arrested for possession of opium, and unceremoniously deported back to Australia. Not having had time to tire of the island's jungle and beach environment and its slow, easy pace, Fiji quickly assumed a sentimental, even mythic place in Whiteley's imagination. As his personal 'Paradise Lost', memories of the island were to haunt him for the rest of his life. The several species of Fijian fruit dove (genus Ptilinopus) came to symbolise that blessed time - Whiteley called it 'probably for me the most beautiful bird in the world.'³ He even bought a stuffed and mounted specimen, and this creature was to serve as the model for numerous nostalgic, imaginary returns to Fiji in succeeding years.

The present work exemplifies this broader signification, the bird forming a link between the artist's fond memories of Fiji and his delight in a newly-discovered substitute tropical paradise. An autograph inscription on the reverse reads 'started in Sydney, finished after first trip to Bali.' Motif, place and graphic style, even the framing make this work a profound expression of Whiteley's orientalism, his apprehension in the Asia-Pacific region of Baudelaire's 'luxe, calme et volupté'. From its first appearance in 1969, the fruit dove appears in a number of oils, painted over a twenty year period, as well as in three prints, several drawings and gouaches, even a blue and white ceramic ashtray. With their poetic allusion to peace and their gentle graphic curvature, these are amongst the works that prompted the poet Robert Gray to write: 'In Whiteley's bird paintings is embodied his finest feeling; 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.'⁴

Despite the clarity of the bird and the raw reality of its collage elements, Glimpse of Eden remains deeply abstract, materially and spatially ambiguous. The Chinese Imperial yellow, Jean Arp-organic form in the top right corner could be either light shining through a rainforest canopy or a map of an island archipelago in a green ocean.

The bird itself sits on a twig-assemblage nest atop a branch-assemblage palm tree, but the curve of the trunk and the spattering of guano on the nest also irresistibly suggest a wave and its foaming crest. The rich bottle-green velvet of the artist's original frame even extends the jungle beyond the picture plane and into the personal space of the viewer.

In this pictorial context, it is not surprising that the species is not precisely identified, though the mauve on the breast and the blue-edged wings suggest that it is in fact the Beautiful Fruit Dove (Ptilinopus pulchellus). Such a scientific nicety might at first seem irrelevant to art history, but is actually quite significant in this case. The painting was purchased in the mid-1970s by a collector who was also an amateur ornithologist, and fellow-birdoes who visited his house regularly commented that the speckled egg visible in the nest was scientifically inaccurate. When the owner presented this problem to the artist, Whiteley simply laughed, and obligingly agreed to the substitution of a dove's (correct) plain white egg. Whiteley's subsequent paintings of the fruit dove all have pure white eggs.

1. Brett Whiteley, quoted in Sandra McGrath, Brett Whiteley (rev. ed.), Bay Books, Sydney, 1992, pp. 91, 94
2. Barry Pearce, Brett Whiteley: Art & Life 1939 - 1992 (exh. cat.), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, p. 31
3. Brett Whiteley, inscription on the reverse of Orange Fruit Dove (1988)
4. Robert Gray, 'A few takes on Brett Whiteley', Art and Australia, vol. 24, no. 2, Summer 1986, p.222