BRETT WHITELEY

Gould Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 2002

Brett Whiteley Drawings, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 16 September -15 October 1994, cat. 93 (bears label on reverse)

There are minor drying cracks to white impasto area lower centre. These appear stable. This work is framed in a gilt timber frame with white gesso mount under perspex.
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Brett Whiteley's 1990 exhibition Regard de Côté (Sideways Glance)¹ was widely heralded as a triumphant return to form. At the time of the show Art Gallery of New South Wales Senior Curator of Australian Art Barry Pearce told Janet Hawley: 'It is as much a curse as a blessing, to be as highly gifted as Whiteley... He can be a scallywag and squander his talent, then he does something so magnificent, like these latest Paris works, and you forgive him.'²

Whiteley had spent two months in Paris during the previous year, on a self-appointed mission or challenge to produce 60 paintings and drawings in 60 days. Entirely successful in this initial quest, he continued to revisit the image of the City of Light in remembrance and imagination over the next two years. The present work dates from July 1990, just a couple of months after the AGNSW exhibition, and presents a delightful coda to that initial Paris project.

Whiteley said of Paris: 'I love the stoniness and creaminess, that wonderful soiled magnolia feeling. Paris is so sensual, beautiful, flirtatious, mischievous, arrogant, orderly, so civilised. They call Paris a whore because she seduces you on every corner, and every street I turned, I could see another picture.'³

This mixed media memory illustrates that quality of the city, and of the artist's vision. The east end of the Ile-St-Louis rises in a stony, creamy impasto of apartment buildings like the prow of a steamship, while in its wake or smoke of ink and graphite Whiteley alludes to some of those 'other pictures': from Notre-Dame to Sacré Coeur, from the Vendôme Column to the towers of La Défense.

1. Brett Whiteley: Regard de Côté, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 March – 6 May 1990
2. Quoted in Janet Hawley, 'Brett Whiteley', in Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1993, p. 36
3. ibid., pp. 42-3