BRETT WHITELEY

Anonymous gift to the Art Gallery of New South Wales through Barry Stern Galleries in 1980
Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales

L'Eté Australie a Montpellier: 100 chefs-d'oeuvre de la peinture Australienne, Musee Fabre, Montpellier, July - September 1990, cat. 105, 1980 (label on reverse)
Brett Whiteley Nudes, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 11 December 1999 - 2 April 2000

S. Crossman and J. P. Bardon, L'Eté: Australie a Montpellier: 100 chefs-d'oeuvre de la peinture Australienne, Musee Fabre, Montpellier, 1900
Barry Pearce, Brett Whiteley Nude (exh. cat.), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990

This work is presented in a gold leaf timber box frame. The work has some very minor fine drying cracks to the white impasto paint, top right hand edge. Small scratch (approximately 0.7cm) to raised arm of figure in bottom right hand corner. Overall the work is in excellent original condition.
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In Don Featherstone's documentary film The Beach: beach culture in Australia, Brett Whiteley is described as 'the great Australian painter of female sexuality at the beach.'¹ This remarkable painting provides conclusive proof of Feathersone's claim.

After five years in Europe and America, Whiteley returned to Australia for the summer of 1965-66. At Whale Beach, north of Sydney, he was inspired to begin what would become a recurrent and extensive series of beach paintings, of which the present work is exemplary. In The Beach (1966, private collection), a decade later in this painting, and in the still later and more extended Bondi sequence of the mid-1980s,² the erotic-expressive Baconesque nudes of the earlier Bath and Christie series are released from their compressed, interior settings and disport themselves sensuously against the open, vertical blankness of the sand, with the rolling ocean squeezed into a distant blue corner of consciousness.

Many of Whiteley's best works begin in this way, with the articulation of a secondary plane or screen within the edges of the picture frame: the table top of a still life, the floor of a studio interior, the window of a harbour view or the blonde paddocks of a Bathurst landscape. As Sandra McGrath observed in the 1970s: 'The large spaces of the Australian landscape lend themselves to Whiteley's style... He uses form to articulate space and silence. So economically and sparingly has he used the paint that he creates startling tension between what is there and what is not. The compositions hang together as finely as an electric wire.'³

Just such formal tension animates the present work, with its array of bikinied sunbathers scattered seemingly randomly across the composition, in cocky defiance of the laws of perspective and the etiquette of painterly finish. Cyphers of animal pleasure, the women are ethereal, linear fantasies of breasts and buttocks and outstretched limbs, distorted as if reflected in a carnival mirror, somewhat in the manner of Picasso's balloon-like bathers of circa 1930. At the same time many of the figures are also solid and fleshy, not unlike Whiteley's carved mangrove branch sculptures of the same period, those works collectively titled Her (circa 1975-76).⁴ Arms and legs emerge out of bulging torsos from slightly odd places or at slightly odd angles or for a slightly odd length, as if constrained by the accidental-organic shapes of found timber.

This is certainly the case with the arm-up, elbow-crooked, hand-on-head pose of the dominant figure in the right foreground. For Whiteley this becomes a favourite pose-pattern, reappearing in a single-figure painting of about the same period (Bather on the Sand, 1975-76, private collection), echoed some years later in the more serious, tragic portrait The Letter (to Anna) (1980-81, private collection) and its sister composition, the Portrait of Wendy (1984, private collection), and recurring yet again in close to its original form in After the swim, Tangier (1986-87, private collection).

Elsewhere, the attitudes of the figures are determined almost entirely by the emphatic, fruit-like double curve and split of breasts and (more especially) buttocks. Against these assertive, pneumatic pink Amazons, everything else on the beach - a packet of cigarettes, a transistor radio, a book, a flabby, lilliputian man - fades into outline and blur and shrinks into toy-like miniaturism. What dominates is 'the great nude... the idealization of [a man's] glands... this glimpse of beauty, where invention and skin become one... mistress, mother, lover, whore, obtainable-unobtainable... the wonder of a perfect distortion.'⁵

1. The Beach: beach culture in Australia, ABC TV / RM Associates / NHK / Featherstone Productions, 2000
2. This latter group also incorporated a print portfolio, the etching suite A Day at Bondi (1984, ed. 30)
3. Sandra McGrath, 'Profile: Brett Whiteley', Art and Australia, vol. 5 no. 1, June 1967, p. 372
4. Six of these sculptures were included in the 1995 retrospective. See Barry Pearce (ed.), Brett Whiteley: Art and Life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, plates 67 & 68, pp. 121, 122, 230 
5. Brett Whiteley, artist's statement in Brett Whiteley: Recent Nudes, (exh. cat.), the artist, Sydney, 2000, p. 7