Brett Whiteley

Acquired directly from the artist

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. The surface inconsistencies appear inherent to the medium and the artist's working method. Some of the collaged elements exhibit signs of lifting and undulations in the respective sheets. The plastic daisies are slightly soiled and some are lifting slightly. The wooden element protruding from the surface is also lifting slightly. The canvas at the lowest extremity is loosened from its support. Unframed.
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Brett Whiteley is one of Australia's most celebrated artists. In 1967-69, he and his wife and muse, Wendy, spent almost two years in New York living at the Chelsea Hotel, where he worked on an important series of paintings, including A Tribute to Brendan. Whiteley had won a Harkness Fellowship and his first impressions of New York were recorded in an article in Time Magazine on November 10, 1967.  The Chelsea Hotel had for many years been home to artists and musicians including William S. Burroughs, Jr., Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the latter occasionally baby-sitting for the Whiteleys' daughter Arkie.  New York in 1967 was frenetic, coarse, seething with energy and creativity, a culture shaped by young people of Whiteley's generation. Looming over everything was the cloud of the Vietnam War, which was being resisted with demonstrations, draft-card burnings, marches and sit-ins. 1968 saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. There was also much going on in America to feel good about, even marvel about, from rock music to the Apollo moon mission, which only added to the confusion of these turbulent times.

Whiteley entered this world as an outsider, and like other outsiders before him, saw it as his mission to sort things out about America for Americans: "I was determined myself to produce a monumental work of art that would summarize the sensation of the impending necessity for America to own up, analyse and straighten out the immense and immediately seeable madness that seemed to run through most facets of American life...."  (Barry Pearce, Brett Whiteley, Art & Life, published on the occasion of the Brett Whiteley Retrospective, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Thames & Hudson, 1995, page 231)

From this resolve, Whitelely created The American Dream, (1968-69,  Art Gallery of Western Australia), a huge, 18-part painting, which was supposed to hold a mirror to American society and thereby change it. It is significant that this was the first multi-panel painting Whiteley ever painted; its huge dimension was partly inspired by the very large pictures James Rosenquist was painting and perhaps by the outsize scale of the city. Whiteley would go on to repeat the multi-panel format in several other seminal works. 

The main compositional component of A Tribute to Brendan is very close to the fiery red, central element in The American Dream and may, therefore, have been a preliminary study for this portion of the painting. At the center of A Tribute to Brendan is a collaged newspaper photograph of Brendan Behan, the celebrated, hard-drinking Irish poet, playwright and novelist who died in 1964, but who had also stayed for a time at the Chelsea Hotel. It is possible that Whiteley and Behan had met there during Whiteley's earlier visit to New York in 1962. Whiteley would certainly have admired Behan's radicalism and raw, creative genius. Alongside Behan  in the collage is the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.  At the base of the composition, a cluster of plastic daisies emerges from a tree pit, possibly an offering to the dead author. Also emerging from the base of the painting are several sperm-like white forms representing perhaps the indomitable vitality of the poet; one of these forms is labelled 'sure'. Other elements include a collaged photograph of Ed White performing the first US space walk (Gemini 4, June 1965) and another of a highwire acrobat, perhaps a visual pun on the astronaut's dramatic mission. The equivalent segment of The American Dream  also contains collaged human images as well as a photograph of a space craft launch.