Brett Whiteley
| Brett Whiteley | |
|---|---|
| Born |
7 April 1939 Sydney, New South Wales |
| Died | 15 June 1992 (aged 53) Thirroul, New South Wales |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Education | Julian Ashton Art School |
| Known for | Visual arts |
| Movement | Avant-garde |
| Spouse(s) | Wendy Whiteley (m. 1962, div. 1989) |
| Awards |
Biennale de Paris – International Prize for Young Artists 1962 Archibald Prize 1976 Self Portrait in the Studio 1978 Art, Life and the other thing Wynne Prize 1977 The Jacaranda Tree (On Sydney Harbour) 1978 Summer at Carcoar 1984 The South Coast After Rain Sulman Prize 1976 Interior with Time Past 1978 Yellow Nude |
Brett Whiteley AO (7 April 1939 – 15 June 1992) was an Australian artist. He is represented in the collections of all the large Australian galleries, and was twice winner of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes. He held many exhibitions, and lived and painted in Australia as well as Italy, England, Fiji and the United States.
Growing up in Longueville, a suburb of Sydney, Whiteley was educated at The Scots School, Bathurst and The Scots College, Bellevue Hill. He started drawing at a very early age. While he was a teenager, he painted on weekends in the Central West of New South Wales and Canberra with such works as The soup kitchen (1958). Throughout 1956-1959 at the National Art School in East Sydney, Whiteley attended drawing classes. After meeting the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, he was included in the group show 'Survey of Recent Australian Painting' where his Untitled red painting was bought by the Tate Gallery.
In 1962, Whiteley married Wendy Julius. Their only child, daughter Arkie Whiteley, was born in London in 1964. While in London, Whiteley painted works in several different series: bathing, the zoo and the Christies. His paintings during these years were influenced by the modernist British art of the sixties - particularly the works of William Scott and Roger Hilton - and were of brownish abstract forms. It was these abstracted works which led to him being recognised as an artist, just at the time when many other Australian artists were exhibiting in London. He painted Woman in bath (1963) as part of a series of works he was doing of bathroom pictures. It has primarily black on one side and an image of his wife Wendy in a bathtub from behind. Another in the series was a more abstracted Woman in the bath II, which owed a debt to his yellow and red abstract paintings of the early sixties. During these years he worked with the American painter George Sheridan, sharing for some months his studio in the Haute Pyrenees.
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