Brett WHITELEY

Australian 1939–92
worked in England 1960–67

The sinuous and charming White sacred baboon, 1965, is one of many images that show Brett Whiteley’s pleasure in animals and nature, something which he returned to throughout his life.

Whiteley’s Zoo series of fourteen drawings and paintings of monkeys, giraffes and lions, and six sculptures in fibreglass, wood, marble, plaster and brass, formed half of his 1965 exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, London. The other half was of paintings and drawings showing the murder and violation crimes of Christie, the London mass murderer. While the Christie paintings were a critical sensation, Whiteley’s animals sourced from Regents Park Zoo were overlooked. White sacred baboon is carved from an old olive tree root. The artist found the root on a road in Majorca and wheelbarrowed it back to Deia village where the Whiteleys were holidaying in 1964.1 Their daughter Arkie was born late that year and the family began visiting the zoo. Whiteley’s interest in animals was also stimulated by the strongest influence on his art at that time, the surrealist and expressive paintings and drawings of Francis Bacon who symbolised the human condition through images of caged apes. For Whiteley, animals symbolised the good in our natures.

1 See B. Pearce, Brett Whiteley: Art and Life, 1939–1992 (exh. cat.), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, p. 25.

Jennifer Phipps

The spare and elusive Still life with cornflowers, 1976, is from the period when his main subject became his immediate surroundings—the inside of his studio or the views from the window. In 1975 Whiteley had painted blue calligraphic designs on white vases thrown by Derek Smith. Still life with cornflowers could be an elongated version of one of these vases, but the blue decoration is now in the mouth of the vase, where the cornflowers bunch, and also in the fragile scattered flowers on the tabletop.

Ultramarine blue and blue-and-white, reflecting the European orientalist love affair with Chinese porcelain, make up the main part of Whiteley’s palette. They are also the colours of Sydney Harbour. He became expert in using white to throw into pleasing highlight the blues, and the key complementary colours on which the eye fastens, and which anchor the design. Whiteley’s choice of fruits of the classic still life—cherry, pear, pineapple, garlic—are a reference to Matisse, against whom the artist used to challenge himself.

Jennifer Phipps