There is a tradition in Italian metaphysical art where artists, such as Giorgio de Chirico and Alik Cavaliere, deployed giant fruit as an allegory of human existence – as both full of life and existing as pure matter. Giant pears also appear frequently in Baldessin’s etchings and sculptures from the 1960s through to his final works in the late 1970s.

Some of the earliest pears in Baldessin’s art suggest physical desire and the human form. In subsequent pieces, pears grow increasingly abstracted and emblematic, and in some of Baldessin’s installations are like the disciples gathered at the Last Supper, or at one of the tables depicted in Baldessin’s Banquet for No Eating series. They are anthropomorphic fruit with emotions, and form relationships with people. Whereas Shakespeare exclaims, ‘O, Romeo … thou a Poperin Pear’, and Erik Satie composed Three pieces in the form of a pear, Baldessin created numerous compositions playing with pear-shaped bodies and on life events that turn ‘pear-shaped’.

On an autobiographical level, Baldessin spent many years working as a waiter, where he observed that spiced pears in wine were a sign of culinary sophistication and a symbol of high living.

Whiteley’s early paintings made in Europe drew on the heritage of Abstract Expressionism that was in vogue in England and France. Artists who attracted his gaze included the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky, Canadian-American Philip Guston and the English painter William Scott, all of whom, for the young Australian, had echoes of painters John Passmore, Russell Drysdale and Lloyd Rees – his ‘little gods’ from Sydney.

Whiteley observed: ‘I could see what abstraction was. It was the culmination of something in which one had served a tremendous apprenticeship and had gone through a terrific amount of experimentation. It was also a very slow process of whittling at which one arrived … at a visual equation in which everything else had been stripped away and reduced. What you were left with was this peculiar essence or summary, this hieroglyph of everything you had tried to achieve’.

In London, Whiteley’s paintings enjoyed spectacular success, with excellent sales, critical acclaim and recognition from the English art establishment. However, by the age of twenty-three, he felt he could no longer commit himself to abstraction and would have to engage more fully with life, in all its multifaceted figuration and sensuous beauty.

Baldessin’s early works include modest-scale etchings – figurative, moody black-and-white prints – touching on themes of distress and anguish. Images are frequently shown emerging out of pools of darkness, and the forms are dislocated, non-literal and somewhat menacing.

In 1962, Baldessin travelled to Madrid to examine works by Goya in the Museo del Prado. Another key early influence was cinema, especially Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), which deals with the tragedy of an ageing circus ringmaster who visits his estranged wife while his mistress, to spite him, has an affair with an actor. It is a dark Swedish tragicomedy that became a classic of existentialist cinema.

Baldessin’s work is edgy, the figures bulbous, dislocated into planes, biomorphic and generally lacking anatomical coherence. When these etchings and his early sculptures were exhibited in Sydney in 1965, the art critic and artist Elwyn Lynn observed, ‘George Baldessin’s first Sydney exhibition … is an extraordinary event, equalled, among the young, only by the first full view of Brett Whiteley. The risks he takes and enjoys spring from Melbourne’s imaginative realism and irrational fantasy’.

Although Whiteley was primarily a painter, he also created a considerable body of original prints and sculptures.

In London, he was introduced to master screenprinter Chris Prater at Kelpra Studios. Together they produced the Regent’s Park Zoo folio in 1965, published by Marlborough Fine Art. It consists of six colour screenprints with a title page rendered in the then pioneering technique of photo-stencilling that permitted a crisp juxtaposition of complex and varied textures, images and surfaces.

Whiteley observed: ‘This was the first time I took printmaking + especially silk screen really seriously. It was more than just a way of breeding gouaches, it was the first time I conceived in series, where each print would confirm or contradict the image before it … The last screen to be used each time in this series was always aimed at a thin nervous black line that would bring a third space or irony to the subject’.

The prints are a brilliant exploration of the relationship between human and animal emotions, where Whiteley’s virtuosity as a draughtsperson combined with humour and inventive skill to produce startling images that are simultaneously entertaining, confronting and seductively beautiful.

Both Baldessin and Whiteley were affected by the existentialist atmosphere prevailing in the 1960s and 1970s, which found expression in the songs of Bob Dylan and the films of Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Francis Bacon, the towering figurative artist who dominated the European art scene, was a major influence on both Baldessin and Whiteley and was known personally to both. At this time the world appeared out of joint, and art, to some extent, set out to make sense of it.

Baldessin’s circus performers burst onto the scene in 1963–64 and rapidly developed into biomorphic figures and figures captured in enclosures, presented on parade or witnessing one of Baldessin’s Banquets for No Eating. The artist peered at the world through windows into industrial wastelands, smokestacks and through clouds of smoke. Figures appeared captured within their interiors, at times mutilated and cantilevered across the picture plane, their anatomy distorted and faces becoming mask-like and tortured. Allegories and enigmas populate this new reality featuring giant pears, flags and emblems.

Whiteley depicted caged animals and serial killers on the loose. The savage beauty of his work combined sensuous line and violent colours and spoke of altered states and a divided self.

In 1964, at the peak of his early success, Whiteley commenced a series that has served to define him as an artist. It was an act of considerable courage by the twenty-five-year-old to abandon non-figurative art, for which he had received considerable acclaim, and adopt a new subject in the recent crimes of John Christie, a serial murderer.

Christie, an army veteran and former postman, moved to Notting Hill in 1938 and settled with his wife Ethel at 10 Rillington Place, very close to Ladbroke Grove where the Whiteleys first lived in London. Over the course of a decade, Christie is believed to have murdered at least eight women. While he was only ever charged with the murder of his wife, Ethel, he also admitted to killing Muriel Amelia Eady, Beryl Evans, Ruth Fuerst, Hectorina MacLennan, Kathleen Maloney and Rita Nelson.

Whiteley observed: ‘I wanted to take something as bad as the human condition could get … something filthy, repugnant, at the very bottom of the scale … and try to purge it’.

The story was told and retold in the tabloids, and shocked and fascinated 1950s London. These works can also be interpreted as a meditation on the spectacle and voyeurism present in the media’s preoccupation with grotesque acts of violence.

Baldessin, accompanied by his wife Tess and baby son Gabriel, stayed in Paris for eighteen months, working at the Atelier Lacourière et Frélaut, making etchings and creating a major series of large-scale charcoal and conté drawings, the MM of Rue St Denis series.

In Paris, Baldessin started to work on a theme related to the biblical repentant sinner Mary Magdalene, who stood at the foot of Christ’s cross. On a visit to Siena, Baldessin encountered late medieval images of her with long flowing red hair, and sometimes wearing a fur. As a penitential sinner, Magdalene was frequently shown in the wilderness with her body covered in hair.

On returning to Paris, Baldessin observed, ‘In Paris I used to walk down the Rue Saint-Denis, the prostitutes’ street, and as autumn was coming on I noticed that the girls, the Madeleines of Rue Saint-Denis, started wearing a kind of rusty red-coloured fur coat … They were twentieth-century Mary Magdelenes walking the streets of Les Halles and near the Georges Pompidou Centre … the Madeleine of my drawings became the personage which wasn’t the Rue Saint-Denis prostitutes and wasn’t the Mary Magdalene but was both’.

In 1975, Baldessin, together with artist Imants Tillers, was invited to represent Australia at the XIII Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil.

Baldessin’s contribution was Occasional images from a city chamber, 1975, a striking monumental sculptural installation accompanied by twenty-five etchings printed on silver foil. In some ways, this was a summation of Baldessin’s art to date, bringing together many of his iconographic and conceptual concerns.

Like Pablo Picasso’s Vollard Suite made in the 1930s, Baldessin’s work combined images of himself as the magician and creator, scenes from his studio, including the resident pigeon, and references to some of the obsessive themes in his oeuvre.

Printed in his new studio in rural St Andrews, the prints were printed on laminate (with a strike rate of one successful print to five rejects) and brought together Baldessin’s surreal industrial imagery of giant pears, smokestacks, body parts and the urban wasteland. It was an installation where the artist seemed to occupy centrestage, from where he conducted a grand and surreal existential theatrical event. On entering the space, viewers saw themselves reflected in the polished surfaces of the surrounding imagery.

The Whiteleys arrived in New York in September 1967 and immediately settled into the penthouse at the fashionable Chelsea Hotel. There they quickly met many famous names in the American art and music scene.

In New York, Whiteley sought to create a single work that would capture the spirit of America, and its essence and dilemma, in the most contemporary language. He wrote: ‘I was determined myself to produce a monumental work of art that would summarise 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 – of little use of continuing … This painting is a record of a struggle and my inability to resolve it; it is an admission of failure’.

The American Dream, 1968–69, is a sprawling, 22-metre- long, all-enveloping installation, a kaleidoscopic image that simultaneously brought together all that was good and bad in the United States. It combined the public and the personal with images of Bob Dylan, Vincent van Gogh, the Whiteleys’ daughter Arkie, Hitler and the war in Vietnam.