Untitled Red Painting III 1961

BRETT WHITELEY (1939-1992)

Untitled Red Painting III 1961

oil and collage on board
122.0 x 122.0 cm; 125.0 x 125.0 cm (framed)
signed, dated and inscribed verso: "UNTITLED/ RED PAINTING 3"/ Brett Whiteley/ OIL/ 1961
bears inscription on backing verso: X/ MATTHIESON [sic]/ E9437
bears inscription on labels attached verso: Miss Welo

Provenance:
The Matthiesen Gallery, London, 12 December 1961 (stock no.E9437)
Kaaren Lynn Welo, United States of America
Estate of the above

Exhibited:
Brett Whiteley: Paintings and Gouaches, The Matthiesen Gallery, London, 9-31 March 1962, cat.13

Reference:
Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2010, p.246, cat.EE21
Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, vol.7, cat.50.61

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Kathie Sutherland with cataloguing this work.

Estimate: $450000 - 650000

Result Hammer: $950000

Rothko is a painter of essences. I am a painter of essentials …

As you move slowly and blindly into the experience of picture making, the reality of certain relationships within the picture plane cannot be adjusted until your ideals are adjusted …

Go to the unfamiliar, go to the end, the whole way the unexplored, but even in this passage of darkness a piece of cotton in the cave, not so much to find your way back to articulate safety, but just as an assurance of ground covered.(1)

Brett Whiteley wrote such reflections in a small notebook after arriving in Italy on a travelling scholarship in 1960. His perspicacity at age twenty-one was certainly impressive; enough to impel him on a career, once the doors to Europe opened up, driven by paradigms of art history - first Australian, then European - whilst at the same time launching himself towards the future with formidable ambition. And by the time of his death in New South Wales in 1992, he had stamped himself as a consummate draftsman across a prolific output of erotic figuration and sensuous interiors, rendered with almost fatalistic vitality.

Yet perhaps it is mostly Whiteley’s earliest abstractions and enduring love of landscape which best encapsulate the artist’s ability to transport us so thrillingly through the light and dark spaces of his imagination via the pure plastic language of painting. Where did this remarkable want of his pictorial creativity come from?

This was perhaps sown in childhood, when he tested the boundaries of suburban Longueville on the northern shores of Sydney Harbour where he grew up: a hyperactive child, likeable, mischievous, immune to danger, flying in his billy cart, stealing bread, burning letter boxes. He was already sentient enough as a growing youth to plot the coordinates he might challenge, confronting contradictions between beauty and ugliness as he began to mature into a serious artist.(2)

Indeed in 1960, Whiteley scoped a huge list of admired artists as he set out on his journey beyond Australia, driven by a virtual explosion of eagerness. Determined to understand secrets of the great ones he might technically emulate - Russell Drysdale, Lloyd Rees and Sali Herman in Australia, then Giotto, Duccio, Piero della Francesca in Italy, as well as modern internationals like Modigliani, Gorky, William Scott and Francis Bacon – he sought above all to crack the mystery of their collective charisma.

Whiteley arrived in Rome in February 1960, as the recipient of an Italian Government Travelling Scholarship adjudged by Drysdale. He met up with Wendy, his muse and future wife, in Paris before moving back to a spacious studio in Florence, located in a commercial building already part-occupied by an Australian sculptor. By November that year Brett and Wendy had moved to London, settling in the now legendary Ladbroke Grove of Notting Hill.

The works created by Whiteley during his first two or three years in Europe were truly astonishing, not least to Bryan Robertson, then the highly regarded director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London:

Shortly after Brett and I met in the gallery, he was able to show me a group of recent paintings and some drawings, made in Italy…  and in some cases completed in London. Seeing Brett’s work for the first time absolutely bowled me over … This was one of the great moments of my life in any studio. The paintings were of startling maturity, richness and spiritual and imaginative poise, perfectly at ease in their medium and wholly original …  filled with youthful panache and energy and above all a personal vision.(3)

Robertson selected three of the best for his exhibition Recent Australian Painting, to be opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in June 1961. One of them, Untitled Red Painting, the younger sibling of the present work Untitled Red Painting III, was bought by the Tate Gallery.  At that time, Whiteley was the youngest artist to have entered the Tate collection. 

One could never conclude from such paintings that Whiteley was a challenging colourist exploring the shifting possibilities of the spectrum that preoccupied a number of his contemporaries during the 1960s. Moreover, apart from a handful of practitioners such as Rothko, Gorky, Rauschenberg and Diebenkorn, he was sceptical of the growing consciousness of American art in London during this period. His heart as a young emerging painter was more attuned to the history and ethos of Europe: ‘The Americans produce a smoothly manufactured artistic object - and that’s its downfall artistically.’(4)

Rather, Whiteley displayed an impeccable sense of tone via his restricted palette, which may have something to do with his employment at Lintas advertising agency in Sydney before taking up the Scholarship. At Lintas he had spent each day manipulating the fonts and layouts of grey textual slabs which loaned a certain discipline to his compositions, with anthropomorphic forms crowded, kissing or overlapped, either transparently or with nuances of rich impasto trying to break free, nudging the edges of the picture plane in perfect synergy with each other to a point of erotic stasis.

Such restraint in his palette, encrypted with an acute sense of draftsmanship, may explain how he was so readily accepted for his first solo exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in March 1962. That spacious old gallery was a highly respected firm in Bond Street specialising in old master paintings and drawings presented with distinctive flair: ideal for a young genius so fussy about presentation, glancing in the rear-vision mirror at Giotto, Duccio and Drysdale whille maintaining his gaze on the road ahead.(5)

The exhibition went well, garnering Whiteley a further boost of international respectability. And there were sales which gave him confidence to maintain his momentum, such as Untitled Red Painting III, which was bought and taken to the United States - never to be seen in Australia until now.

Whiteley may have held himself back from possibilities of the spectrum - tone, form and calligraphy were more his thing - but Untitled Red Painting III hums with the dignified power of a lone, monochromatic pigment dominating modulated passages of black, grey, brown and small relics of ragged-back yellow, orange and white, like buffed fragmentations of boulders or torsos.

There was good reason for this aesthetic. The dominant slabs of reddish brown reflect Whiteley’s attraction to the ancient, time battered walls of Rome and Florence, and at the same time reminded him of the Australian landscape he had left behind; not to mention the vision of a beloved artist who had blessed him with his Scholarship. He wrote letters home to Drysdale, as well as Lloyd Rees, expressing his gratitude for their support with unapologetic ecstasy.(6) This was his lineage and his legacy.

Whiteley’s fascination for this particular shade of reddish brown arose from a chance encounter in the back streets of Florence in 1960, with the unexpected discovery of an abandoned barrel of tomato powder. As Wendy recalled, Brett successfully mixed the powder with polyvinyl acetate and spread the colour across one whole page of a 1960-61 notebook, in an experiment to see if it would work against the white paper:

… that was from a visit to a very old, local Florentine person who sold paint in an art shop and he had it in his back room. He hadn’t used it and he just had a lid on the barrel …  PVA was the answer to everything in the 1960s; everyone had PVA. You used to glaze with it and stick the string on. Everybody used it. Sculptors used it…. It just glued anything together and gave a glaze and you could mix it with powder pigments. Worked terrifically.(7)

And so within the diverse span of modern Australian painting, this consummate example of its time stands solid. Untitled Red Painting III offers a profound anchorage of russet red during an era of artists preoccupied with flat surfaces - with maybe a very slight wink towards Matisse’s Red Studio of 1911.(8)  It is a Pompeian statement of managed collisions in texture and shape, with an implied connective history. Everything, in fact, that is most inspiring across the entire oeuvre of Brett Whiteley during his brief ‘fidget with infinity’.(9)

Footnotes

1. Brett Whiteley, artist’s notebook 1960-61, private collection
2. See accounts of the artist’s childhood in Wilson, A., Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2016 and Hopkirk, F., Brett, Random House, Sydney, 1996.
3. Robertson, B., ‘The London Years’, in Pearce, B. (ed.), Brett Whiteley: Art & Life, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995, p.9
4. Brett Whiteley, artist’s notebook 1960-61, op. cit.
5. Robertson, B., op. cit.
6. See letters from Brett Whiteley to Russell Drysdale in ‘Sir Russell Drysdale – Correspondence, 1933-1981’ in State Library of New South Wales collection, Sydney.
7. Interview with Wendy Whiteley, by Barry Pearce and Alec George, in Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p.112
8. Henri Matisse, The Red Studio 1911, oil on canvas, 181.0 x 219.1 cm, Museum of Modern Art collection, New York. In his 1960-61 notebook Whiteley inferred that Matisse’s work aligned with Rothko principally through the thinning medium of turpentine, a technical aspect he deployed in later paintings of Sydney Harbour.
9.  Brett Whiteley, quoted in Brett Whiteley Studio, op. cit., p.20

Barry Pearce AM

Barry Pearce AM is Emeritus Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was the curator of Brett Whiteley’s touring retrospective in 1995-96 and editor of the related publication, Brett Whiteley: Art & Life.

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