Untitled Black Painting 1960-61
(also known as The Black of Anxiety)

BRETT WHITELEY (1939-1992)

Untitled Black Painting 1960-61
(also known as The Black of Anxiety)

oil, tempera and collage on canvas and board
105.0 x 173.0 cm; 108.0 x 176.5 cm (framed)
signed verso: Brett Whiteley
signed, dated and inscribed verso: BRETT/ WHITELEY/ "UNTITLED/ BLACK PAINTING 1960"/ TEMPERA + OIL/ 70" x 30"/ MOLTON GALLERY/ CAT NO/ 10
inscribed verso: so I returned and the afternoon went on
bears inscription on frame verso: E8965 LYNN WELO X MATTHIESEN

Provenance:
The Matthiesen Gallery, London, 12 December 1961 (stock no.E8965)
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.2 (label attached verso, incorrectly identified as cat.10; catalogued as The Black of Anxiety)
Ayrton, Daws, Smith, Vaughan, Whiteley, Sorsbie Gallery, Nairobi, March - April 1963, cat.52 (as The Black of Anxiety)

Reference:
Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2010, pp.60, 250, cat.EE38 (as The Black of Anxiety)
Wilson, A., Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2016, p.76 (as The Black of Anxiety)
Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, vol.7, p.112, cat.68.61 (as The Black of Anxiety)

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

Estimate: $300000 - 500000

Result Hammer: $280000

Six decades on, it’s hard to fully grasp the antipodean atmosphere — the lingering post-war caution, the suburban conservatism, the visceral sense of being far from the action — that convinced Australian artists to head off across the seas in search of new, inchoate possibilities. It’s also hard, from this vantage point, to fully comprehend the force with which Brett Whiteley made his mark in Europe upon his arrival from Sydney. Restless, ambitious, precociously talented, Whiteley first brought his voracious appetite to Italy, then to London, where he settled on the third floor of a tall West London house on Ladbroke Grove with his girlfriend, Wendy, in late 1960.

The appetite he brought with him was as much about the images he was bringing to life as it was about the feast that was now laid out before him in the galleries of Europe. He communed with artists from the distant and recent past: Giotto, Pierro della Francesca, Rembrandt, Matisse, Van Gogh. He studied his contemporaries, among them William Scott and Roger Hilton, both of whom he met in London, and Morandi, whom he met in Italy. And all the while, as he spent time with some of the Australian artists who were already spread out around the city, Brett turned his focus to his new environment.

The young Australian had been familiar for some time with the work of William Scott, the British painter, having admired his pictures in reproduction back home. Now they were living in the same city, Brett described Scott as ‘the most important in the world today’. He also realised that the debt ‘must show profoundly’ in his own pictures.(1)

In London, Whiteley was developing the sensuous, suggestive abstractions that had made him stand out back in Sydney. It was there that he had caught the eye of a young Robert Hughes, who said in The Observer that Whiteley, barely twenty, ‘already commands a technique of paint handling which many established painters could envy; he approaches his images with assurance and dash, and keeps a firm control over the entire surface.’(2)

Within a year or so of his arrival in London, Whiteley already could tick off a remarkable list of achievements, not least for someone so young. The curator Bryan Robertson had invited him to join a group exhibition of new Australian painting at the Whitechapel, in London’s East End. As a result of that show, the Tate bought one of Whiteley’s works, making him the youngest artist to have work purchased by the institution. He had shown work at the Paris Biennale. And he had been given his first solo show at the Matthiesen Gallery, in March 1962, which featured a cross-section of his early British flourish across 31 pictures.

Whiteley painted most of his abstractions on boards, and the result was an earthy physicality in which hints of figuration — interlocked, organic shapes that brought to mind the human body or aerial landscapes — seemed ever ready to break through the surface. In Europe, particularly in London, Whiteley was also making sense of a different kind of light to what he knew from home, and the shades of this tonal environment were now coming through in his work.

In this painting, part of the Matthiesen show — and one of the first works to be completed in his new London home — those familiar abstract forms are bundled together among a new heavy darkness that creeps across the picture plane, like a horizon. The youthful confidence on display is abundant. There’s a rough, tactile finish that brims with life and energy. Here, too, is an example of the ‘monumental corporeal jigsaw’ that characterised so many of his images from this time.(3)

Whiteley had been in the habit of leaving his paintings mostly untitled, as in Untitled Warm Painting, or Untitled Orange Painting. At the same time, he also came up with titles that invoked more specific moods or emotions, as here, with The Black of Anxiety presented as the alternative title to Untitled Black Painting.

The title, and the colours, contrast with another painting from these early London years:

Untitled White Painting, now held in the collection of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Hatton Gallery. Taken together, we see the early stirrings of his fascination with dualities, the twin poles of nature, the daunting expectation that within every note of beauty can be found the qualities of its inverse: with the light comes the dark. With sanity, madness. By 1965, while living in London, his reputation amplified by the Whitechapel exposure, his social life having expanded from artists to royalty, Whiteley would turn his focus to an especially grim subject: the serial killer, John Christie. For an exhibition at the Marlborough New London gallery, in 1965, he presented his Christie series alongside pictures from the London Zoo. The zoo served as a relief, a yin to the yang of Christie.

In later years Whiteley continued to build on the theme of duality, most notably in the sets of arrows – ‘the reconciliation of opposites’ – that pointed in opposite directions and also back towards themselves.

But in those early days in London, Whiteley kept pushing the possibilities of abstraction as far as he could. By 1963, upon returning from his honeymoon in the French village of Sigean, he had moved on to different forms of expression, finally allowing those sensuous shape to break through into more recognisable, representational forms. Perhaps, rather than moving on, it is more accurate to say that he incorporated what he needed from abstraction into his broader, evolving practice, an evolution that he identifies in a catalogue entry some two decades later: ‘Anything that is beautiful is a unique mixture of abstraction, realism, and expressionism: if one is neglected or overdone, if one is not considered in the light of the other, if in fact, the three forces are not felt as one, in one brilliant flash of a glimpse —inspiration will be missing and eventually meaning.’(4)

Footnotes

1. Wilson, A., Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2016, p.51
2. Robert Hughes, quoted in Wilson, A., op. cit., p.34
3. Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2010, p.250
4. Brett Whiteley, quoted in 162 Drawings: Brett Whiteley [exhibition catalogue], Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 1985

Ashleigh Wilson

Ashleigh Wilson is the author of Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (2016), On Artists (2019) and A Year with Wendy Whiteley (2022) and editor of Transcendence: 50 Years of Unforgettable Moments at the Sydney Opera House (2023).

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