Sketch of a White Baboon 1965

BRETT WHITELEY (1939-1992)

Sketch of a White Baboon 1965

oil on board
122.0 x 106.0 cm
signed and dated lower left: b. whiteley 65
signed, dated and inscribed verso: SKETCH OF A WHITE BABOON/ 1965/ london/ brett whiteley

Provenance:
Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private collection, United Kingdom
Cooks Hill Gallery, New South Wales, 1987
Private collection, Sydney
Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney, 13 March 2007, lot 35
Private company collection, Melbourne
Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney, 24 September 2008, lot 38
Private collection, Melbourne

Reference:
Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67, Macmillan Art, South Yarra, 2010, pp.296-297, cat.008 (illus.)

Estimate: $220000 - 260000

Result Hammer: $190000

This rare oil painting is from Brett Whiteley’s early Zoo Series, which was contemporaneous with his famous Christie Series. The paintings of these two series were exhibited together at the Marlborough New London Gallery in London in October 1965, just two months before Whiteley’s return to Australia. The solo exhibition was his second in London and it established his reputation to the point where London’s famous Tate Gallery bought two of Whiteley’s paintings from 1960 and 1963 for their permanent collection – he was only twenty-one years old and the purchase made him the youngest artist ever bought by that prestigious institution. 

 

The oil painting Sketch of a White Baboon of 1965 arose during a critical developmental period in Whiteley’s life and artistic progress. It was a year during which he was awarded Perth’s T. E. Wardle Invitation Art Prize and it was also the time of Alan Watts’s (1915-1973) book The Way of Zen and the rise of a great disenchantment with Western religion and the consequent interest in other alternative religions – different world views, foods, medicine and experimentations with mental perceptions. Aldous Huxley’s (1894-1963) popular book The Doors of Perception seemed to sum up the generalised search for a spirit of adventure and reaction to the restrictions of the time. This was somewhat encapsulated in the music of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, films such as Easy Rider, the cartoons of Robert Crumb, the views of newspapers such as Oz magazine and the general turmoil of the 1960s - a turmoil set in the so called Hippie Generation; a generation itself born of the Beat Generation of the 1940s and 1950s and much influenced by the social polarities of reactions to the Vietnam War. 

 

Brett Whiteley arrived in London in 1960 - the start of the time of the so-called Swinging Sixties. It was a time when London was the centre of the new cultural ferment engendered by the baby boomers who were then aged between eighteen and thirty years old. It was also a time when Australian art was readily accepted in England.  London and English society were already accustomed to Australian talent - Patrick White was respected as an author from his stay there in the 1930s and the Australian artist Roy de Maistre had worked there from the 1920s. This was added to by an influx of artists such as Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Francis Lymburner, Louis James, Tony Underhill, Frank Hodgkinson, John Olsen, Leonard Hessing, Albert Tucker, Leonard French and John Passmore. The favourable acceptance was aided by the existence of the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street in central London. This was further enhanced by the atmosphere generated by the influx of Australian dancers, musicians, academics, designers, actors and singers. It was, in short, a very propitious time for Brett Whiteley to be in London - the London of Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, Biba’s fashion house, Zandra Rhodes, David Hockney, Ravi Shankar and the Rolling Stones.

 

Whiteley’s response to all this was visceral and linear. This early and singular painting, closely related to an impressive 1965 drawing entitled Drawing of an Ape held by the National Gallery of Victoria, is a calligraphic response to the caged figure paintings of the English artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992) – one of Whiteley’s most admired artists. This painting also acts as a complement to the animality of the Christies Series. It is as though Whiteley wanted to explore the twisted intensity of imprisoned people, like Christie, and the caged animals that he saw in the London Zoo. Its calligraphic freeness exists as an antidote to the impasto treatments of the Christie series and it heralds the new open spaced compositions that come to the fore in Whiteley’s Beach Series of 1966.

 

 

Literature:

McGrath, S., Brett Whiteley, Sydney, Bay Books, 1979.

Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley, Art and Life, Sydney, Thames and Hudson and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995.

 

 

Associate Professor Ken Wach

(Dip. Art; T.T.T.C.; Fellowship RMIT; MA; PhD.)

Emeritus Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts

The University of Melbourne.