Pablina 1974

BRETT WHITELEY (1939-1992)

Pablina 1974

ink and mixed media on paper
100.0 x 75.0 cm
signed, dated and inscribed lower right: Pablina brett whiteley/ 74

Provenance:
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 2 May 2000, lot 2
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 21 August 2001, lot 79
Private collection, Victoria

Estimate: $60000 - 80000

Result Hammer: $55000

Pablina is a portrait of an artist at work. We see a female figure (the protagonist), an artist, holding a sketchbook and pencil, making a copy of picture hanging in a gallery. The gallery is showing an exhibition of work by Brett Whiteley. The exhibition includes a number of nudes, done in Whiteley’s distinctive cubist inspired style. In front of our protagonist is one of the beach nudes for which Whiteley was famous. The picture, number 16 in the catalogue, is marked with the red dot denoting it as sold. A successful exhibition of drawings Whiteley held at Bonython Galleries in Sydney in January 1974 might offer a location and point in time for the scene.

Whiteley has stepped into the gallery and has encountered the female artist, our protagonist, Pablina, in the act of making a drawing of one of his own drawings hanging in the exhibition. He in turn has made a drawing of her copying one of his own drawings. This sort of labyrinthine self-referencing irony was not unusual for Whiteley. A picture of an artist making a picture of another picture which is by the artist sounds about right for Whiteley, who had recently concluded his largest and also his most colossally complicated magnum opus, Alchemy.

So much of painting is to do with chance and accident… it becomes a point of risk ,1

If Alchemy, begun, in 1972 and completed in January 1973 expounds on life experiences, global politics, the meaning of life, sex, love, the kitchen sink and everything in between. Pablina is the opposite: a specific moment in time and a flash of inspiration. The subject is enriched with several more or less discrete clues: the double arrow ←˃ (which Whiteley devised as his personal logo and which makes its boldest appearance in Alchemy) appears in the space between the subject and her work. Three mushrooms tell a different story but are integral to the mood of the picture. A vertical geometric bar running the length of the protagonist’s face is probably an expression of the effect of mushrooms on the subject or on Whiteley himself. The geometries of the framing and the gallery number and dot all neatly contribute to the composition and bring the whole thing back to earth.

Is the title of the work itself- Pablina- also a veiled reference to a possible mentor and the work’s origins in Pablo Picasso?

At his best Whiteley never fails to present works that are thought out and sophisticated, and where pretentiousness is nuanced or moderated by banalities, whimsy or even earthy humour.  In both his grandest efforts and his most intimate studies Whiteley paints Whiteley. Pablina explores his own processes and offers us generous insights into the workings of his mind, sharing unrestricted access to his thoughts, right or wrong and to his mood.  

Footnotes:

1) Brett Whiteley, quoted from Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007 p.67

Timothy Abdallah BA (Hons)