Towards Sculpture 1977

BRETT WHITELEY (1939-1992)

Towards Sculpture 1977

lithograph (set of 8)
90.0 x 63.0 cm (each sheet)
each stamped with monogram, numbered and signed below image

edition: Hors de Commerce (edition size of 50)

Provenance:
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Recent Paintings and Drawings, Fischer Fine Art Limited, London, September 1977, cat.79 (other example)

Reference:
Deutscher, C., Brett Whiteley The Graphics 1961-1992, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1995, pp.111-112, cat.28-35 (illus. pp.38-45, other examples), (illus. cover Towards Sculpture 5, other example)

Estimate: $90000 - 120000

Result Hammer: $65,000

Brett Whiteley first came to printmaking in 1961 when he produced some experimental serigraphs with Ganymed Press for a one-man show in London. In the artist’s words, this was the first time he had taken printmaking ‘really seriously’. The Towards Sculpture series of prints was created in 1977, and are studies of one of Whiteley’s most celebrated subjects, the female nude.

The nude was a subject which Whiteley constantly worked on throughout his career. He played with the line, shape, colour and texture of the nude in the many mediums in which he worked. He began drawing the nude early in his career at night classes and sketch clubs in Sydney in 1956, the same year he met his future wife, Wendy Julius, who would become the muse from which so many of his famous works are modelled. The female nude would become a significant motif, one which Whiteley revisited often. The Bathroom series was the result of his studies of Wendy in the bath at their home in London; it is this series with which Whiteley credits the discovery of his draughtsmanship.

I didn’t find my draughtsmanship until 1963. It was Wendy in the bath; it wasn’t until seeing the relaxation and the sensuality of a love affair that I could really learn to draw’1

Whiteley’s renowned series of lithographs, Towards Sculpture, were produced in London with the eminent printmaker Bernard Baer, who years before had introduced the young Whiteley to the process of printmaking. In this series of prints, Whiteley celebrates the nude form with his boldly drawn figures, experimenting with the lithographic technique. This series of prints can be seen as the prelude to his nude sculptural works which were created over the next few years and executed principally in wood. The influence of Brancusi and African carvings is evident in these works. He found the natural curvaceous forms of branches and boughs mimicked the soft, round female body and therefore were the perfect medium for his art.

Whiteley’s innumerable studies of the female form – in notebooks, drawings, sculptures and paintings – culminated in an exhibition in 1981 devoted entirely to the subject. On the theme he writes: 

Most men, and certainly all artists, even if many never get around to actually painting it, carry in their heads the great nude. The Venus, the Bathsheba, the Bather, Diana, even the great centrefold, he carries all his life the idealisation of his glands, carries it like some little uncut gem in his mind, waiting there to be given form’2

Whiteley continued to explore printmaking in depth throughout his career. His catalogue raisonné shows periods of high and low productivity, as well as a shifting between mediums as the artist played with screenprint, lithograph, etching and even linocut. Towards the end of the artist’s career, his output became quite prolific, in the artist’s own words, ‘they just seem to accumulate like parking fines!’3

Footnotes

1. Whiteley, B., My art, my disease: Brett Whiteley talks with Phillip Adams (interview), Tension, no.11, Jan/Feb 1987, p.5-8, 35

2. Whiteley, B., Recent Nudes, studio exhibition catalogue, October 3-31, 1981 

3. Brett Whiteley, cited in Brett Whiteley, the Complete Graphics, 1961-1992,
Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1995, p.5

Caroline Jones MA (Art Admin.)