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Brett: A portrait of Brett Whiteley by his sister

Author: Frannie Hopkirk

Publisher: Pan

Published: 2013-02-01

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1743341334

'Brett was the sweetest, funniest, cleverest man I've ever known, my confidant and best friend. He had a rare radiance, an inner certainty which was compelling and hugely attractive.' Frannie Hopkirk knew Brett Whiteley all his life. He was her brother. Here, for the first time, one of those closest to Brett presents a vivid and movingly personal insight into his life and work. Throughout their lives, despite the sometimes vast geographical distances that separated them, brother and sister maintained a strong spiritual connection, an unbreakable bond. This brave, often painfully honest but loving portrait could only have been written by someone who Brett knew and trusted implicitly. They were born two years and one week apart into an average to extraordinary middle-class family. Brett was a streetwise larrikin from the very beginning, both a leader and a loner, spending hours drawing the harbour from his bedroom window in their Longueville home or plotting all kinds of mischief for his gang. Frannie adored her brother, and was a willing participant in his chaotic adventures. At the time Brett was awarded his travelling art scholarship and left for Europe, Frannie married and moved to New Zealand. Five years later, Frannie was the mother of five and Brett had stepped into the international art scene. Staying with Brett and Wendy in New York, Frannie had her first taste of the rock'n'roll generation that held such fascination for Brett, and her writing captures the essence of the hip '60s. The lives of brother and sister seemed to run on parallel lines, and often intersected. When the Whiteleys returned to Australia in the '70s, Frannie was part of the Lavender Bay scene. Throughout Brett's life Frannie watched and celebrated his success, as well as sharing his disappointments. She also experienced her own joys and tragedies as the mother of a large family in New Zealand, then living with her lover in London, eventually moving back to Sydney and then to the Central West of NSW, a landscape familiar to her and Brett from boarding school. This is her story too. For Brett Whiteley, art and life were intertwined. Frannie examines the relationship between her brother's life and art as she discusses Brett's major works and some lesser known paintings and drawings. She knew the young man who dreamed of fame as an artist while he sketched the ferries ploughing across Sydney Harbour. She understood when he painted The American Dream as a response to the toxic influence of American culture and violence, and she shared his devotion and connection to works such as Alchemy. During the last years of his life, Brett relied on Frannie and she became his closest friend. As his addiction to heroin deepened and ultimately controlled him, she offered him unconditional love. Her compassion and understanding set this book apart as a unique and moving account of the life of one of Australia's greatest artists.

Brett Whiteley

Author: Ashleigh Wilson

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 1922253812

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When he died in 1992 Brett Whiteley left behind decades of ceaseless activity—some works bound to a particular place or time, others that are masterpieces of light and line. Whiteley had arrived in Europe in 1960 determined to make an impression. Before long he was the youngest artist to have work acquired by the Tate. With his wife, Wendy, and daughter, Arkie, Whiteley then immersed himself in bohemian New York. But within two years he fled, having failed to break through. Back in Sydney, he soon became Australia’s most celebrated artist. He won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year—his prices soared, as did his fame. Among his friends were Francis Bacon and Patrick White, Billy Connolly and Dire Straits. Yet addiction was taking its toll: Whiteley struggled in vain to separate his talent from his disease, and an inglorious end approached. Written with unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, and handsomely illustrated with classic Whiteley artworks, rare notebook sketches and candid family photos, this dazzling biography reveals for the first time the full portrait of a mercurial artist. Ashleigh Wilson has been a journalist for almost two decades. He began his career at the Australian in Sydney before spending several years in Brisbane, covering everything from state politics to the Hollingworth crisis to indigenous affairs. He then moved north to become the paper's Darwin correspondent, a posting bookended by the Falconio murder trial and the Howard government’s intervention in remote Aboriginal communities. During that time he won a Walkley Award for reports on unethical behaviour in the Aboriginal art industry, a series that led to a Senate inquiry. He returned to Sydney in 2008 and has been the paper’s Arts Editor since 2011. He lives in Sydney. ‘Ashleigh Wilson has produced an intriguing, absorbing and assured account of Brett Whiteley’s life and work’. Mark Knopfler ‘With relentless precision, Ashleigh Wilson has provided a peerless grasp of the life and genius of Brett Whiteley. This storied journey of one of Australia’s most mercurial twentieth-century artists will be impossible for the reader to put aside until it is finished. It is the dispassionate biography Whiteley has long needed: a career clarified from the brilliant clouds of myth.’ Barry Pearce, Emeritus Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW ‘A full-dress life of Whiteley that speeds and soars and never ceases to do homage to the colossal confrontation and contradiction the artist represents...Wilson has written that rarest of things, a 400-page biography that is hard to put down...[It] will make you weep for this exasperation of a man and hunger for his art.’ Australian ‘An essential and invaluable resource for any Whiteley scholar...Wilson’s achievement is considerable...Ashleigh Wilson’s Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing is a benchmark publication in Whiteley studies.’ Sydney Review of Books ‘The best biography I read [this year] was Ashleigh Wilson’s Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing...Combines journalistic rigour and personal compassion his landmark account of one of our greatest artists.’ Australian ‘Ashleigh Wilson’s biography of Brett Whiteley is hard to put down. The narrative hums along beautifully, allowing readers a rare insight into Whiteley’s complex genius. A colossal undertaking, helped by extraordinary access. Wilson has delivered readers—and history—an absorbing, detailed and fascinating read.’ Walkley Magazine ‘Ashleigh Wilson methodically tracks this mercurial artist from early family days to his final years—a motley of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and importantly, art.’ Art Almanac

Impact of the Modern

Author: Robert Dixon

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1920898891

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Australian and international modernity from the late 19th to the mid-20th century inspires research in many fields of cultural endeavour: architecture, fine arts, design, cinema, theatre, and music; in urban studies, literary history and Aboriginal studies. Impact of the Modern brings together examples of this new interdisciplinary work on modern Australian culture by 21 leading scholars. Their writings reveal an original account of 'modernising' Australia as dynamic and creative in many art forms, and interactively linked with international processes and ideas. The essays in Impact of the Modern were presented as papers at the conference, 'Australian Vernacular Modernities', convened by the editors at the University of Queensland in 2006. Plenary papers by Jill Julius Matthews and Angela Woollacott signal the book's focus on the erotic and gendered spaces, and on popular aspects of modernity. They provide the central focus of the material, through such vital and dynamic categories as the 'modern', the 'erotic' and the 'primitive'. As essential components of the historical processes of innovation and modernisation, these central questions of gender and public sociality are taken up in diverse ways in the other chapters, forming a varied and exciting study of a range of creative Australian engagements with modern international life and popular culture.

Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19

Author: Melanie Nolan

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 970

ISBN-13: 1760464139

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Volume 19 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) contains concise biographies of individuals who died between 1991 and 1995. The first of two volumes for the 1990s, it presents a colourful montage of late twentieth-century Australian life, containing the biographies of significant and representative Australians. The volume is still in the shadow of World War II with servicemen and women who enlisted young appearing, but these influences are dimming and there are now increasing numbers of non-white, non-male, non-privileged and non-straight subjects. The 680 individuals recorded in volume 19 of the ADB include Wiradjuri midwife and Ngunnawal Elder Violet Bulger; Aboriginal rights activist, poet, playwright and artist Kevin Gilbert; and Torres Strait Islander community leader and land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo. HIV/AIDS child activists Tony Lovegrove and Eve Van Grafhorst have entries, as does conductor Stuart Challender, ‘the first Australian celebrity to go public’ about his HIV/AIDS condition in 1991. The arts are, as always, well-represented, including writers Frank Hardy, Mary Durack and Nene Gare, actors Frank Thring and Leonard Teale and arts patron Ian Potter. We are beginning to see the effects of the steep rise in postwar immigration flow through to the ADB. Artist Joseph Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski was born in Poland. Pilar Moreno de Otaegui, co-founded the Spanish Club of Sydney. Chinese restaurateur and community leader Ming Poon (Dick) Low migrated to Victoria in 1953. Often we have a dearth of information about the domestic lives of our subjects; politician Olive Zakharov, however, bravely disclosed at the Victorian launch of the federal government’s campaign to Stop Violence Against Women in 1993 that she was a survivor of domestic violence in her second marriage. Take a dip into the many fascinating lives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

"Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950?965 "

Author: Simon Pierse

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1351574957

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Subtle and wide-ranging in its account, this study explores the impact of Australian art in Britain in the two decades following the end of World War II and preceding the 'Swinging Sixties'. In a transitional period of decolonization in Britain, Australian painting was briefly seized upon as a dynamic and reinvigorating force in contemporary art, and a group of Australian artists settled in London where they held centre stage with group and solo exhibitions in the capital's most prestigious galleries. The book traces the key influences of Sir Kenneth Clark, Bernard Smith and Bryan Robertson in their various (and varying) roles as patrons, ideologues, and entrepreneurs for Australian art, as well as the self-definition and interaction of the artists themselves. Simon Pierse interweaves multiple issues of the period into a cohesive historical narrative, including the mechanics of the British art world, the limited and frustrating cultural scene of 1950s Australia, and the conservative influence of Australian government bodies. Publishing for the first time archival material, letters, and photographs previously unavailable to scholars either in Britain or Australia, this book demonstrates how the work of expatriate Australian artists living in London constructed a distinct vision of Australian identity for a foreign market.

Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950-1965

Author: Simon Pierse

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9781409420545

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Subtle and wide-ranging in its account, this study explores the impact of Australian art in Britain in the two decades following the end of World War II and preceding the 'Swinging Sixties'. Publishing for the first time previously unavailable archival material, this book demonstrates how the work of these expatriate artists constructed a distinct vision of Australian identity for a foreign market.

Brett Whiteley

Author: Ashleigh Wilson

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 1925355233

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When he died in 1992 Brett Whiteley left behind decades of ceaseless activity—some works bound to a particular place or time, others that are masterpieces of light and line. Whiteley had arrived in Europe in 1960 determined to make an impression. Before long he was the youngest artist to have work acquired by the Tate. With his wife, Wendy, and daughter, Arkie, Whiteley then immersed himself in bohemian New York. But within two years he fled, having failed to break through. Back in Sydney, he soon became Australia’s most celebrated artist. He won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year—his prices soared, as did his fame. Among his friends were Francis Bacon and Patrick White, Billy Connolly and Dire Straits. Yet addiction was taking its toll: Whiteley struggled in vain to separate his talent from his disease, and an inglorious end approached. Written with unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, and handsomely illustrated with classic Whiteley artworks, rare notebook sketches and candid family photos, this dazzling biography reveals for the first time the full portrait of a mercurial artist.

Brett Whiteley

Author: Barry Pearce

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780500092521

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Brett Whiteley died in 1992 at the age of fifty-three, ending one of the most prodigious careers in the history of Australian art. He attended Julian Ashton's school in Sydney during the late 1950s while working at the advertising agency Lintas, and then made an impact on the Australian art world just as it was receiving unprecedented international attention. Whiteley achieved wide recognition, spending a long period abroad, exhibiting paintings, drawings and sculpture in Britain, Europe and the United States, before returning to Sydney permanently at the end of 1969. His years in London were particularly formative, when he came into contact with many of the art world's most influential figures, including members of the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art movements. Whiteley's early paintings startled critics and fellow artists with their sensuality of color and erotic under-drawing. At the root of all Whiteley's work was a draftsmanship of stunning virtuosity, capable of capturing all the poetic arabesque of a river in a single sweeping line of brush and ink, or the erotic curves of the human body in a few searching strokes of charcoal. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales - the first major retrospective of the artist's work - presents an illuminating evaluation of Whiteley's achievement. Works dating from the 1950s until the last years of his life, illustrated in 180 color plates, allow Whiteley's fascinating career to be surveyed in its entirety.