This new biography of Brett Whiteley is completely compelling.

Brett and I were close. Geographically. He lived just around the corner in Raper Street, Surry Hills. I would often see that compact, woolly-haired, tightly-wound man barrelling down Crown Street. We never spoke. I never met him, but everyone knew who he was – a walking tale of mystery and romance.

In nearby Esther Lane a beautiful young man once sat cross-legged for days, naked, waiting for his teacher to find him, but Brett was a reluctant guru. The cost of fame is high. By the mid-1980s Whiteley was a household name. His career was set in concrete, his place in the artistic canon secure, and the space he occupied in my artistic imagination was large and luminous. He was an avid bowerbird of images and ideas and a regular visitor to the Ray Hughes Gallery where I lived and worked with my ex-husband.

I’d also been in close proximity to Wendy. My stay coincided with hers at a health farm in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. I was drying out from way too many gallery lunches and openings, and she spent much of the time on a mattress going cold turkey off who-knew-what. I was too intimidated to even look in her general direction but now, since reading Ashleigh Wilson’s wonderful biography of the life of the Whiteleys, I wish I had found to courage to approach her, lay my head in her lap and cry a bucket of empathic tears. Though separated by 20 years in age, I see my whole life in the Australian art world mirrored in hers in this book.

Everyone knows the details of Brett’s brilliant rise to almost instantaneous fame as the youngest artist to have work acquired by the Tate Gallery in London. He was the enfant terrible who led a rock-star life all ‘tyger-tyger-burning-bright’ at the Chelsea Hotel, who gave Bob Dylan art lessons and led one of the most public lives of his generation; there is little to be said that hasn’t been said before. His drive and unnerving intensity, his energy and application to the task are well known and documented and indeed, I wondered what else there was to know about Whiteley. He was prolific, personable and great meat for journalists. Many, many words have been printed about him, his art, his antics and his antecedents and we are all well versed in his inexorable decline into addiction and his ultimate demise. But given all my prior knowledge of his life and art, I found this new biography completely compelling.

The simple episodic structure peaks naturally with each exhibition and the reader is taken through the creation, execution and presentation of the work. Wilson draws on Whiteley’s extensive notebooks to examine his process and investigate the visual and intellectual underpinnings of the images and ideas the artist poured into his work. He describes in detail the struggle to prepare emotionally and physically for each show and manages to convey what a lonely thing it is to be an artist. Most people think it is all wine and cheese and glamorous openings with glossy magazine features and red spots on the wall that represent the price of a luxury car. But few comprehend the solitary drudgery of being locked inside one’s own imagination for years on end, trying to wrench images out of nothing but smears of poisonous pigment. It takes time to paint; it is a laborious, repetitive process which requires uninterrupted time with no competing demands. Whiteley wrote of this in a catalogue entry:

Painting consists of mainly sitting in a chair staring at a rectangle and periodically getting up and going over to this skin … [and applying] the use of every trick of honesty or contradiction one has learnt or guessed at in order to show the Great Glimpse, the split second between the unconscious mind and the ideal … The only difference between death and art is life.

The book could have been entitled Alchemy, after the major multi-panelled work that now hangs in the Whiteley museum in his old Raper Street studio. The practice of alchemy is a philosophical process of transformation, creation, or combination. The perfection of the human body and soul was thought to permit or result from the alchemical magnum opus.

Whiteley maintained that making art was equal to the alchemist’s intention: ‘Alchemy is the business of seeing what doesn’t exist.‘ The great work of his life – his painting – is his own philosopher’s stone, transmuted by the slow heat of time and experience out of base matter, made by his own hand out of his own imagination. Wilson too, has done his own alchemy with this biography by burning off the extraneous dross gleaned from hours of interviews to get to the core of the artist’s intention. Whether or not Whiteley is a genius in the opinion of art scholars is irrelevant to Wilson’s purpose, which is the examination of Whiteley’s life, the space between art and death.

However, Wilson chose Art Life and the Other Thing as the title for this book, the title of the Whiteley painting that won the 1978 Archibald Prize, a ‘confessional self-portrait which announced his addiction to the world’. Whiteley also picked up the Wynne and Sulman that year – the hat-trick of all three prizes – which no other artist had ever done.

The ‘other thing’ in this portrait is presumed to be about Whiteley’s addiction, but there is another possible reading. The portrait is a triptych; the small square portrait on the right is a straightforward photograph of the artist’s ordinary outward form; then he splits into the two sides of his internal nature – angel and beast. In the middle image, art is represented by a stylised self-portrait of the high-minded painter at work through his precursors, and on the left, life is portrayed as a frenetically rendered, demented baboon, trapped and held in check by spikes. But the other thing is conspicuous by its absence: the alchemical ‘unseen’ thing in the work is Wendy. 1978 was the beginning of the end of their intense relationship.

From the moment Brett Whiteley is ‘knocked silly’ by the beautiful young Wendy Julius, the author gives equal weight to the significant other who made his art life possible. That is what the other does – gives the artist space. The other gets a job, puts food on the table, organises the parties and sweeps up the crap.

Whiteley and Wendy bonded over art – each as gifted and driven as the other by the possibility of visual ideas. Brett was working as a baby ad-man, and Wendy was at art school. They were equals. Indeed, Wilson states that Wendy was considered a superior draughtsperson to Brett at the time. She was 15 and he 17 when he took her on their first date to a sketch club. It is her steely resolve and support of Brett during those long stretches between shows that drives the narrative. She is there, at his side, not three paces behind, making it possible for the work to emerge. She is its midwife and mentor, not merely the model. She is much more than a beautiful organisation of musculature for Brett to draw – she is muse, both noun and verb.

We are led to believe the myth of individual genius, but no artist can survive without the support of others – before the dealer/collector enters the picture, it is a parent who supports the youthful artist, and the life partner who supports the young adult and enables the budding talent to develop in a partnership of two people, each as devoted to ‘the great work’ as the other, engaged in a sacred alchemical marriage. Alchemy is a process of becoming and this book tells the story of the shared life the Whiteleys lived and breathed, with all the blood, sweat, tears, heartbreak and loss it took to forge the Whiteley ‘brand’.

When Wendy was arrested at Perth airport for possession of heroin, Stuart and Anne Purves sent a character reference to the court to plead that Wendy was a user, not a dealer:

‘She has always been of tremendous support and importance to her brilliant artist husband, Brett Whiteley, fulfilling with devotion and a brilliance to match his own, the extraordinary demands involved and imposed on the partner of a famous creative artist.’

Wilson reveals their intimate conversations: Wendy reading to Brett while he worked, her critical and editorial eye, her ‘delicious food’, her style, her wit and her sheer dogged persistence in the face of his often belligerent womanising and occasional violent outbursts. This biography is an homage to all the unmentioned, long-suffering, deeply fulfilled others who are so integral to, but seldom credited with the production of works of art. The others are the frontline curators of culture, who fund, edit, promote and conserve the oeuvres for the edifices of culture to consume. The others work across all the arts and without their devotion, our cultural life would be much impoverished.

Ashleigh Wilson Brett Whiteley: Art, life and the other thing Text Publishing 432pp HB $49.99

Annette Hughes has been a handmaiden to the arts for her whole life. She is the author of Art Life Chooks, and is currently touring her debut EP with her significant other in DATSON HUGHES.

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

 

Tags: Ashleigh | Wilson, Australian art, Australian biography, Bob | Dylan, Brett | Whiteley, the Archibald Prize, the Sulman Prize, the Wynne Prize, Wendy | Whiteley