Wieneke Archive Book 4d : Artists - Australian & Other Presscuttings

THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE 7 ART! The Soup Kitchen, 1958 Head Of Christie, 1964 Self-portrait After Haircut, 1976 WHITELEY: The Arth WHEN Brett and Wendy Whiteley returned to Sydney in November 1969 they rented a three -storey- ed Victorian brick and wood house at No 1 Walker Street, Lavender Bay. The old house perched on an urban hill looking down into an intimate inlet of Sydney Harbor -a setting that would inspire many of his most lyrical paintings, A large wooden yellow and white frangipani was nailed to the wall near- est the front door, which was entered by climbing up a perilously rickety set of steps. (Later, when they bought the house. Whiteley added a 13m circular' brick Norman tower with a thatched roof,) The exterior's squalid appear- ance was erased on the inside by the extraordinary view the windows of the studio/sitting room commanded. The Harbor Bridge with its clearly enun- ciated steel girders dominated the boats - stately schooners for the local charter trade, small pleasure yachts and estuary trawlers - which dotted the bay beneath. To the left, a fairytale image of an amusement park with pink and green minarets and towers provided a visual fantasy that contradicted the sombre elegance of the multi-storeyed build- ings and the barque -like sane of the Sydney Opera House just beneath the curve of the bridge, . Framing the house on both sides were two parks: one filled with lines of huge palms and brightly manicured grass, the other a small park tangled with Moreton Bay fig trees and uneerbrush. A broken and cracked set of steps leading to the Walker Street wharf gave the final touch to the Polynesian- Monmartre atmosphere that the whole setting evoked. When Whiteley returned he had intended to exhibit his paintings from Fiji . . . of gentleness, of heaven and! propaganda for peace - on view within. three nuittir. It actually took eight months until the show was ready., When the exhibition was mounted, it was the Whiteley everyone had been waiting for. The exhibition took place in June 1970 in the spacious Bonython it was uncatalogued and untitled. Whiteley's original intention to just show the Fijian pictures had expanded to include the whole range of his experience over the past three years, including The American Dream, his Fijian paintings and new works which were reactions to his own homeland after several years away. Since his exhibition t so years before. Whiteley had become something of a pop star figure to the Australian art public. Various friends and artists who had returned to Australia after seeing Whiteley in New York had spread stories ranging from the humorous to the grotesque about his life and work in America. His involvement with Vietnam, drugs, Dylan, his outrages ana genius had become almost legendary by the time he arrived on home soil, Laurie Thomas wrote: "Not for him the cool and unimpassioned modules of the technological age, the cerebral conceptions, the abdication from anger or love "He seems to have been driven like a mighty s AtiTIC111111111 centrepiece, but other works were equally impressive and almost as large. There was the 3m portrait of Baudelaire which will be discussed later detail; a Japanese room and. images of Australia - The Olgas,' kookaburras, Aboriginal totems, pic- tures of the Opera House and Sydney falling into the sea. There were gloriously decorative honeyeaters and frangipanis from the paradise which had rejected him. It was overwhelming to almost all who viewed it. There was also sound, as Laurie Thomas noted: "A sound like a trillion cicadas pierces the eardrums when you go into Brett Whiteley's exhibition at Bonython Gallery. The cicadas become screaming sirens, police sirens and female sirens, and the medley and the cacophony of cities, sex, despair,, joy, evil and beauty. This' is no cool withdrawal from life." James Gleeson took another tack: "One becomes lost In the world of Brett Whiteley. ForWhiteley's exhibi- tion isn't so much a show of individual paintings as an exhibition of Whiteley. We are invited to share his fears and ecstasies,. his ideas and dreams, his passionate love of life and'his equally passionate hatred of it." . Whiteley had written messages and warnings, presentiments and predictions on almost every picture. Reading the reviews of the time it have appeared that a vengeful angel of doom has descended into the midst of the Sydney art world. He denounced. Australia's villgarism and cartoonlsm as a pathetic repetition of what had happened to America. He berated the mentality of his countrymen for their all -too -blind attitude to Asia. He turned his eye on ecology and the environment and demanded a revision. At the same time he was caressing the public with his sheer magic as an artist, "No one," wrote Daniel Thomas, "can carry curvilinear forms, gentle or violent, across a picture so well as he." Elwyn Lynn saw two possibilities: "It ==11, Marian SI reel Them re (02) 498 3166 HURRY! FINAL WEEK . a good spool" Sun Tele. "Lighthearted play ,, winner" Sun WINELEE JOAN INUCE INILLIP MUNI THE MURDER ROOM Turn McCarthy, Brand )n Burke & Louise Le Nay Tue.. to Sot. 8.15. Dinner 6.30 Sunday 30 Licensed . . Cooled . . Tree Parking 4913166 2 MAMAS IT, KRUPA THE pictures above and the extract below are taken from a remarkable new art book, BRETT WMTELEY, by The Weekend Australian's art critic, Sandra McGrath. The 232 -page lavishly illustrated book will be published shortly by Bay Books at a price of $34.95. It will also be made available as a special offer to readers of The Weekend Australian and The Australian. Watch the next issue of The Weekend Australian for details. is a splendid, reckless, 'sprawling tour de force with an unsequential medley of deranged images that accumulate in shattering climaxes. It's a dreary world where the energising horror is Whiteley's. True or not, it's. a vision of life as hell as valid as Baudelaire's is,. but it is interspersed with flashes of sheer loveliness as Pilgrim in the Slough of Despond sights the Promis- Land. "Whiteley, the enfant terrible of the Marlborough Galleries, is only partly a combination of Swift, Celine, Daumier and Hogarth, for he is no pure prophet of doom; as corny as it may sound, he does glimpse dawn's pearly light and life is real and life is earnest. What Whiteley has done amid all the youthful, total denigration of our times, has been to present with 'extraordinary intensity the old theme of the possibilities of good and evil." (How Pilgrim In The Slough Of Despond sights Paradise. The Bulletin 27 June 1970,) Whiteley in a sense baffled everyone. He was unselfconscious enough to paint banalities and Picture-poste:tut material - the kookaburras, Ayers Rock and the. Opera House - as well as to try to convey in glowing surreal images some kind of metaphysical state of being, Most people thought the title of The American Dream was Heaven And Hell. While Whiteley always has one eye cocked on nature he has the other cocked on man. The interaction between the two is often behind some COPY RECEPTION FOR THE L) $11 ADVERTISEMENTS ARE BETWEEN 9 AM -4.30 PM MONDAY TO FRIDAY IN SYDNEY, MELBOUR NE CANBERRA, BRISBANE 9 AM -4 PM MONDAY TO FRIDAY IN ADELAIDE IN HOBART 9 AM-2PM MONDAY TO FRIDAY IN PERTH THE AUSTRALIAN ii "4 VIMPIONIMINNIORINNIMMINIIIIIMIRIIINMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIRM1111111141 E 1212=2211 IE "" E-: . . . A play gat remains a classical comedy , , , Hem ,,E .2 a, verting civilised fun suavely directed by. MnMr (wing with ..p, r.r. * eye always to the humanity ;II the pore. Just as Mr Sem, S eeek/ ese. sal MUSTtuns MARCH 3181 Nri Smon'suproaric, z QOQ paiteDISE PRESENT .!ritual engine to :mazli the of his most powerful works of this d. perio be unfair to summarise this exhibition without saying that behind' the breathlessly expansive reviews there was no reservation. Almost to a man, there was also a feeling of suspended disbelief or suspicion. The reviews, with one exception, are notable for this almost schizophrenic reaction to this particular group of works. Elwyn Lynn again saw him as a showman good ernc ugh to both use and despise the mass media. His messages were not, he felt, prophetic but rather collages of opinions. Daniel Thomas found aspects of the exhibition slightly sado-masochistic. "There are lots of sharp spears, beaks, needles for impaling with pleasure." James Gleeson, whose review had started with such enthusiasm, found "when he put on the dark glasses of criticism" that the ideas, the philosophies, as they were expressed inthe jottings and statements written into his works, were in the end "classical hippfsrile in which the ideals of peace and love are cocooned in woolly thinking. They offer no concrete programs, no intellectuality, clear or precise proposals about how the millenium is to be attained," This attitude was most forcefully expressed by Donald Brook who two years earlier had in a rare moment of exuberance announced Whiteley as being "absolutely and without reservation first rate. It is weird, beautiful, nasty and authoritative. Essendon Grammar School DELPHI SOCIETY Subscription Series 1979 McNeil House Lecture Theatre Woorite Place. East Ken" Thursday egrillgth Thursday June 21,1 JulyTay :311ds4 Thursday Sept 13th We are proud to present our artists: La R001909ST21 Early Music Consort Hartley Newnham, Counter Tenor Ruth Wilkinson, Recorders, Viol da Gamba Ros Band! Recorders, Renaissance Flute Jon Griffiths, Lute The CollegiurnTrio Stephen McIntyre, Piano Mary Nowt, Violin Phillip Green, Cello Melbourne Mandolin Orchestra Pluckedstring orchestra comprising Mandolins and Guitars MelbourneUniversity Faculty of Music Brass Ensemble Season subscription ticket Adults $16 00 StudonN $10.00 COMM Mdnapie, DELPHI SOCIETy P.o. sox 136 ESSINDON. 3040 Without cons: will give on e at sight that best of today Talent, 8 Feel Morning Hera But Brook with some "clumsy and visual tri commentariii question unanswerabi up our mile mystical cu., activity, as 11 by-products, respect. I am seems to ns vision. of a through thi: indulgent aild as a child's: advocacy is ' pitched to corr He reached there are st I painter, but ground to thepretentini But whata Sydney's un almost unive young as a ic Gleeson, tryir of Whiteley him, had to a cool and sobs the 041U:dial the point of hl able to dct exhibition "c of his dazzling brilliance of In the "magic of It is importa of the malnstr this m(1111%1011 year the don a artists as Rich Frank Stella minimal artat Whiteley's BARRY STERN'S EXHIBITING GAL AN EXHIBITION OF PAINTIN, ANNE JUDELL LEON PERI HUGH OLIVEIRO SCULPTURES By SAUL MUNRO 17th March until 71/s April 1979. 42 Corner St, Poddington 2021 (02) MS: Gellert HOW.' 11.30 en, 9.30 en., closed Sur BARRY STERN'S GALLERY se Glermoro Rd, Paddington 2021(02)31 7, Gallery Hours. 11.30 ani5.30 or,., Cloppl Sun 1001a PedM Highway. Pyinble (02)44983 Gallery Hours: 10 em-S pm, °mod Sunduv, t*************** *>I17: * * ALUN LEACH -J * RECENT PAINT * * * Monday/Satur, * * RUDY MON ART G 124 Jersey Road, jMiosAlohro, Sydney, AUSTRALIA TEL: 10 arri.5 pm