Brett Whiteley’s America
1967 – 1969
WHY
“Driver, take me to the Chelsea Hotel”
Yellow
Marlborough-Gerson Exhibition
Sketches
Heroes
Booze, drugs and the New York scene
Red
Sketches
The American Dream
Escape from New York
Catalogue of Works
References
Figure 1 Dylan - Attempt 1 1967-8 (detail). Source: Tharunka,
February 1968.
WHY
One of the most significant, though least known episodes in the life of Australian artist Brett Whiteley (1939-1992) concerns his residency in New York between September 1967 and July 1969. Whilst numerous books, articles and exhibition catalogues have appeared which chronicle the artist’s Australian work between 1957-92, and even his better known British Bathroom, Christie and Zoo series of 1960-7, there has not been any equivalent presentation or detailed documentation of his American years through publication or exhibition. Supported by a Commonwealth Harkness Fellowship, the time in New York proved an exciting and tumultuous period as Whiteley found himself at the very centre of American cultural and political change. Yet such were the circumstances of this chapter in his life that during 1979 his biographer Sandra McGrath was able to refer to the ‘exciting’ works produced there, whilst some 16 years later senior Australian commentator and friend Barry Pearce questioned whether the experience was ultimately ‘a shipwreck in terms of Brett’s art’ (McGrath 1979, Pearce 1995). Why such opposing views? Why should the passage of time inexplicably diminish the achievements of this historically significant episode in the artist’s life?
Whilst it could be suggested that Pearce's question was more an indication of the ignorance of those outside Whiteley’s intimate circle, rather than a reflection on reality, it was nevertheless legitimate, supporting a commonly held view which had arisen, in part, due to the paucity of information on the residency and the artist’s own reticence in talking about his time in New York, at least in public if not in private. It was also exacerbated by a strange lack of interest in digging deeper into the American story from those who sought to comment on Whiteley’s place in the history of twentieth century art, and of Australian art in particular. Perhaps the fact that he spent most of the 1960s out of the country was an excuse for such neglect, alongside a nascent provincialism. Antipathy towards Americanisation of a traditionally British-based culture was also a dominant current within Australia during a post-war period in which the nation was seeking to develop a distinct identity and ever so slowly severe its ties with the British Empire and the servile pandering of the Robert Menzies era (1949-64). Grovelling to American warmongering during the period of the Vietnam war (1965-72) was equally abhorrent to many Australians and viewed as an abrogation of sovereignty, alongside widespread opposition to its horrific reality. Whiteley happened to be in the United States as this anti-war, anti-American sentiment was on the rise in his home country. Like many of the Australian soldiers who served in Vietnam, when he returned to Sydney in 1970 he found the subject of the war touched a raw nerve with many of his friends, and raised emotions on both sides of the political spectrum. The forced conscription of young men was especially irksome to Whiteley. This antipathy began with Australia’s entry into the war in 1965 and continued through to the early 1970s, with large-scale moratorium protest marches in towns and cities throughout Australia. The war may be one of the reasons Whiteley was reticent in discussing his recent experiences in the United States. Though he understood the American psyche better than many of his countrymen, he was generally weary of it all by the time the new decade dawned and he found himself back home in Sydney.
Brett Whiteley was very much an Australian, in the same way as those expatriates who ventured to Europe and the Americas throughout the 1950s and 1960s seeking education, enlightenment, excitement and opportunity. This is clearly seen in the 1965 English television documentary The Australian Londoners which commented upon the large number of Australians – up to 30,000 - in the city at the time (Sargent 1965). Introduced by the comedian and artist Rolf Harris, it also included an interview with Whiteley in his London studio. Therein he presented with a distinct British accent and slightly aristocratic air, though this was tempered by a casual, down to earth manner as he spoke to the reporter with baby daughter Arkie in his arms. Such was the degree of superficial disassociation with his homeland during this period that in 1964 the American Time magazine listed him among the exciting 'new wave' of British artists, alongside rising stars such as David Hockney and Peter Blake. In a similar vein during 1969 he was included with a group of young, contemporary American artists during an exhibition at the Kannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In both instances this was a reflection of Whiteley’s success in self-promotion and efforts to represent the cutting edge of contemporary art movements within those respective countries. It was not to deny his Australian heritage.
Whilst it could be suggested that Pearce's question was more an indication of the ignorance of those outside Whiteley’s intimate circle, rather than a reflection on reality, it was nevertheless legitimate, supporting a commonly held view which had arisen, in part, due to the paucity of information on the residency and the artist’s own reticence in talking about his time in New York, at least in public if not in private. It was also exacerbated by a strange lack of interest in digging deeper into the American story from those who sought to comment on Whiteley’s place in the history of twentieth century art, and of Australian art in particular. Perhaps the fact that he spent most of the 1960s out of the country was an excuse for such neglect, alongside a nascent provincialism. Antipathy towards Americanisation of a traditionally British-based culture was also a dominant current within Australia during a post-war period in which the nation was seeking to develop a distinct identity and ever so slowly severe its ties with the British Empire and the servile pandering of the Robert Menzies era (1949-64). Grovelling to American warmongering during the period of the Vietnam war (1965-72) was equally abhorrent to many Australians and viewed as an abrogation of sovereignty, alongside widespread opposition to its horrific reality. Whiteley happened to be in the United States as this anti-war, anti-American sentiment was on the rise in his home country. Like many of the Australian soldiers who served in Vietnam, when he returned to Sydney in 1970 he found the subject of the war touched a raw nerve with many of his friends, and raised emotions on both sides of the political spectrum. The forced conscription of young men was especially irksome to Whiteley. This antipathy began with Australia’s entry into the war in 1965 and continued through to the early 1970s, with large-scale moratorium protest marches in towns and cities throughout Australia. The war may be one of the reasons Whiteley was reticent in discussing his recent experiences in the United States. Though he understood the American psyche better than many of his countrymen, he was generally weary of it all by the time the new decade dawned and he found himself back home in Sydney.
Brett Whiteley was very much an Australian, in the same way as those expatriates who ventured to Europe and the Americas throughout the 1950s and 1960s seeking education, enlightenment, excitement and opportunity. This is clearly seen in the 1965 English television documentary The Australian Londoners which commented upon the large number of Australians – up to 30,000 - in the city at the time (Sargent 1965). Introduced by the comedian and artist Rolf Harris, it also included an interview with Whiteley in his London studio. Therein he presented with a distinct British accent and slightly aristocratic air, though this was tempered by a casual, down to earth manner as he spoke to the reporter with baby daughter Arkie in his arms. Such was the degree of superficial disassociation with his homeland during this period that in 1964 the American Time magazine listed him among the exciting 'new wave' of British artists, alongside rising stars such as David Hockney and Peter Blake. In a similar vein during 1969 he was included with a group of young, contemporary American artists during an exhibition at the Kannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In both instances this was a reflection of Whiteley’s success in self-promotion and efforts to represent the cutting edge of contemporary art movements within those respective countries. It was not to deny his Australian heritage.
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Figure 2 Brett Whiteley, Self-portrait with 3 staples across his mouth (removed), New York 1968. Source: Marlborough-Gerson catalogue, May 1968. |
Questions in regards to what exactly Brett Whiteley got up to in America, and what he achieved there during 1967-9, were therefore being posed in 1995, just three years after his death. To a large extent they remain unanswered, though we do have the bare bones of an answer as a result of subsequent research, interviews with some of the participants in his American adventure, a series of biographical publications, and the ongoing work of his former wife Wendy Whiteley in preserving and promoting the artist’s legacy and making infrequent reference to the New York period within interviews. This article argues that whilst Brett Whiteley’s time in New York may have been stormy, it was no ‘shipwreck’, despite the artist casting himself ashore, Gulliver-like, on a Pacific island at the end of it, exhausted and looking to experience a new adventure away from the violence and trauma of a nation – the United States - then in a state of turmoil. A study of the many works he produced there reveals that 1968, for example, was a missing year only in so far as the published chronicles of his life which appeared in Australia from the late 1970s through to the new century were concerned. Commentators generally got it wrong in neglecting this period, for during the first eight months of the Harkness Fellowship Whiteley produced major works dealing with a broad range of topical and art historical subjects, including Bob Dylan, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, the New York streetscape, nudity and sex, the Vietnam war, automobiles, politics, drugs, the atomic bomb, racism and love. And whilst many Australian artists went to the United States during the latter half of the 1960s, it could be said that Brett Whiteley was the most successful in plugging into what was happening and expressing it through his art, in a way that even the Americans found difficult to accept at times. And why was this? Why was the initial success he achieved in London between 1960 and 1966 not repeated when he landed in America at the end of the following year? Why was the reportage of these extra-antipodean adventures, and recognition back in his home country at the time and subsequently, almost non-existent? Sure, there were a number of Australian showings of his overseas work during his absence, but the American period was largely missing. Why was the New York residency ignored in this way and the work done there seemingly rejected, apart from the singular, multi-panelled and somewhat infamous The American Dream which has garnered most comment to date. The episode cannot be explained away with a simple 'out of sight – out of mind'. One needs to dig deeper to find a reason why Whiteley’s American years have elicited so little interest to date.
Brett Whiteley was an Australian larrikin, agent provocateur, talented artist and hyperactive proto-punk who found himself in New York at the end of America’s so-called Summer of Love. This outpouring of goodwill and fraternity, spearheaded by the hippie movement and widespread use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, was focused on the west coast around San Francisco and Los Angeles, with its opening the Human Be-in at Golden Gate Park in January 1967 and high point the Monterey Pop Festival the following May. The utopian dream was short lived, however, and had taken a dark turn by the following American winter. On the opposite side of the country the cold, inhospitable New York climate presented a more intense and violent atmosphere as the new year dawned. All of this was a decided change from what Whiteley had experienced in London and Europe where he had spent much of the decade, or even during his more recent travels in Spain, Morocco and sunny Tangiers. This was in many ways an idyllic period as he and his young wife Wendy travelled around England and the continent visiting art galleries and museums, engaging with fellow artists and generally developing a comprehensive knowledge of art historical movements in what was a veritable living museum. So whilst San Francisco may have been relaxed, liberating and welcoming, in contrast New York by the end of 1967 was decidedly edgy and self-conscious. Scott Mackenzie famously sang for people to come to San Francisco, ‘wear some flowers in your hair’ and meet ‘gentle people there’, whilst at the same time in New York Lou Reed, Nico and the Velvet Underground were promoting a grungy, avant-garde rock album produced by Andy Warhol and featuring songs dealing with issues such as drug abuse (specifically heroin), prostitution, sado-masochism and sexual deviancy. The album cover was a simple Warhol graphic design featuring a banana and printed in black and yellow on white.
Figure 3 Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, LP cover, March 1967.
The image was iconic, and the album’s release in March corresponded with the appearance of a mock article in the Berkeley Barb underground newspaper suggesting that banana peels had psychedelic properties (Garson 1967). The image stuck with Whiteley, who later placed a copy in a prominent position on the wall of his Sydney studio. As with many of his generation, the new music by bands such as the Velvet Underground became a core element of the 1960s experience, and a vital part of everyday existence during the following decades. Like a drug or religious encounter, pop, rock and folk music could draw one in whilst reflecting the changing times and perhaps even one’s own experiences. In some instances music offered answers to the questions then being posed by a radically changing society. The soundtrack to Brett Whiteley’s life during this period was both the classical music of the past and the potent, new music of his peers as performed by individual artists such as Bob Dylan and a multitude of bands and musicians including the stellar Jimi Hendrix Experience. Drugs would also play an important part in the life of young people during these years and Brett Whiteley was no exception. Alcohol, marijuana, hashish, amphetamines, hallucinogens, uppers and downers, opium, cocaine and heroin were all on offer by the time he landed in New York. However in seeking to become one of its own by immersing himself in its frenetic, libertarian lifestyle, the Big Apple would ultimately take its toll on this brilliant, though erratic Sydney-born artist. Tellingly, his premature departure from New York some 20 months into the 2-year Harkness Fellowship was, according to his wife Wendy and sister Frannie, due to a nervous breakdown (Hopkirk 1996, Cuthbertson 2014). Whiteley was not able to sustain the pace of life in the city and, wearing of it, escaped in haste. The Fellowship had almost run its course by this time, and he undoubtedly felt the urge to move on as finances, inspiration and energy ran low. Immersion in Zen Buddhism helped him cope with the many stresses and strains of life in America, but may also have been a factor in the decision to drop everything and seek faraway idyllic shores. Whatever the case, a veil of mystery has for a long time hung over Whiteley’s time in New York, with lots forgotten and lost, either meaningfully or inadvertently, as a result of the personal breakdown and the circumstances of his premature and hurried departure in July 1969.
It is often said of this period of the Sixties that ‘If you remember much of what happened, you weren’t really there.’ In fact, Brett Whiteley was very much ‘there’, and as a result for a long period following his return to Australia at the end of 1969 precious little was known about what he did in America, or when he did it. This wasAriane9x seen, for example, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales 1995 monograph Brett Whiteley: Art & Life, which accompanied a major retrospective exhibition following his untimely death in 1992 (Pearce 1995). Therein the ‘Biographical Notes’ section did not contain any entry for 1968, despite the fact that a solo exhibition was staged in New York during May-June of that year at the prestigious Marlborough-Gerson gallery. The exhibition was also accompanied by an illustrated catalogue which chronicled his American work up to that point in time. The catalogue revealed the wider variety and heightened intensity of subject matter in comparison to his previous work in London, Europe, Australia, North Africa and India (Marlborough-Gerson 1968).
Whiteley’s art had, prior to New York, moved from an emphasis on abstraction during the late 1950s and early 1960s, into a surreal figuration which reflected both good and evil in the world, whilst often focussing on the latter through representation of horror and the macabre. An ever-present feature was the landscape upon which such events took place, with emphasis on a romantically curvaceous line which Whiteley first identified in the work of fellow Australian artist Lloyd Rees. Major influences upon him during the London period included the heavy, paint-laden work of British contemporaries Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, who also reflected the darker side of life in a city where homosexuality was illegal and underground, drug use was widespread, and criminals such as the Kray brothers held sway. The softness and sensuality of love was revealed in Whiteley’s Bathroom Series of 1962-4, featuring the naked form of his wife Wendy. This was juxtaposed by the stark brutality of the Christie Series during 1964-5, addressing the activity of a London-based serial killer and necrophiliac, whilst reflecting the distorted and anguished human figures of Bacon. New York would likewise provide Whiteley with an opportunity to observe and experience a broad range of human activity, and reflect upon it within his art, much as a journalist reports daily on the state of the world around them. Immediacy would feature in these works, culminating in the artist’s production near the end of his residency of a political campaign poster – perhaps the most immediate and ephemeral of all art - for writer and activist Norman Mailer. This took place in June 1969, just prior to Whiteley’s leaving the country. Between his subsequent deportation from Fiji in November of that year, due to possession of marijuana and opium, and death in a Thirroul motel on 15 June 1992 from a heroin overdose, little was said in public by the artist about his New York residency, apart from intermittent, choppy critiques of American society and reflections upon The American Dream. It was as though all the other work created between October 1967 and July 1969 did not exist. Of course a lot has been revealed since then, and we now know that Whiteley's presence in the city was marked by intense activity in regard to both his art and personal life. It could also be said that there was a marked progression artistically, which only becomes obvious when one looks at the material he produced there. Unfortunately many of the American works have disappeared into private collections in the United States, or suffered destruction at the hands of the artist prior to his departure, though there is uncertainty around the precise details of this latter activity (McGrath 1979). As such, the pictorial record is fragmentary; the written record sparse; and the oral accounts likewise erratic. We know more, for example, from the second-hand anecdotes of those around the artist, including his wife and sister, then from Whiteley himself. In a 1991 interview with ABC Radio journalist Andrew Ollie he could not recall a lot of what took place whilst he was resident in New York. This vagueness – if genuine - was likely due to a number of factors, including the intake of drugs ranging from alcohol, marijuana and LSD (Acid), through to opium - all of which tended to blur the memory; a fragile state of mind during a period which saw intense pressure due to family issues and the pressures of work; the harsh societal conditions in America with, for example, both Martin Luther King (9 April 1968) and Bobbie Kennedy (5 June 1968) being assassinated, Andy Warhol shot (3 June 1968) and the nation in a state of turmoil over its involvement in the bloody Vietnam war; and, finally, the failure of The American Dream to be exhibited during 1969 by the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery and to have the impact upon the nation that Whiteley hoped for. His time in New York was therefore hectic, exciting, debilitating and traumatic. Despite this, Whiteley achieved much prior to July 1969 when, just as mankind’s technological achievement of landing a man on the moon was taking place, he fled the city in search of Paul Gauguin's mythical Pacific island paradise. By chance he found it in Fiji rather than Tahiti, however in his haste Whiteley left behind chaos – a wife and child who followed him there two months later after attempting to put the family’s affairs in order and close down his London and New York studios; artworks lost, perhaps stolen, given away to pay debts or put in storage prior to despatch home; and a tarnished reputation – the ‘shipwreck’ as Pearce put it. All in all the episode represented an unfulfilled dream to stand as an equal beside the masters of modern art in New York at that time, such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Mark Rothko. To top it off, Whiteley felt that his final major American work - The American Dream - was a failure in that it did not change the world or stop the war in Vietnam, as unrealistic as such expectations were. In fact, The American Dream had, by July of 1969, become more of a personal rant rather than a universal call to lay down arms. The name of the work itself was also highly misleading, for it referred to Whiteley’s dream of escaping New York, not of achieving success in the form of untold wealth, as is its usual association. Ultimately the work’s elements of grotesque surrealism and presentation of the harsher realities of American society – “the horror” - repelled those who saw it, including his dealer Frank Lloyd, founder and owner of the Marlborough Gallery.
Through The American Dream Whiteley had sought to shock its population into action and ultimately uplift a society he felt was teetering on the brink of apocalypse, whether that be in reference to the end of time or dawning of a new era. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic movie on the Vietnam war is perhaps the most accurate portrayal of the surreal dread present amongst its participants, both at home and abroad. Though he was a foreigner standing on the sideline, Whiteley was actively tuning into the mood of America at the time, as presented to him each night on the TV screen, in the print media, through the underground press and on the street. Like Coppola, he saw before him a veritable Apocalypse Now!
Figure 4 Brett Whiteley wrapped in the American Flag. This is possibly the same flag that got the family into trouble with the Fijian authorities during the latter half of 1969. Source: Brett Whiteley Estate.
Was neglect of this period in his life perhaps a reflection of the belief that Brett Whiteley was a small fish in a big pond, albeit the biggest pond in the art world at that time, and there was nothing much to talk about in regards to his almost two years in America? It has obviously been viewed that way, and as recently as 2006 the ‘shipwreck’ was also being referred to as a period which saw ‘dissipation’ of his talent (Pearce 2006). Such a conclusion can be reached if one ignores the artist’s focussed and varied output outside of The American Dream. However, to do so is to do an injustice to him. Whiteley arrived in the New World as a shining light and up-and-coming young ‘British’ artist, with a solid body of work and enviable reputation for one so young. He then tried to conquer the metropolis, and just as London had become a mecca for expatriate Australian artists, writers and intellectuals from the late 1950s through to the mid’ 1960s, so also many found themselves in New York later in the decade, attempting to do what Whiteley set out to do. How successful was he? On the surface it would seem that success eluded him. However that question is difficult to answer due to the fragmentary records of his time in the city, a lack of published commentary, and the unknown fate of the many works he produced there. We do not know, for example, how successful the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery was in selling his works, and the degree of any impact. The American period is, however, of enough interest to want to know more, and attempt to provide an answer to the various questions arising out of it. This article therefore seeks to present an historical chronology of Brett Whiteley’s New York sojourn and thereby reveal his experiences whilst resident. It is based on the scarce archival records, recently published biographies, interviews and the few surviving artworks. As ever there are sketchy and often conflicting accounts presented within the many biographical works and surveys of his art, including those by Sandra McGrath (1979, 1992), Barry Pearce (1995), Janet Hawley (1993), Frannie Hopkirk (1996), Margot Hilton and Graeme Blundell (1996), Barrie Dickens (2002), Kathie Sutherland (2010), Lou Klepac (2013) and Ashleigh Wilson (2014). The latter book contains the most comprehensive account to date of what happened to Whiteley whilst in America, for the author had access to the artist's notebooks, along with other material in family and public collections such as letters and sketchbooks. He also interviewed a number of the surviving participants. Despite this, questions remain around the work Whiteley undertook there, the people encountered and the things he did. Many of the published anecdotes are not precisely dated and therefore tend to blend together to portray a single, homogeneous American experience. The reality was actually quite different. Sure, Whiteley may have suffered a nervous breakdown for example, but that came towards the end of his time in the country. He was not physically or mentally inhibited for the majority of his stay, and in fact energetically attacked the task at hand. Whilst the last 9 months in New York saw him focus on a single work - The American Dream - his first year was a frenzy of activity dominated by the lead up to his one-man Marlborough-Gerson Gallery exhibition. Yet of the works he produced during that period there has been precious little discussion or analysis.
Whiteley's time in New York was to have a profound effect on his life and subsequent career. As such, it should not be ignored. He would never again be so bold, so out-there, so in-your-face, so visceral and so bloody. Through the turmoil of his life in New York and the society then around him, he discovered a lot about himself. This was to such a degree that he was finally able to settle back in Sydney at the end of 1969 – somewhat reluctantly - following a restless decade travelling the world and educating himself in its ways. The American episode is also notable for the fact that here we had a major Australian artist resident in one of the most important places on the planet at a time of great societal change and evolving art movements. Furthermore, Whiteley was not someone who meekly sat by observing and painting - he was an active participant in the scene around him, and as a result his work both soared and suffered.
Figure 5 Brett Whiteley, rooftop garden, Chelsea Hotel 1968. Photographer: Hermann Landshoff. Collection: Münchner Stadtmuseum.
The New York episode is therefore worthy, in this writer’s opinion, of more than the 15 to 20 pages allocated to it in recent biographies. The Hilton and Blundell chapter, for example, hints at the dark side of Whiteley's American experience as he strives for immersion in the New York scene. Unfortunately it does not, to any significant degree, address his achievements in art, perhaps because the authors were journalists focussed on reporting the events of his life. Also, they did not have the support of the immediate family and, as a result, relevant records were not readily at hand. Despite this, in its compilation a number of the participants were interviewed and accounts of their engagement with the artist in New York noted. In order, therefore, to appreciate the full extent of Whiteley's American experience a variety of resources, including those cited above, need to be considered and various elements pulled together, like pieces in a jigsaw. Others have engaged in this task before, and others will undoubtedly do so in the future. This article approaches it from a different tack – as a chronological archive focused on both events as they impacted upon the artist, and upon the art. In doing so it adds a few new pieces to the puzzle, bringing further clarity to a decidedly blurry period in the life and times of Brett Whiteley.
“Driver, take me to the Chelsea….”
During 1966, whilst resident in London, Brett Whiteley applied for a Harkness Fellowship to study in New York for 2 years. His disparate aims were set out in the Fellowship application and an associated letter dated 7 March 1967, though they basically came down to observing and experiencing the life of a city which was acknowledged at the time as an important centre of modern art. Whiteley would also be required, as part of the Fellowship, to visit various galleries and museums in America, allowing them to inform his work. He had briefly visited New York during 1962 for a couple of weeks and was keen to return. During that visit he met artist Wilhelm de Kooning. His wife Wendy had also spent two months there, just prior to their marriage in March of that year. Though aware of the challenges America presented, by 1966 Whiteley felt he was ready to take them on. Following the December 1966 public announcement of his successful Harkness Fellowship application, in September 1967 Brett, Wendy and their young daughter Arkie boarded the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth I for the voyage from London to New York. By that stage, at the age of 27, the artist already held strong views on a wide variety of subjects, and was keen to express them, both in words and through his art. He liked to talk and was extremely articulate, though he also tended towards the frenetically scatological, which to the uninitiated and not used to ‘artspeak’ could be incomprehensible. He was, for example, critical of capitalism and mindful of Marxist philosophy, all of which would be brought to a head through his visit to New York - the veritable home of capitalism and a hotbed of political activity and cultural dissent. Though never overtly political – in fact, the American works would prove to be the most political of his entire career - Whiteley held an Australian left-leaning, middle class sensibility and what he saw in America was to prove both shocking and exciting. This helps explains his plea, both whilst in London and upon returning home at the end of 1969, for Australia to begin looking towards Asia and abandon the century-old, debilitating and racist ‘Yellow Peril’ philosophy which inhibited engagement with the art and culture of countries such as China and Japan. His increasing interest in Zen Buddhism and yoga no doubt helped highlight to him the different paths taken by the East and West, all of which was brought into stark focus by his residence in America’s own Gotham City. In addition, the art of Vincent Van Gogh had introduced him to the simplicity of the Japanese woodblock print, as exemplified by proponents Hiroshige and Hokusai in works such as The Great Wave off Kanagawa 1832. All of this was in stark contrast to the complex, technology-focussed, nature-deprived and highly charged society he now found himself in.
There was a sense of madness in America which, once again, was an element reflected in the art of Vincent Van Gogh. This led Whiteley to produce the work Vincent 1968, which marked the commencement of a period in which he sought to both promote and interpret the art of this brilliant, troubled artist, culminating in the 1983 Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition Another way of looking at Vincent Van Gogh (Whiteley 1983). In America Whiteley was able to observe first-hand the flaws in a society that Australia appeared so keen to emulate, and as exemplified by Prime Minister Harold Holt’s grovelling proclamation in 1966 that the nation was ‘All the way with LBJ’ (i.e President Lyndon Baines Johnson) and would actively support engagement in the Vietnam war. Just as Prime Minister Menzies had pandered to British royalty in the immediate post-WWII years, so now his successor was seen by some to be kneeling at the feet of America’s President Johnson. Innocent lives would be lost as part of a modern blitzkrieg in South-east Asia, and the sheer horror of the conflict would play out on television screens around the world, in the media, and through public protests. Whiteley was both abhorred by the Vietnam war and attracted to it as a subject for his art, perhaps in a similar way to Christie. Because of its opposing poles of good and evil, the war offered the possibility that if genuinely studied and the artist put himself deep enough within its space, then he would perhaps find some meaning (McGrath 1967). The journey to the heart of America would only heighten the Australian's objections to the war and awareness of its more violent and horrific elements. Brett Whiteley cared. He cared for his family, his art, and for nature and humanity. He could not but help comment upon events around him which were so near and raw. For example, the My Lai massacre of some 500 innocent Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, by US soldiers took place on 16 March 1968 but was not first reported in the New York papers until the end of November. Such were the divisions in American society at the time, that this atrocity would be hidden from public view by both a compliant media and a military establishment focussed on presentation of the war as a righteous endeavour, when in fact the reality was otherwise. Whiteley would react accordingly.
Upon arrival in New York on 13 September 1967 the Whiteleys immediately decamped to the 10-storey Chelsea Hotel at 222 West 23rd Street (Willis 2013). They were fortunate to secure a recently vacated top-floor, ‘penthouse‘ apartment - room 1028 - with attached kitchen, access to the rooftop garden, and a view of the city towards the Empire State building. Wilson reveals that within a week Whiteley had looked up Harkness Fellowship recipient and newly arrived Chelsea resident Richard Crichton, asking him: 'You make plenty of bread?' Crichton, a good friend of fellow Australian artist Albert Tucker, was in America with his wife Florence and their three children. Their apartment was directly below the Whiteley's. Tucker was also resident at the time.
The Chelsea Hotel was both famous and infamous. Built during the 1880s, it gained notoriety throughout the new century with residences by writers, artists, actors and musicians, including Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Sarah Bernhardt, Brendan Behan, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frida Kahlo, Arthur Miller, Arthur C. Clarke, Gore Vidal, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, to name but a few. Its reputation as a bohemian enclave continued into the 1980s and beyond, with hotel manager and part owner Stanley Bard supporting its disparate clientele through an openness to eccentricity, a lax attitude towards alcohol and the use of recreational drugs, a 24/7 open door policy which encouraged visitors, active support for development of the artist community as in, for example, provision of drop sheets, and relatively low rents. Dylan Thomas had died there during 1953, alone and in a drunken stupor, much as Brett Whiteley would do back home in Australia some 40 years later from a heroin overdose in the less salubrious Thirroul Beach Motel.
The mythos of the 'hotel/motel room' comes to mind as a place of escape, loneliness and isolation where one is prone to want to exit as soon as you enter; a room which exists more as a doorway or portal to another world or new adventure, rather than presenting the security of home; a box with no lid; an escape for an artist seeking to reconnect with their inner muse, or a writer to walk the streets whilst having a temporary base to return to and record their thoughts. As such, Arthur C. Clarke was able to write 2001: A Space Odyssey there, and just as Alice used the rabbit hole to enter Wonderland, so also Brett Whiteley utilised the Chelsea Hotel as his entre into an American dream. Having said this, the Chelsea also existed as a long-term abode for many of its residents, and in such instances they were able to transform individual apartments into a reflection of their personalities and tastes. As a result of this eclectic mix, the hotel became a veritable Wonderland in and of itself, developing a community with its own unique customs, courtesies and eccentricities. The Whiteleys would become part of that community during their extended residence. In a 2004 interview with ABC journalist Caroline Jones, Wendy Whiteley noted the following of their arrival:
We went to New York in the late '60s on a Harkness Foundation fellowship, and we sailed on the last voyage of the 'Queen Mary'. We went straight to the Chelsea Hotel, and by absolute chance and luck, ended up with the penthouse (Jones 2004).
A later 2007 interview by Barry Pearce and Alex George of the Art Gallery of New South Wales refers again to the Chelsea, Brett’s studios in New York during 1967-9, and to his working methods therein (Pearce and George 2007):
Barry Pearce: Anyway, the next big move was to the Chelsea Hotel in New York with the Harkness Fellowship. What was New York like?
Wendy Whiteley: It was amazing. I just loved it and Brett both loved it and hated it. He found it a bit overwhelming. He got into some pretty silly behaviour I have to say. I mean we took him to hospital three times, out cold, and they kept saying 'Has your husband ever seen a psychiatrist?' In the middle of The American Dream, his father's brother died and I had to go and get the door broken down and he was absolutely unconscious on the floor. So he was driving himself into a very odd space and drinking a hell of a lot.
Alec: And he was leaning towards large works, perhaps influenced by the American pop movement which was also pushing larger formats. The American Dream was really his first multi-panelled work on that scale.
Wendy: Well, Brett had a studio across the road. The Chelsea Hotel wasn't big enough to keep using as a studio and for us to live in. It was one room, again with a little set of steps that went up to a top area and then a garden, and Arkie was getting bigger. So those first early works that you see in the photograph of the Chelsea were painted there and that odd sculpture, but then he got a bigger studio just literally across the road.
Figure 7 Brett and Arkie Whiteley, Chelsea Hotel, circa July 1968. Photographer: Hermann Landshoff. Source: Münchner Stadtmuseum.
. . . I just always felt very comfortable in New York; I loved it, I loved its energy. Noel Sheridan went a bit crackers there with the pressure and I do know that in the end the Johnsons were not all that happy there either. It is very pressured, and we were more outsiders in New York than we were in London by a mile, even though we met Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and you know, everybody, Warhol, everybody who was a fellow artist or musician.
Barry: So you have to adapt in some way or it will bruise you, is that what it boils down to?
Wendy: Well Brett got a bee in his bonnet about wanting to be part of that lot, to be accepted ... everybody went to Max's Kansas City or to the [Andy Warhol] Factory; we all went to the same nightclubs ... Like any big city, it's a small town for a certain group of people. You go to the same restaurants, you all go to the same places ... and you go to the Electric Circus when that happens and I had a business there; and in the Chelsea Hotel Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and all those people used to come and stay and Jasper Johns was living in the hotel for quite some time, and Arthur Miller, and Andy Warhol made Chelsea Girls in there. All those people were just around , and it didn't seem like any big deal.
Alec: But in terms of the artwork, it was quite an extraordinary period of time?
Wendy: Brett quite liked Rauschenberg, but not that much. He really admired Rothko more than Rauschenberg though he did a bit of pop stuff himself.
Alec: Rosenquist?
Wendy: Yes.
Alec: Richard Diebenkorn, did he come across him then?
Wendy: Always. Everybody loved Diebenkorn; he didn't have the same kind of fame as some of the others. He was a painters' painter, Diebenkorn; generally acknowledged by the painters as being quite important. I don't know any artist who didn't actually admire Diebenkorn at that time, which was strange because the others were much flashier. And there was Robert Motherwell. And of course de Kooning was still very active. So it was a very active art scene. Leo Castelli's gallery was going full guns.
Alec: It seems that there was an extraordinary zeitgeist that you guys actually tapped into; you were in the right places in terms of London, for all of that energy of those times, and then New York, with also politically a lot of energy flowing around?
Barry: The Chelsea Hotel seems to have been some sort of magnet for outsiders.
Wendy: Well [expat Australian artist] Dick Crichton was downstairs and [British artist] George Segal, although I don't remember Segal being in the hotel; I mean I remember him staying in the hotel. I read somewhere that he claims that Tony Woods was in New York too, so those people were around. New York was just amazing, with the Chelsea Hotel very much a pivotal point, like the Algonquin [hotel] used to be for the writers, but that had kind of died away.
Barry: When Brett finally went to Fiji in 1969, what happened to the works? Did you have to pack everything up and send it on somewhere?
Wendy: Marlborough [Gallery] did, and they kept Fidgeting with Infinity to cover storage charges.
Alec: Why did Brett choose Fiji of all places?
Wendy: It could have been Tahiti just as easily but I think he literally almost stuck a pin in the map. He just wanted to go somewhere that was a complete antithesis to all the intensity about the war - somewhere where there was nothing happening really - and beautiful weather, and all you do is swim and eat. But it didn't take him long to start getting antsy there and writing me letters. I needed a break from him too. He was worrying everybody.
Alec: In terms of his mental health?
Wendy: Yes, just the intensity of it and whether he was having heart attacks or what was going on. It was almost like a nervous breakdown in the end. He worked so intensely on The American Dream and then [Frank] Lloyd, from the Marlborough Gallery, just said 'No way'. Up to that point Lloyd had been treating us like a prince and princess. They had been really terrific and I knew that he was supposed to be a very tough guy but he was also starting to get into trouble himself, with the Rothko estate and tax and a lot of dishonest behaviour, but up until that point they had taken us to amazing dinner parties with very interesting people; the New York Jewish intelligentsia, like the Roses, who had amazing collections, and Bryan Robertson was coming and going. Francis Bacon and Bryan came to New York a couple of times. Apparently he nearly died when he saw us getting out of the elevator and we both looked so weird, and he said 'Oh, my God, what's happened to them?'
Barry: What was the most common time of the day for Brett to be working then?
Wendy: The best time of the day? No real best.
Barry: Just whenever the mood took?
Wendy: Yes, he would often work late at night, but then he didn't really sleep in the morning either; he would cat-nap if he was really tired. He didn't stay in bed and get over it; he would just keep pushing. [And] always, always, he had music blaring out, whatever was the current thing. This time, more Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.
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Figure 8 Brett Whiteley, Chelsea Hotel 1968. Photographer: Hermann Landshoff. Source: Münchner Stadtmuseum.
The interview makes note of various changes in the artist whilst in New York. His attire, for example, went from the smart dress of London during a period when Carnaby Street was in its prime, to presenting a casual appearance more in tune with the alternate, hippie movement. As his wife noted, Whiteley worked hard and pushed himself into a nervous breakdown. And the hectic social life opened up to them an art scene that was not to be ignored. For example, the former gay couple Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg held court in a multi-storeyed building on Lafayette Avenue which was a hive of activity as both studio and drop in space. Andy Warhol’s Factory was in full swing, producing artworks, film and social events as part of the scene.
In a 2009 television interview with ABC journalist Peter Thompson, Wendy Whiteley expanded on the couple’s time in New York and life at the Chelsea:
Wendy Whiteley: … Then we moved to New York. I loved it. I loved it. We went straight to the Chelsea Hotel because we’d heard about it. It was not very safe because it was full of eccentrics – Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol and, you know, a lot of those people ended up living there. The first studio in New York was actually the one big room in the Chelsea Hotel. When Arkie was a baby I got to the point of drawing a chalk line across the floor, saying, ‘Do not bring the paint across the line because there is nowhere for us to go.’ So we were in New York at the right time. I and the kids would go to demonstrations but Brett’s idea was that he would paint something that would change America’s mind about Vietnam. Brett painted The American Dream. He nearly went crazy doing it, I have to say, and he nearly drove me crazy too. But Marlborough Gallery just took one look and said ‘No way can the gallery exhibit this painting!’ Brett decided he’d had enough, so he literally stuck a pin in a map – literally – and said ‘I’m going to Fiji.’
Peter Thomson: When we look at the canvas of your lives together, it looks like that time at the Chelsea Hotel in New York was never really topped. The Chelsea sounds like it was the world capital of wild.
WW: Riding up and down in the elevator with Arthur Miller wasn’t a wild occasion – it was just like ‘Oh, that’s Arthur Miller – Hi, good morning.’ You know, that kind of stuff. In many ways it was a very comfortable place to be, because you weren’t being poked fun at.
PT: And you had the penthouse, I presume, because the art had been successful?
WW: It might have been called the penthouse, but really it was just a room up some stairs with a kitchen and out to this amazing roof garden. You know, the ducks were great watchdogs. You know, birds flying around – it was amazing to be able to go on to this garden in the middle of New York (Thompson 2009).
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Figure 9 Penthouse garden, Chelsea Hotel with Arkie Whiteley 1968. Photographer: Hermann Landshoff. Collection: Münchner Stadtmuseum.
Shortly after their arrival at the Chelsea the Whiteleys brought a pair of ducks for a pond on the rooftop garden and to amuse young Arkie. The ducks can be seen in one of the group of photographs taken by German-born photographer Hermann 'Rough' Landshoff during the summer of 1968. The Chelsea would remain the Whiteleys base during their time in the United States, though Brett also hired a small, single room, first-floor studio across the road and Wendy, with friend Liz Sheridan, set up a shop called The Put On in Greenwich Village on West 20th Street. The Put On sold old clothes and furs, and was so successful that a second outlet later opened in the city. Brett was apparently not happy at this expression of independence on the part of his wife, fearing abandonment should she, like his mother, become financially secure and not totally reliant upon him.
According to Australian artist Martin Sharp, who stayed at the Chelsea briefly during 1968, their apartment '…was arranged with a great sense of style. It was well organised and beautiful. Wendy had a lot to do with that' (Hilton and Blundell 1996). We can see this in some of the Landshoff photographs. One is taken high up and looking down across the main room in their Chelsea Hotel penthouse apartment. We see that the room is painted in white, with Wendy stating elsewhere that they had always lived in a white space, whether it be residence or studio. White walls reflected the light and allowed works to be hung or featured, as in a gallery space. The photograph also reveals a rug and double-mattress bed in the middle of the floor, three large windows on one side letting in the sun, and the artist at work on a small easel near the fireplace on the right as his daughter Arkie lays back reading a book. In one corner can be seen the sculpture Yeah … That’s Her 1968 which featured in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition of May-June 1968, and on the walls two works, including the small photograph Dylan – Attempt 3 1968. Many of the Landshoff images – of which there are ten in the Munich State Museum collection - are simply of the family relaxing or playing. The fact that they are scantily clad suggests that it was taken during the height of the American summer around July and prior to the onset of the winter chill. A copy of the catalogue of the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition is seen on the bed in one of the photographs and indicates the shots were likely taken after the show had opened. In the version of Dylan – Attempt 3 1968 seen on the wall, the three small mounted photographs are arranged differently and one of them has a large cross on it in comparison with the photograph of the work contained in the catalogue. We can also see that the room is very neat and tidy compared with an earlier photograph possibly taken in late 1967 wherein Whiteley’s large painting Dylan – Attempt 1 1967 fills one corner and another unidentified work lies on a paint splattered floor. This was most likely prior to the artist securing the separate studio across the road from the Chelsea. Though ten photographs are known to have been taken of the family at the time by Landshoff, it is also possible that he took the image of Whiteley with stapled lips that was included in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition catalogue. Of interest in a number of the images is the fact that the artist is at work on a painting that was not included as a full page illustration in the show. He is also drawing with a pen in a large sketchbook and there are at least two otherwise unknown works visible – a painting on the wall and a large drawing on the ground beside his easel. It has been noted on numerous occasions by both the Whiteley and those around him that he worked at his art every day, on sketches, within notebooks, or large works for sale and sculptures. He was prolific throughout his career and to suggest that an intensely stimulating atmosphere such as he experienced in New York should prove any different is naive.
Brett Whiteley’s mother - whose real name was Beryl but was known amongst her family as Ning - had an apartment in the city with her partner Gio (John McCarthy). She had also previously been resident at the Chelsea. One of Whiteley's earliest extant drawings following his arrival in New York is of his mother, taken at the Chelsea Hotel. The drawing is typical for the time, presenting a distorted, two-faced, ball-shaped head from the side and front, with a deformed upper body hidden beneath a skivvy. Her hands, with bulbous fingers, are fiddling with some sort of fibrous material – perhaps wool or cloth. This pencil sketch is reminiscent of Brett's famous self-portrait from the same year Remembering Lao Tse (Shaving off a Second) 1967, copies and variants of which featured in a number of works, including alongside Dylan – Attempt 3 1968 and within the larger work in oil, plaster and collage Not Me – I 1967. This latter piece was a highlight of his London work just prior to coming to New York and featured on the cover of the catalogue to his Marlborough Gallery October 1967 exhibition there. It was one of the many three-dimensional works Whiteley would produce around this time, as he used collage to add a 3-dimensional element to the canvas, extending out and engaging with the viewer in a manner which tended towards the confrontational.
Figure 10 Brett Whiteley, Ning, Chelsea Hotel 1967. Pencil on beige ruled paper, 32 x 19 cm. Collection: Brett Whiteley Estate. Reproduced Klepac 2013.
The small drawing of Ning can perhaps be seen as an amalgam of mother and son – an indication of their closeness in appearance and spirit, especially in regards to the restlessness which took them away from Australia and landed them both in New York at the end of the Sixties. The portrait is of someone on the move, always active and looking to engage with the world around them. Ning’s presence in the city brought some solace to the artist as he was able to manifest the closeness he felt to his mother – a closeness which had existed as a child, but been partially broken when he was shipped off to boarding school in Bathurst during his early teenage years as his parents’ marriage began to break down. More traumatically, it was severely damaged when Ning left her husband Clem and the two children - Brett and Frannie – for a new life in London back in 1957. Their time together in America was marked by regular encounters and the exchange of letters, though Beryl remained very much a background figure in the life of a son and artist who was overwhelmingly attracted to women and the female form. Whiteley was a sensualist and New York was an ideal place in which to experience the fruits of the various cultural and sexual revolutions being played out in Western democracies at the time. He liked to be surrounded by women, and with his mother, wife and daughter in New York with him, and for a brief period his sister, Whiteley had a secure base upon which to venture out, explore, and allow his art to evolve. Upon arrival in New York this boy from OZ therefore wasted no time in setting about painting, drawing and sculpting. According to Wilson:
He started work trying to make sense of the city. In his notebook he drew a picture of two bodies on top of each other, one black and one white, torsos entwined in a single shape. He drew bodies in different settings: on a placard, beneath the words MAKE LOVE NOT WAR; and as a new American flag (Wilson 2014).
Whiteley's presence in New York is briefly mentioned in a New York Times article during October 1967, citing the recent influx of 'English' artists (Mellow 1967). He is featured a few weeks later in a Time magazine interview published on 10 November. Within that piece, which features a picture of the dapper artist standing nonchalantly, with a cigarette in his right hand, dressed in white skivvy and dress pants in front of his large work Dylan – Attempt 1 1967, Whiteley refers to the city as 'a living sculpture', with everywhere the prevalent New York yellow obvious 'in taxis, in the mustard, in the Kodak boxes and Con Edison construction tents [and] in the sanitation trucks'. He would have been delighted with the publicity and the fact that the piece appeared alongside one dealing with an exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh watercolours and drawings then touring the United States and about to open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Whiteley had been enamoured of the Dutch painter since he first revealed an interest in, and talent for art whilst at the boarding school. The anonymous Time article is interestingly and rather forebodingly titled ‘Painting: Plaster Apocalypse’.
Figure 11 Time magazine, 10 November 1967 [detail].
It opened with a review of his London show, held in his absence at the Marlborough New London Gallery there between 2-31 October 1967. This was followed by an interview with the artist, supposedly taken in New York. The article also makes reference to a previous Time magazine piece from 1966 which featured a brief profile of Whiteley alongside fellow young British artists. The 1967 article is reproduced in full below:
Painting: Plaster Apocalypse
"I'm trying to paint the life force of a thing," says Australian-born Brett Whiteley. "There has always been a sense of violence in my work." There has also been a strong strain of sensuality. Three years ago, at the age of 25, Whiteley established himself in the vanguard of young London painters (TIME, Oct. 9, 1964) with one Baconesque series of 25 paintings, all showing his pretty young wife nude in the bath, plus another series depicting the passionate antics of Sex Murderer John Christie. His latest show at Marlborough New London Gallery is difficult to characterize. Is it Expressionist? Surrealist? Pop? Funk? Hard to say, but critics find Whiteley's new work infinitely greater in depth and sophistication.
Demonic Force. The artist now mixes media with enthusiastic abandon. The 17 monstrous painted panels in the London show are augmented by grafted-on photographic blow-ups, found objects and even entire plaster sculptures. And their subject matter is as apocalyptic as their technique is accomplished. Typical is his self-portrait of the artist at work [Not Me – I 1967]. Whiteley painted in his head, wreathed in its halo of reddish hair, and showed his left hand drawing at an easel. But the right, black-shirted arm snakes out across the floor to where his twisted, plaster-spattered fingers offer the startled viewer a fresh carnation (the gallery changes it daily). Nor did Whiteley stop there. Above his self-portrait erupt five flat thought balloons, containing a photo of a nude torso, a tube of oozing white oil paint, a fungoid dream landscape with a bit of highway, a montage of Hitler in a motorcade emoting into a zebra-striped speech bubble – and question mark. The whole is obviously meant to depict the varied factors that Whiteley believes shaped his artistic sensibility; the balloons are also signs pointing to Whiteley's belief that life is a journey to be travelled and that it is dominated by the demonic force of history.
Figure 12 Time magazine, 10 November 1967.
Whoop It Up. Whiteley himself is now in the U.S., at the start of a $500-a-month Harkness Foundation scholarship. He has holed up in a penthouse at Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel with his wife and three-year-old daughter, and is already hard at work on an American series, including a collage portrait of Folk-Rock Singer Bob Dylan. Says Whiteley: "Dylan is the outsider. He's the most on person in America." What turns Whiteley on mainly is New York itself, a city that he feels is "like a living sculpture." To capture his first impressions he has nearly completed a "celebration to New York, a whoop-it-up scene" that shows a model consisting entirely of legs, breasts and lips emerging from an immense, sculptured yellow taxicab [New York 1 1967-8]. He has spotted yellow as New York's special color. "It is an American yellow," he says, "the color of optimism. It's in the taxis, in the mustard, in the Kodak boxes and Con Edison construction tents, in the sanitation trucks." It is a joyful color, which reminds him of the sun. But he adds, "It is also the color of madness."
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The article highlights the fact that Whiteley wasted no time in getting to work on a so-called 'American series' which would feature both the city and its people. He had come prepared and was not about wasting time in recording his reaction to the high-rise metropolis which now engulfed him, or acknowledging local heroes such as Bob Dylan. Another aspect of this was his immediate awareness of, and reaction to, the colour yellow.
Yellow
The Time article reference to the colour yellow was significant as it in many ways represented the colour of hope for the younger generation during the latter part of the Sixties. The English musician Donovan had a hit with his song Mellow Yellow in October 1966, featuring a lyric referring to the ‘electrical banana’ as the next craze; in March 1967 the cover to the new LP by the Velvet Underground featured an image of a yellow banana by Andy Warhol; and the yellow and white petals of the daisy flower featured in photographs and posters of hippies throughout this period, such as in Martin Sharp’s Plant a Flower Child 1967 poster released in London as issue number 5 of the underground magazine OZ. The Indian variant saffron represented the increasing interest in Eastern religions and philosophies such as Buddhism, and the move away from Christian traditions. Yellow was also the colour of the sun and of optimism. It represented the beauty of nature that people wanted to embrace through a new environmental awareness. One popular representation of this came in the form of the naked female body amidst a bed of daisies – Eve in the Garden of Eden - painted in psychedelic patterns or dancing freely with flowers in her hair. This hippie sensibility may have been overtly present in the work of Martin Sharp at the time, but Whiteley did not identify as a hippie and his reactions to it were more subtly presented within his art. He and Wendy naturally felt a closer association with the Beat generation of the late Fifties and early Sixties. As a result, so-called hippie motifs are only included in Whiteley’s work as secondary elements and terms such as 'psychedelic' are not usually applied to his paintings, drawings and sculpture of the latter part of the decade.
Yellow also had associations with the burgeoning hallucinogenic drug culture. For example, the great banana skin hoax of 1967 featured the colour, as the rumour spread that smoked banana peels could get you high. Whiteley was a user of LSD, though his reaction to it may have tended towards the inducement of paranoia rather than the psychedelic flights of fancy which appeared more commonly amongst users and can be seen in the San Francisco rock concert poster art of the time and works such as Martin Sharp’s OZ magazine covers. It is therefore not surprising that he reacted so strongly when he saw the colour yellow all around him on the streets of New York, most noticeably in the hundreds of Yellow Cab Company cars which clogged them every day. He was immediately drawn to make use of yellow in its representation of the city and also the fact that it opened up to him the world of artists Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin who had featured it in their work during the 1880s. It was also the colour of madness. The heightened presence present of yellow in his early American work was a marked change from the colours which comprised his palette in Australia, London and on the continent between 1955 and 1967. This was seen in his most recent London exhibition and, for example, the self-portrait Not Me - I 1967 where the somewhat sombre ochres, dark reds and browns dominate, as they did in his work prior to the New York transformation. However during 1967 there was also evidence that the bright day-glo colours of psychedelia, which were present on the streets of London, in print and fashion, and on the walks of poster shops and art galleries at the time, began to slowly and subtly enter into his work, culminating in the bright pink atomic mushroom cloud panel of his epic The American Dream.
Whiteley’s earliest dated, though not the earliest completed, American painting New York 2 January 1968 strongly features the colour yellow in its presentation of buildings, vans, taxis and street signs. One such sign includes a left turn arrow with the word NO. This obviously political motif also featured as a panel in the work Just Recently …. 1968 which was included in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition of May-June, and also in the New York sketchbook #1 which at present forms part of the Benalla Art Gallery collection.
Figure 13 No Left Turn 1968. Page from New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery.
The simple yellow upon yellow with black text is pure New York. The subtle political jibe also reflects Whiteley’s rising concern and anger at the violence, poverty and injustice the artist came to feel entrapped by during his time in America. Donovan may have sung about 'mellow yellow' but to Brett Whiteley the colour in many ways reflected the frantic pace of life in the city and its political and social instability. As Wendy Whiteley noted in 2007:
It was a time of great political upheaval. I'd take Arkie to anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, civil rights demonstrations. Feminism was a hot topic. We got involved in Norman Mailer's run for mayor, and Brett made a poster for him. A lot of serious discussion went on at the Chelsea (Hawley 2007).
Within such an environment Whiteley’s art reflected good and evil, portrayed angels and demons, glorified heroes and exposed villains, moving from the yellow of the inanimate city and impending madness to the blood red of humanity's open wound.
The Marlborough-Gerson exhibition 1968
The Brett Whiteley exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London during October 1967 was an obvious indicator of the direction the artist’s American work would take. This is amply revealed in the book Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1959-67 wherein the detailed discussion and accompanying catalogue raisonné reveals the artist’s progression from the Christie and Zoo series of the early and mid’ Sixties, towards a more varied palette just prior to his departure for New York (Sutherland 2010). Works such as Birth-Rebirth (for Arkie) 1967 and Woman of Tangiers 1967 feature bright blues and greens, possibly as a reaction to the vibrant colours of both Carnaby Street and northern Africa. Even the self-portrait Not Me – I 1967 reflected the influence of contemporary Pop and psychedelia with its trippy thought bubbles. Three of the five feature 1) sex in the form of a photograph of a large breasted, naked female body with head hidden; 2) the thick, alternating black and white lines of an optically challenging motif in the shape of an atomic mushroom cloud; and 3) an idyllic coastal scene from nature, with the verdant green of the land falling away into the blue of the sea.
Figure 14 Brett Whiteley, Marlborough Gallery, London, October 1967. Exhibition catalogue.
The fire within the artist was fed by the flames of lust, the fight for freedom and a fearful rage against a Cold War apocalypse. Love both physical and spiritual, hate in all its forms, and the search for nirvana were all themes which would feature in Whiteley’s work during this period. Not Me I 1967 invited the viewer to join the artist in the ride of a lifetime. He was obviously not present at the opening of the London exhibition, though he was heavily involved in its staging, going so far as to mock-up the precise details of the installation in a drawing. As a former advertising agency artist in Sydney, he knew the importance of presentation and promotion in order to sell product and enhance reputation leading towards success. It was for this reason, and the quality of his art, that he was picked up by the prestigious Marlborough Gallery which, though based in London, also had a presence in New York. And so it was that upon setting up his Chelsea apartment and nearby later 24th Street studio, Whiteley went about producing a series of large artworks in preparation for a May-June 1968 exhibition at the Marlborough-Gerson gallery, located at 41 East 57th Street. Two of his works had been shown there in November-December 1965 as part of The English Eye exhibition – Untitled Dark Painting 1961-2 and Christie and Hectorina 1964-5, with the latter work illustrated in the New York edition of Time magazine during October 1964. The scope of his activity during the last few months of 1967 and first half of 1968 in preparation for the show is reflected in the accompanying exhibition catalogue which lists some 25 new or recent works. According to McGrath:
The first year he painted 'conventional easel-type' paintings, to be shown at New York's Marlborough Gallery in the spring of 1968. They were, despite his description, anything but conventional. Many were huge works done in an almost bewildering variety of media: fibreglass and perspex, wood, chrome. He used paint, photography, plastic, electricity, steel and charcoal. He added real objects such as piano keys, barbed wire, fur, rice and grenades. The subjects ranged from erotica to portraits, from New York 'landscapes' to war pictures and crucifixions. His portraits of Martin Luther King, Gauguin and Bob Dylan were arguably among the most exciting of these 'conventional' works..... (McGrath 1979).
From this description – which arose in part from intimate discussions with the artist – one would deduce that the show was an artistic, if not commercial success, such was the scope of the work and the obvious progression it represented in Whiteley’s art, even if only in terms of the variety of subject matter addressed. However, whilst this may have been true, it was also true that a perceived lack of follow up, his subsequent physical and mental breakdown, the failure of The American Dream, and a hasty departure from New York in July 1969 meant that the moment appeared squandered and the momentum dissipated. The fate of numerous American works subsequently became shrouded in mystery and Whiteley had little to show for his two years of hard work when he arrived back in Sydney in November 1969. There was no subsequent exhibition in Australia or London; no retrospective featuring the New York works apart from the unveiling of the completed The American Dream in Sydney during 1970; no formal identification of a so-called 'American period'. As it stands, we do not know how the Marlborough-Gerson show was received. Was Whiteley satisfied with his work up to that point in time? What was sold by the artist and Marlborough whilst in America, and what was given away? What additional works, apart from The American Dream, were produced by the artist between June 1968 and July 1969? What was destroyed by Whiteley, and if so, why? What survives? Unfortunately there are no clear answers to any of these questions, though the artist was known, in later years, to have indicated the fate of many of his works – at least as far as he was aware in light of the trauma of the period and associated LSD and alcoholic fog. The comments by McGrath are significant, arising as they did out of conversations with Whiteley in research for her 1979 biography. As such, it would seem that he played down his early New York pieces as ‘conventional easel types’, whereas McGrath saw them as anything but, and assessed his output up to that point in time as ‘exciting’. This enthusiasm for the New York period would not carry through to other commentators on Whiteley’s work, especially following the distractions brought about by the success of his 1970s views of Sydney Harbour and the Australian environment. Nevertheless, the McGrath perspective points to the significance of the American period. And that significance is revealed by a detailed study of the actual Marlborough-Gerson exhibition and additional known works such as those contained within his two extant New York sketchbooks.
The Marlborough-Gerson exhibition followed relatively quickly upon the London gallery show, and a new illustrated catalogue was produced. Marlborough was one of the top international galleries at the time, having been foundered by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer in 1946. The portrayal of the former by an actor in The Rothko Controversy documentary of 1983 reveals a smooth operator who knew the value of the artists in his stable and nurtured them to his best financial advantage. Frequent exhibitions in a variety of locations around the world, plus accompanying high quality catalogues, were commonly used to promote and sell works in a volatile art market. In Whiteley’s instance the New York exhibition catalogue featured on the cover in glorious colour his painting Vincent 1968.
Figure 15 Brett Whiteley - Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York catalogue, May-June 1968. Cover illustration.
This work was possibly inspired by the recent showing of Van Gogh works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other works by the artist accessible to Whiteley from his New York base, including the iconic Starry Night 1889 acquired in 1941 by the Museum of Modern Art. It was a wise choice as Vincent 1968 was one of the artist’s best works to date. The cult of Van Gogh was also on the rise in America. As a result, the work was sold at the time to the Abrahams family of New York. Apart from that, the catalogue, which was printed in England, contained a chronology of the artist, cited his work in public collections, and included a list of 23 items on show, plus two additional works. Each is described as follows from the catalogue, with an indication as to whether an illustration is included:
1. Shankar 1966 / Charcoal and ink on paper / 84 x 80 in / 213.3 x 202.2 cm (not illustrated)
2. The Grin and the Hymn 1968 / Oil on ply / 58 ½ x 48 in / 148.6 x 121.9 cm (illustrated b/w)
3. Vincent 1968 / Oil, ink, mirror and razor on ply / 87 x 65 ¾ x 15 in / 220.9 x 164.4 x 38.1 cm (illustrated b/w and in colour on the cover)
4. Gauguin 1968 / Oil, photograph and poison on ply / 60 x 104 x 2 in / 152.4 x 264.1 x 5.1 cm (illustrated b/w)
5. Dylan – Attempt 2 1968 / Oil and photograph on ply / 20 x 27 in / 50.8 x 68.6 cm (illustrated b/w)
6. Dylan – Attempt 1 1967 / Oil, photography, electricity and piano keys on ply / 84 x 112 x 2 in / 213.3 x 284.2 x 5.1 cm (illustrated b/w)
7. Dylan – Attempt 3 1968 / Slightly altered photograph / 6 x 5 in / 15.2 x 12.7 cm. Mounted with two other images (illustrated b/w)
8. New York 1 1968 / Oil, photograph, chrome and taxi / 79 ½ x 92 x 46 in / 201.9 x 233.6 x 116.8 cm (illustrated b/w)
9. New York 2 1968 / oil, plastic and red blinking light / 55 x 36 in / 139.7 x 91.4 cm (illustrated b/w)
10. New York 3 1968 / Charcoal, pencil and ink on paper / 48 x 52 in / 121.9 x 132 cm
11. The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?) 1968 / double-sided object / Oil, fiberglass, photography, steel, barbed wire, grenade and … rice / 82 ½ x 146 x 20 in / 209.6 x 370.8 x 50.8 cm (illustrated b/w + detail in colour)
12. …No ! 1968 / Oil and photography on ply / 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm (illustrated b/w)
13. Indefinable 1968 / Oil, photography and plastics on ply / 92 x 72 x 2 in / 233.6 x 182.9 x 5.1 cm (illustrated b/w)
14. Kiss 1967 / Charcoal on paper / 54 x 63 in / 137.2 x 160 cm (?illustrated b/w)
15. … Yes … 1968 / Oil and ink drawing on ply / 48 x 66 ½ in / 121.9 x 168.9 cm (?illustrated b/w)
16. Mindlessness 1968 / Oil, fiberglass and photography / 64 x 22 x 5 in / 162.6 x 55.8 x 12.7 cm (illustrated b/w)
17. Sailor on Leave 1968 / Wood, chrome and perspex / 54 x 11 x 11 in / 137.2 x 28 x 28 cm (illustrated b/w)
18. The No in Yes 1968 / Fiberglass and Perspex / 97 x 24 x 12 in / 246.3 x 61 x 30.5 cm (illustrated b/w)
19. Yeah … That’s Her 1968 / Fiberglass, steel, fur and flower / 67 ½ x 34 x 35 in / 171.4 x 86.4 x 58.5 cm (illustrated b/w)
20. The Infinity Machine 1967 / Oil and fiberglass / 43 ½ x 9 x 4 ½ in / 110.5 x 22.9 x 11.3 cm (illustrated b/w)
21. Blackness – Version 1 1968 / Photograph and shade / 20 x 20 in (approx.) / 50.8 x 50.8 cm (?illustrated b/w)
22. … True 1968 / Oil and opal / 20 x 8 x ¼ in / 50.8 x 20.3 x 0.6 cm (not illustrated)
23. Just Recently … 1968 / Oil, ink and photographs / 53 x 73 ½ x 13 in / 134.6 x 186.8 x 33 cm (illustrated b/w)
In addition, two loose leaf sheets containing four images were included with the catalogue. Of these, two were new, previously unlisted works:
24. To Martin Luther King 1968 / Oil, photography, aluminium, Perspex and fresh care / 82 x 84 x 72 in (illustrated b/w)
25. Crucifixion 1968 / Wood, fiberglass, Perspex, rubber band, nails and St. Matthew / 96 x 72 x 24 in (illustrated b/w).
These were significant late additions to the exhibition, with Wilson noting that Whiteley had spent three weeks on Crucifixion 1968 alone. He would continue with this motif in a series of related works through to the late 1980s, the most notable of which featured his friend Joel Elenberg. Finally, two large unnumbered paintings / drawings showing a couple intimately entwined are illustrated in the catalogue as background to three pieces of sculpture.
Figure 16 … Yes ... 1968. Photograph from the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition catalogue (#15), with two sculptures placed in front of the work.
Figure 17 Kiss 1967. Photograph from the Marlborough-Gerson catalogue (#14), with a sculpture partially covering the work.
It is unclear whether these were mere studio works or included in the exhibition, though a relationship between the group can be suggested. The large drawing may be the work referred to in the catalogue as Kiss 1967, as it portrays a naked couple kissing which they are making love. In addition the oil painting on ply may be … Yes … 1968, presenting us with a frontal view of the act of love and the statement one associated with the pleasure of the encounter and the moment of ecstasy. These two sexually explicit works are almost hidden in the catalogue. This may have been deliberate on the part of the Marlborough Gallery in seeking not to engage with authority over matters of censorship. Whiteley would continue to produce such works throughout his career, with sex and sensuality an important part of his psyche. Paintings and photographic collages of naked female bodies, couples engaged in congress, representations of the ejaculation of sperm and the more darker elements of sexuality as seen in the Christie series were commonplace in Whiteley’s art. How these sometimes explicit and confronting works were dealt with by his agents and dealers, especially in conservative England and Australia, was a problem for the artist during the Sixties and on into the following decade prior to the withdrawal of antiquated censorship laws. Whilst the authorities may have objected, it seems that these subjects were popular with the buying public.
All the works in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition, bar one – True 1968 - are illustrated in the Catalogue of Works included at the end of this article, along with other works from the American period. More than sixty have been identified, though the fate of the majority remains unknown. Marlborough was responsible for their sale and, following Whiteley’s hasty departure from New York in July 1969, the artist appears to have severed his ties with the firm. They had no Australian presence and he was no longer based in London. The turmoil that surrounded the firm from 1970 through to the early 1980s may also have been an element in this cutting off of ties. However it appears that generally the relationship was mutually beneficial, and as noted by Wendy Whiteley, prior to the falling out over The American Dream, Frank Lloyd and Marlborough treated the artist well.
Whiteley spent approximately seven months preparing for the Marlborough-Gerson show. During that time he produced a range of paintings, assemblages, drawing and sculptures in his unique and evolving style. We do not have any contemporary published reviews of the exhibition at this stage, however a reconstruction based on the catalogue reveals an exciting mix of work, addressing the multiplicity of issues and themes then occupying the mind of the artist. They included the self, idols such as Dylan, Van Gough, Gauguin, Jesus and Martin Luther King, the city, soldiers and Vietnam, sex and politics. There were a number of highlights, among them the three Dylan works, those presenting a narrative around tragic events in the lives of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, and landscapes of the city which conveyed the trauma and violence of humanity amongst the cold, hard lines of skyscrapers and speeding traffic. Of course politics, violence and the Vietnam war also featured, brought together in works such as the bleak, black To Martin Luther King 1968 and, most graphically, the double-sided and free-standing The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?) 1968.
Figure 18 The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?) [detail of reverse site] 1968. Source: Marlborough-Gerson catalogue 1968.
As journalist Sandra McGrath noted when she interviewed Whiteley in 1967, the war was very much on his mind:
‘Saigon’. The word is like a red rag to a bull. ‘But, man, that’s where it all is.’ The destruction, the meaninglessness, the corruption, the conflicts are there, pinpointed and localized. It is East versus West. The Eastern mind and the Western mind confronted. It is Christianity and Buddhism locked in battle with monks burning themselves and GI’s and tape-recorders and tanks and altars, and battle fatigues and saffron robes. ‘It’s Everything.’ It is not surprising that he is both attracted and repelled by the Vietnam struggle, because it is characteristic of Whiteley’s mind that he quickly sorts out the poles of situations, and seek intuitively to reconcile opposites into some sort of meaning. Some part of the artist is attracted to violence, seduced by violence (McGrath 1967).
The quote is substantially paraphrased, reflecting the difficulty of recording the meandering, often loaded and confused, but nevertheless interesting and relevant speech of the artist. The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?) 1968 – of which a colour reproduction of one of the panels is included in the catalogue - was unambiguously seeking to portray the brutality and horror of the Asian conflict. Three images are contained in the catalogue. They show a double-sided work mounted on a plaster frame in the shape of an atomic bomb, similar to that used for his work Birth Rebirth (for Arkie) [ Vietnam 1967.
Figure 19 The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?) [detail] 1968. Source: Marlborough-Gerson catalogue 1968. Front side of a diptych.
One side featured a soldier carrying a gun as he walks cautiously through the mist and smoke of a Vietnam jungle, surround by evidence of catastrophic fire which is perhaps the aftermath of a napalm bombing raid. The other side features a bloody, heavily distorted arm of a soldier amidst a background of the 'brutalized anatomical rubble' of an explosion. Blood drips from the canvas onto the frame and then onto the floor, like a fresh wound. This work was later included in the University of Illinois’ annual survey of American contemporary art at the Krannert Art Museum during March 1969. A review in the Chicago Tribune noted the following in regard to Whiteley’s entry and the issue of the war as portrayed by contemporary American artists:
….Several artists are explicit in their American concerns. There is one of Peter Saul's Saigon indictments, a Robert Osborn collage commenting on Vietnam's unfortunate children, and Clayton Pinkerton’s “American Hero," whose central, flag-draped coffin is suspended above fleecy clouds. Others take a more general view of violence. Brett Whiteley's giant atom bomb collage has a groping hand reaching in supplication from one surface, and both a sergeant's chevrons and an oriental symbol may be distinguished among the brutalized anatomical rubble (Willis 1969).
Pinkerton’s figurative abstractions would have sat well beside Whiteley’s earlier London works, but less so his more colourful and contemporary American paintings and assemblages. Saul’s Saigon 1967 was in many ways a combination of psychedelic comic art and graffiti, perhaps a multi-coloured homage to Picasso’s Guernica 1937, with fluid lines and bright, dayglo colours.
Figure 20 Peter Saul, Saigon, 1967. Collection: Whitney Museum.
The Pacifist Robert Osborn’s cartoonish collage revealed the deep emotional reaction of the artist to his country’s involvement in the war. The atomic bomb shaped frame of Whiteley’s piece allowed the work to be displayed on a floor, rather than a wall, and walked around with caution. It also placed the war within the context of the ongoing Cold War paranoia which had prevailed since the end of the war in 1945. This work is in many ways a companion piece to Whiteley’s Birth-Rebirth (for Arkie) [Vietnam] 1967 diptych.
Figure 21 Birth-Rebirth (for Arkie) [Vietnam] 1967. Diptych. Private collection.
One side features the joy of birth, but on the other side is a scene of the Vietnam war, with a soldier trekking through waist-high water in a tropical jungle, rocket launcher at the ready on his shoulder, a white and brown liquid oozing from its barrel. The verdant green rolling hills and blue vegetation of the landscape is therein juxtaposed with the grim monotone of the soldier, all contained within an emotive, heart-shaped frame. Along the base is the Japanese calligraphic script for the English equivalent of Time or Now. This script is repeated by Whiteley within a number of his New York works, including The Grin and the Hymn 1968.
Though not as horrific as the later diptych from 1968, Birth-Rebirth (for Arkie) [Vietnam] 1967 nevertheless points to the harsh reality of life at that time and Whiteley’s deeply felt response to the Vietnam war. Though based in London, the artist had returned to Australia for approximately 6 months at the very end of 1965 and through into 1966, during a period of widespread protest and concern over the decision by aged Prime Minister Robert Menzies to send Australia to war alongside the Americans. Whiteley’s friend Martin Sharp and his colleague Richard Neville were able to express some of this outrage through the pages of their Sydney-based satirical and countercultural magazine OZ. A January 1966 cartoon, for example, featured an Australian soldier saying ‘Come out you dirty Vietcong disguised as an old woman and young girl’, whilst other items included the ‘Make love not war’ slogan, ‘I will not serve in Vietnam’ t-shirts, and horrific photographs of the treatment of the Vietnamese on both sides. This came to a head - graphically - in 1968, for as Whiteley was dripping red paint onto the canvas and frame of The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?) 1968, as if to imitate the flow of blood from a would, on the other side of the world, in London, Martin Sharp was applying paint in a similar manner to a white piece of paper collaged with a copy of the brutal, summary justice then occurring in Vietnam. The work, labelled 'The pornography of violence' would become the iconic cover of OZ magazine, March 1968.
Figure 22 OZ magazine, London, March 1968. Artwork by Martin Sharp featuring a photograph of a South Vietnam soldier shooting a North Vietnam participant in the war.
Neither Whiteley or Sharp, residing and New York and London respectively, could escape the horror of the Vietnam war from late 1965 through to the middle of 1973 when the last Australian forces were withdrawn from Saigon. In addition, the outrageous sacking by local politicians of the Sydney Opera House architect Joern Utzon at the end of 1965 had raised the spectre of Australia remaining a cultural backwater. The sheer dullness of Menzies' Australia, compared with events overseas such as the explosion of youth-based music brought about by rock and roll in the late 1950s and the Beatles early the following decade, alongside the rebelliousness of the Beat generation, encouraged artists, writers and musicians such as Sharp and Neville to escape to London, which they did in February 1966. Whiteley hung around Sydney for a Bob Dylan concert in April of that year and likewise returned to England. Though somewhat isolated there from events such as the Vietnam war, his brief return home had undoubtedly raised his concerns over the direction American and Australia were taking, especially in regards to Asia and the ongoing Cold War. Whilst he did not directly participate in the London edition of OZ magazine published by Sharp and Neville from January 1967, or engage in the then numerous public protests and rallies, he was very much on the same page. The three Australians did not hold back in presenting the brutality and horror of the conflict within its pages and through their art, either as text or graphics. OZ was political, countercultural, artistic and libertarian, dealing with issues such as racism, revolution, drugs, corruption, censorship and the stifling conservatism of English and Australian society, whilst all the while promoting a message of peace, love and environmental awareness. As the war progressed, the magazine’s colourful, psychedelic graphics were replaced by more intense, documentary content. It was towards this end of the spectrum that Whiteley’s art drifted as the northern winter of 1967 approached, just as he had been drawn to the horror of the Christie murders a few years earlier.
Figure 23 To Martin Luther King 1968. Source: Marlborough-Gerson catalogue.
No other work in the 1968 Marlborough-Gerson exhibition so directly addresses the Vietnam war as The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End? 1968, though it is there as an element in Whiteley’s memorial to the Reverend Martin Luther King, who was a vocal opponent to the war and spokesperson for peace and civil rights for Black Americans. It was also somewhat cryptically present in the sculpture Soldier on Leave 1968 which, in the exhibition catalogue photograph stands before a painting of a couple having sex. Within the large work simply titled To Martin Luther King 1968 the artist reflects his emotional reaction to the assassination in a painting and collage which features the blackness of death and of race. This is done through the presentation of a bitumen road which extends both out of the canvas and into it, taking the viewer down the road towards a dark, racially divided future. A semi-automatic rifle has been placed at the end of the street, pointing towards a target, whilst a small image of King sits next to the Statue of Liberty in the far distance to the right. Liberty stands ready to protect the peacemaker, but in this instance fails miserably.
In addition to the large paintings, there were also seven items of sculpture in the exhibition. They were free standing or wall mounted non-figurative pieces, apart from the large work titled Crucifixion 1968 which was a representation of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary, with a bible at the base open at the epistle of Saint Matthew.
Figure 24 Crucifixion 1968. Source: Marlborough-Gerson catalogue.
Whiteley’s sculptured pieces were a combination of post-Cubist collage assemblies and traditional carving and moulding utilising materials such as wood, fiberglass, perspex and marble. His sculpture Yeah … That’s Her 1967 had a psychedelic, molten fluid-like base with an upper extension of fiberglass, steel, fur and a flower. The piece reminds one of nothing less than the alien out of the 1956 science fiction film War of the Worlds, as directed by George Pal and based on a novel by H.G. Wells. Apart from the image in the exhibition catalogue, it can also be seen in some of the photographs by Landshoff, situated prominently in the corner of the Whiteley’s Chelsea apartment. One of his New York sketchbooks contains images of sculptures which may or may not have been created in the months following the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition. One such sketch is of a 30 foot high sculptural fountain made of white marble, chrome-plated barb wire and fiberglass. The amorphous, fleshy blob also contains a section comprising a female face, in a predominantly pale pink hue.
Figure 25 Barb wire sculpture fountain 1968. Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
It is interesting to note that within the exhibition catalogue there is a photograph of three of the free-standing sculptures with a background of a wall-mounted large painting, a similarly large drawing and another item of sculpture. It is almost as though the sculptures are extensions of the works on the wall, living entities that have leapt out of the paintings and, as in the film Forbidden Planet, represent the monsters from the id, or deep subconscious, of those portrayed. In the background is the sexually explicit images of a female breast and a naked man and woman making love, whilst in the foreground the slender, vertical sculptures bear titles such as Sailor on Leave 1968, The No in Yes 1968 and Yeah … That’s Her 1968
Figure 26 Four sculptures and a painting and drawing, Marlborough-Gerson catalogue, 1968.
The title Mindlessness 1968 given to the breast sculpture perhaps refers to the almost uncontrollable lust and sexual desire that the artist himself experienced in regards to the female form throughout his life. Once again there is a connection here with the Vietnam war, as soldiers and sailors on leave in ports such as Sydney and in the United States relieved the stress and horror of their battlefield experiences through engagement with prostitutes and partners. Sex was ever present and though not openly discussed, Whiteley featured in prominently within his work throughout the Sixties.
This 3-dimensional extension of wall mounted art works was a devise that Whiteley had used in some of his earlier London shows, including that held at the Marlborough Gallery in October 1964. Its origins can be found within the Dada and Surrealist movements of the Twenties and Thirties as artists sought to both shock and engage their audiences, whether it be through art or performance or a combination of the two. Rauschenberg extended the idea from his New York back during the early Sixties. Despite his eccentricities, Brett Whiteley was view as a valued artist by the Marlborough Gallery and tuned into contemporary trends. He not only featured in a number of their exhibitions throughout the decade but was actively in the promotion of his work, through, for example, entry into local and foreign art prizes and group exhibitions. His CV rapidly expanded, reflecting an intense period of activity. He was prolific and enjoyed the ever-increasing financial rewards of his labour. Unfortunately, despite early success in London, he was not to have the impact hoped for in America, with fellow Australian artist Robert Jacks pointing out that in New York during 1968-9, ‘Laurie Anderson was the future of art, not Brett Whiteley … so even though Brett was making very radical statements in his work, it was retrograde. Brett was still tied up with Picasso and Matisse’ (Hilton and Blundell 1996). His sister Frannie noted how out of touch he was with the New York scene, though working hard to be noticed. For example, in order to extend his network, and despite being attached to the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Whiteley also became friends with Leo Castelli, the number one art dealer in New York at the time. His clients included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and Castelli regularly showed works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, de Kooning and Pollack. A visit to his gallery in September 1968 was described by Frannie:
I don’t know if Brett ever exhibited at Leo Castelli’s SoHo gallery, but we went there one day and he introduced me to Castelli, a small charming man in his sixties who was the main man for the big stars of New York Pop Art. While we were checking things out, Roy Lichtenstein came in and unrolled some work; he was tall and very good looking. There were Oldenburg food sculptures on display – a hamburger, apple pie, that kind of thing – with their fleshy resin contours and grotesque reality; Warhol screens; and a Lichtenstein comic strip painting filling an entire wall. I was, and still am, pretty ambivalent about the Pop Art movement which peaked in New York in the mid-Sixties. What Brett referred to as the ‘Mickey Mouse Hemingway’ aspect of what they were calling art was historically interesting… (Hopkirk 1996).
Not all the works shown in the Whiteley Marlborough-Gerson exhibition had obviously been completed in New York, with some shipped over from their gallery in England after having been part of his October 1967 show there. Two have been noted, including An a large drawing featuring Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar.
Figure 27 Brett Whiteley, Shankar, 1966. Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales.
As McGrath noted of these two works:
Also in the exhibition were two exquisite drawings, one called The Kiss, and the other titled Shankar. The latter is a drawing of hands and a sitar, and is now owned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. But these, along with the portrait of Gauguin, were the show's most lyrical images. Whiteley felt these paintings were not meant to be charming or likeable, personal or subjective; they were meant as warnings, messages to America. He wrote at the time: 'Honesty is accurate projection. Truth is someone recognising it (McGrath 1979).
McGrath obviously saw reproductions or originals of both works, though the latter – Kiss 1967 - is not listed in the Sutherland catalogue of his works from that year (Sutherland 2010). It is referenced in the 1968 Marlborough-Gerson catalogue and an image has been tentatively identified. Hopkirk noted that Shankar 1966 was displayed prominently in the Marlborough-Gerson office at the time of her visit there in September 1968.
Following the opening at the gallery on 17 May 1968, a party was held at the Chelsea in the Whiteleys penthouse apartment and through to the rooftop garden. The artist called it a 'rock-pot party' as a reflection of the lifestyle he was then enjoying. Both elements were at once extraneous and integral to his art, with music and drugs of prime import as he immersed himself in New York’s nightlife. Guests included the head of Marlborough, Frank Lloyd. One of the invitees was British writer Piers Paul Read who Whiteley had befriended on the voyage from London. In a letter to his mother dated 20 May 1968, the conservative Read described the artist at the time as small, fast talking, with 'blond golly-wog hair which made him look ridiculous.' In regards to Whiteley’s art and the New York exhibition, Read commented:
[Whiteley] paints very energetic paintings - Committed Pop, if you see what I mean, but they are much more engaging and amusing than most. It was a good show, rather like a high-brow chamber of horrors, but one wonders whether the individual pieces are works of art (Wilson 2014).
This is, unfortunately, the only known review of the show, apart from a line from an undated clipping cited in Wilson, which notes......
Brett attended the opening party before slipping away to the downstairs apartment of architect and jewellery artist Constance Abernathy for a tryst. He was later found there by his wife Wendy, hiding on the outside balcony naked. Abernathy was then director of the New York office of radical architect and counterculture icon Buckminster Fuller. After this incident Whiteley left the Chelsea and his wife and daughter for Abernathy's Soho apartment, perhaps hoping she would provide him with the 'in' to the New York scene he so fervently desired. However the affair lasted less than a month, after which he returned to the Chelsea. Wendy commented on the episode in her interview for The Australian Story during September 2004, noting:
I had a business in New York – a very elegant shop. It was very successful. Brett never liked me working, which he explained quite carefully to being about his mother leaving as soon as she got her finances together and she got the independence. He threatened me with divorce when I first was going to open the shop in New York, and I just said, "Oh, well." He ran away with a woman called Constance Abernathy for a few weeks. She thought Brett was terrific stuff, very entertaining, very marvellous, so she carefully explained to me we should share his genius. And he was intrigued and had a good time. Then she fell down an elevator shaft and started complaining and he arrived home, abandoning her, I might add, poor thing, with no teeth (Jones 2004).
The couple's time in America was marked by affairs and sexual experimentation, with rock star Janis Joplin (room 411) apparently one of Whiteley's intimate encounters. Joplin presented both an exotic and lonely figure about the Chelsea. She and the band Big Brother and the Holding Company arrived in New York early in February 1968 for two concerts at the Anderson Theatre and recording sessions at Columbia Studios for their album Cheap Thrills. They all checked into the Chelsea, with guitarist Sam Andrew noting that: The band made the Chelsea Hotel their headquarters for the next six weeks. It was favoured by all the San Francisco bands, as they were free to smoke dope and play loud music all night (Glatt 2016). Other bands such as the Jefferson Airplane used the Chelsea as their home base, with the guitarist Jorma Kaukonen writing the song Third Week in the Chelsea as a tribute. Janis decorated her room with Persian rugs and retro jewellery and made extensive use of it over the following two years during periods of recording at the Columbia studio, east coast gigs with her various bands, and promotional activities such as television spots.
Paul Morrisey, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin and Tim Buckley, Max’s Kansas City, New York, circa February 1968. Photograph: Elliot Landy.
Whiteley subsequently observed her slide into the heroin addiction which would claim her life on 4 October 1970. Janis had, despite her preference for alcohol and most especially Southern Comfort, had long been a user of amphetamines and, after joining Big Brother, returned to using heroin. Promiscuity was part of the sexual revolution then sweeping western society, and both Whiteley and Joplin were open to all it offered. However with the promiscuity came the trauma of infidelity and loneliness. The Summer of Love was followed by a long winter of betrayal for many couples and individuals. Another Chelsea resident at the time - poet and singer Leonard Cohen (room 424) - had a liaison with Joplin in the spring of 1968, following a chance encounter in the hotel lift (Runtagh 2016). He recorded some of the intimate details in his song Chelsea Hotel. Brett and Wendy had met the laconic Canadian singer one night in a burger joint near the Chelsea. Joplin was not impressed by her encounter with Cohen – he barely said a word throughout and she considered him to be ‘ugly’ like her; it is not known what the Whiteleys view of Cohen was.
Of the 24 works included in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition catalogue, only seven are at present known in public or private collections. They include the following:
1. Shankar 1966
2. New York 1 1967-8
3. New York 2 1968
4. New York 3 1968
5. Dylan – Attempt 2 1968
6. Vincent 1968
7. Gauguin 1968
The whereabouts of the rest remains a mystery. One of the surviving works - New York 1 1968 - now forms part of the Brett Whiteley Studio collection in Sydney, though not in the form as originally exhibited.
Figure 28 Brett Whiteley, New York 1 / The New York Scene / Celebration to New York 1968. Oil, collage, chrome and mixed media on plywood. Collection: Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
The shape of the canvas is reminiscent of Whiteley’s home state of New South Wales in Australia. A picture of that work was recently posted on a blog by a visitor to the gallery, with the following comment:
This old piece HAD a cab door attached to it at some point before its 2 year stint at the Chelsea Hotel, NY. It showcases the intensity of urbanism that is New York.
A black and white photograph of the work in its original form with attached piece of a taxi cab is included in the Marlborough-Gerson catalogue. Subsequent to that the attachment has been lost, and part of the bottom section displaying the leg and foot has been cut off. It is likely that this is the ‘whoop-it-up’ scene mentioned in the Times article of November 1967. New York 1 reflects Whiteley's immediate reaction to the yellow of the city and the soaring skyscrapers which defined this modern metropolis. It contains legs, breast and lips emerging from a yellow New York taxi cab. As Wendy Whiteley noted in a recent interview in regards to the now missing taxi cab fixture and Brett’s tendency to make his work 3-dimensional: It was an element of Pop, which was being tossed around in New York – found objects stuck on things… (Tunnicliffe 2013).
This work has an interesting history, for it can be seen hanging in pride of place in the foyer and above the reception desk of the Chelsea Hotel in film footage and photographs from 1981 through to 2001.
Figure 29 Stanley Bard, manager of the Chelsea Hotel, standing in the foyer with New York 1 / The New York Scene 1968 in the background, above the reception desk.
One Australian visitor to New York during the 1970s – lightshow pioneer Roger Foley aka Ellis D. Fogg – recalled standing in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, signing in at reception, and the light reflecting off Whiteley’s painting as the overhead ceiling fan worked its oscillating magic. This effect was undoubtedly exaggerated by the star-shaped chrome mirror which the artist had place on the lower right hand corner of the work. New York 1 1968 obviously had more than a ‘2 year stint’ at the Chelsea, as suggested in the blog posting, and was part of a cache of works left there prior to Whiteley fleeing the city in July 1969. It is also most likely the work referred to as The New York Scene 1968 in a 1992 newspaper article featuring an interview with Stanley Bard following the artist’s death. The Brett Whiteley estate retrieved this painting from the Chelsea Hotel prior to its redevelopment in 2011 and the subsequent retirement of Bard. According to Wendy Whiteley it was only ever on loan to them. The artist was also known to have brought back some of his own works prior to his death, hoping to donate them to a public collection later in life, just as the ill-fated New York based artist Mark Rothko had hoped to create a post-mortem collection of his life's work. Two of the Chelsea Whiteley’s were subsequently sold at auction during 2007 and 2011, including one which had featured in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition.
Another of Whiteley’s surviving early American works is the graphically intense New York 2 (First sensation of New York City) which is dated January 1968.
Figure 30 Brett Whiteley, New York 2 (First sensation of New York City) January 1968. Oil, collage, charcoal, ink, US currency coin and electric light on board, 70 x 90.6 cm. Illustrated Pearce 2004, plate 79.
This multimedia work features a crowded street scene with a cartoonish yellow cab speeding by on the right and, on the left, two black and white arms in a gesture similar to the injection of heroin into a vein. However in this instance the needle is replaced by a hot dog dripping yellow mustard and a hand clutching a US coin. The speeding yellow cabs, street signs including one indicating no left turn, a flashing red light and soaring skyscrapers in the background form a work which brings into contrast the stark linearity of the cityscape with the curvaceous line of humanity, ugly though the latter may be in this instance. Sensuality and the naked female form were defining elements of Brett Whiteley’s art in London and following his return to Australia, especially in works featuring the sensuous curves of nature and the naked body of his wife Wendy. A preliminary sketch relating to New York 2 1968 is known, along with a black and white photograph in the Marlborough-Gerson catalogue. Both show the work with a lower extension featuring a hole in which a number of electric cords are exposed, supposedly in connection with the flashing red light which is a feature of the streetscape. The images in the catalogue and sketchbook also show an upper extension with a black dot in the middle. As with New York 1, the original extensions are now not attached to the work.
Yellow is the dominant colour in Whiteley's American paintings through to the middle of 1968, after which it was dramatically replaced by blood red. The artist also made extensive use of collage in all its forms during this period, reflecting its significant role in the Pop Art movement. This was brought to notice in the modern era by artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton during the 1950s, and fellow Australian artist Martin Sharp in the mid' 1960s, though both Pablo Picasso in the early 1900s and the German Dada / Surrealist Max Ernst in the 1920s had pioneered its use. Apart from the preparation of large works and sculptural pieces for the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition, all the while Whiteley was sketching in black pencil, pen and ink, often in preparation for larger works or within notebooks and sketchbooks. An example of this is the large New York 3 sketch which was also included in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition.
Figure 31 Brett Whiteley, New York 3 1968. Charcoal, pencil, ink and paper on paper on composition board, 122 x 132 cm. Private Collection.
This work features a first-person view of the artist sketching in the foreground – a device frequently made use of by Whiteley - and looking out the window of the Chelsea Hotel towards the towering skyscraper-dominated skyline in the background. The latter also features in the New York 1 1968 painting. The large black blot on the pad is reminiscent of a bullet hole, with the sharp, needle-like splatter behind suggesting the spray of blood associated with assassination or murder. This was a motif Whiteley had recently developed in works such as Hotel Majestic, Tangier 1967. It would be used both during his New York period and throughout the following decade.
There was an obvious political element to life in America at that time, with violent street protests against the war in Vietnam, racial tensions in the South and in the city as exemplified by the presence of the Black Panther Party, the overpowering presence of guns and violence on the street, and forthcoming elections igniting the political instability in the country following on the assassination of President Kennedy back in 1963. Whiteley was very much aware of, and interested in, the rise of the Black Panthers – a group of Black Americans who took up their constitutional right to bear arms on the street and sought to protect individuals from harassment and abuse by police forces around the country. Such a group was an obvious affront to the segregation and racism which existed in the United States at that time. One surviving manifestation of Whiteley's reaction to this turmoil and the conservative backlash represented by President Johnson and his successor Richard Nixon, is the collage sketch Vision of Johannesburg – Nixon’s ’69 1969 which is to be found in one of his surviving sketchbooks.
Figure 32 Brett Whiteley, Vision of Johannesburg – Nixon’s ‘69. Ink and collage page from the artist's notebook / sketchbook. 30.4 x 24.4 cm. Illustrated McGrath 1979. Source: Brett Whiteley Estate.
The title is a play on words around the Bob Dylan song Visions of Johanna and refers to presidential candidate Richard Nixon's policy in regards to apartheid in South Africa, seeking appeasement rather than strong sanctions. This is overwhelmingly a brutal and anguished work, highlighting the despair felt amongst a large section of the population in regards to the direction the country was taking. It references police brutality in dealing with public protests around race in both South Africa and the United States, with one of the faces screaming in anguish ‘Pigs Pigs’. It is in no way the affectionate homage to Bob Dylan that Whiteley’s Vision of Johanna 1966 pencil sketch was, but rather one of anger. Another sketchbook work features the Alabama governor George Wallace who would face an assassin's bullet due to his promotion of racial hatred and segregation. The Wallace collage is seen in a single page illustration within Wilson comprising four works from one of Whiteley’s New York sketchbooks. It includes a sketch in ink of two birds; a perspective drawing of New York skyscrapers with a collage photograph of the Empire State building, perhaps related to the large painting New York 1 1967-8; a preliminary sketch for the work New York 2 1968; and the George Wallace collage.
Figure 33 Brett Whiteley, Examples from the Brett Whiteley’s New York sketchbook #2, Brett Whiteley Estate. Illustrated Wilson 2014.
1967’s Summer of Love, and rise of the hippies the previous year with their mantra of Peace and Love, came in part out of the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. It was, however, starting to sour by the time Whiteley arrived in the country. The conservative establishment was fighting back, especially in regards to the use of recreational drugs, defence of its Vietnam war stance and opposition to student protests. There were soldiers in the streets and on campuses, along with heavily armed squads of police engaging with young people and Black communities. The hippie vibe was able to flourish longer on the sunny west coast around California, however the bleakness of the New York winter dampened the dreamy, Aquarian optimism and brought home to its residents a darker reality. The garbage strike of February 1968 was one manifestation of a seemingly impending apocalypse.
Figure 34 New York garbage strike, 2-10 February 1968.
And just over one year later, as Whiteley fled New York in July 1969, the nearby Woodstock music and art fair became the last rallying call prior to the tragedy of Altamont. The utopian dream of the Sixties was replaced by a return to greed and pragmatism during the 1970s. Brett Whiteley, having lived in both London and New York, experienced first-hand the full breadth of the various cultural and societal revolutions then taking place in the western world. He could not help but be affected by it, and his portrayal of violence and the Vietnam war in his American work is evidence of this.
Amidst this initial flourish of activity, during March of 1968 Whiteley was visited by one of the members of the board of management of the Harkness Fellowship. In the city to check up on the activities of the various recipients, he found Whiteley to be 'a pain in the neck ... not only garrulous but incoherent', prone to speak in a 'continuous protest with strong anti-capitalist leanings' and ‘intellectually rather a light-weight’ (Wilson 2014). Nevertheless, support from the Fellowship continued in the form of the approximately US$660 per month stipend, for Whiteley was obviously doing what he had originally set out to do, and his behaviour was not far different from that seen during his London years. He may have been a pain in the neck, but his talent was undeniable and his strong work ethic on display.
The Whiteleys wasted no time during their first 6 months in New York to socialise, travel and generally acclimatise. They met up with London friends David and Serena Shaffer and, apart from site-seeing around the city, travelled with them to check out art galleries and museum collections in Chicago and Pittsburgh as per the requirements of the Fellowship. According to Serena, Brett’s inquisitiveness made him a fun companion as he walked the streets, talking to strangers and looking behind doors for adventure and stories (Wilson 2014). Whilst out and about one day, Whiteley met LSD guru Timothy Leary, noting that he was ‘very friendly, smashed face, white cowboy boots, white cowboy hat & giving the Hindu bow at parting. Very bizarre' (Wilson 2014). It was at the nightclub / restaurant Max’s Kansas City that Whiteley initially met Andy Warhol and his Factory associates, though there are no precise details describing such meetings. Whiteley did not keep daily diaries whilst in America. The primary sources of information are within his notebook, two sketchbooks – one of which is housed in the Benalla Art Gallery and another with the Brett Whiteley Estate - upon individual works, and within correspondence with family and friends. Of course research by subsequent biographers has uncovered a lot of material as well, and Wendy Whiteley remains an important source of information.
Heroes
One interesting aspect of Whiteley’s American period is his move towards celebrating and interpreting the life and work of certain historical and contemporary individuals – moving from villains such as John Christie to his heroes, if you like. Brett Whiteley idolised singer and poet Bob Dylan, having been a long-time fan. In his 1965 London television interview a copy of Dylan’s The Times They Are a Changin’ LP is seen prominently displayed on the wall of his studio (Sargent 1965). Later that year Australian Robert Hughes interviewed Whiteley for the Bulletin magazine and noted the following in regards to the atmosphere within the studio, which was formerly occupied by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt:
… the big red bed, the canvas chairs, the litter of photographs, drawings and prints of Piero della Francesca, Colin Wilson’s Encyclopaedia of Murder and John Rothenstein’s book on Francis Bacon, hearing the raucous voice of Bob Dylan at full volume, smelling, on party nights, the odor of whisky and cigarette smoke, hashish and sweat. The studio now belongs to Brett Whiteley (Hughes 1965)
During his brief return to Australia at the end of 1965 Whiteley stayed long enough to see Dylan perform live at the Sydney Stadium, Rushcutters Bay, on 13 April 1966, backed by a band later known simply as The Band. Arising out of this event - which was part of a world tour marking Dylan’s transformation from folk singer to rock star - Whiteley produced a detailed pencil sketch entitled Visions of Johanna 1966, referencing one of the songs sung at the concert.
Figure 35 Brett Whiteley, Visions of Johanna August 1966. Illustrated Sutherland 2010. Source: Brett Whiteley Estate.
Whiteley was also a fan of D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 film Don't Look Back which documented the 1965 British tour – Dylan’s last as a solo, acoustic performer. Whiteley was played Dylan records at volume in his London, New York and later Australian studios and the Chelsea Hotel apartment whilst working (Hughes 1965). The singer was living in New York at the time of Whiteley’s Harkness Fellowship and had been a resident at the Chelsea between 1961-4. He was at the height of his fame and notoriety during this period, though very reclusive following a motorcycle accident in July 1966, following on the world tour. A number of iconic posters of Dylan appeared around this time (1967), including those by Milton Glaser and Martin Sharp. Whiteley’s reaction to Dylan was manifest in gallery works, rather than ephemeral, pop culture mass produced prints and graphics. Dylan’s March 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited with its hit i was a landmark in the history of modern popular music, taking the folk movement into new areas of rock. Since then Whiteley would have devoured the 1966 Blonde on Blonde double album – written in part at the Chelsea - and the more recent December 1967 country-influenced John Wesley Harding. During 1967 Australian journalist Sandra McGrath interviewed Whiteley, and one of the topics covered was his relationship to the works of Dylan:
Bob Dylan to the Whiteleys is a hero. Curiously alike physically, one feels that Dylan and Whiteley are kindred spirits. Dylan, folk-singer, a mouthpiece for the young, a new sort of old-young, in fact articulates in song and verse what Whiteley to some extent seeks to convey in paint – a sort of convulsions of the soul … where opposites meet and merge into one. They are both concerned with the violence and potential destruction of the world. The words of Dylan and his anguish somehow relate to Whiteley’s own anguish. For they have both, in Whiteley’s words, ‘taken it all on’. Whiteley means this in an almost quasi-mystical way: in the sense that Christ ‘took it on’. It is, in another manner of saying it, one individual trying to assume the collective consciousness or awareness of man and make of it a symbol or myth or image that is meaningful (McGrath 1967).
There are no precise details regarding a meeting between the singer and painter during the 1967-9 period in America, though such can be inferred from subsequent statements by the artist, even if such encounters were only fleeting. Dylan held a press conference in Whiteley's Sydney studio during his 1986 tour, supposedly following an introduction from the Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, though the singer was apparently already familiar with the Australian. As noted above, one of Whiteley's first paintings in the United States was a portrait of Dylan performing, and two more Dylan-themed works done in New York are known from various historical accounts, including the Marlborough-Gerson catalogue, with one of the most significant (the first) described by McGrath as follows:
Whiteley had seen Dylan at a concert in Australia - an experience that produced a catharsis of the magnitude of finding the van Gogh book in his schoolboy days. Not only did Whiteley see Dylan as an idol; but he began to see himself in Dylanesque terms - as a seer, as a bard of paint, as an artist capable of capturing the lunacies and monstrosities of the Vietnam-torn world around him. Whiteley's own explosive brand of surrealism was indeed close to the sort of imagery Dylan used in his verse. Both shared the passion, felt the torment, and had the conviction that truth must be revealed and hypocrisy banished if the world were not be destroyed by the events whirling around a troubled America. In the largest of the portraits, Whiteley shows Dylan on a stage, the heads of the audience at his feet. His hands, holding the guitar, are outsized, and dominate the instrument. (In many of Whiteley's drawings feet and especially hands are predominant images.) The lyrics of the Dylan song become a trailing meteorite swinging into a curve of photographs showing his wife, an eye, a Vietnam war scene, a keyboard, and a landscape. Images of optimism and pessimism are mixed in equal proportion (McGrath 1979).
Figure 36 Photograph of Brett Whiteley with Dylan – Attempt 1 1967-8, left panel, in the Chelsea Hotel. Note the differences between this version and that shown in the following photograph, with this earlier version missing the white wavy line on the left of Dylan’s painted head, and the speech bubble to the right.
Figure 37 Brett Whiteley in his Chelsea Hotel apartment with Dylan - Attempt 1 1967-8. Note the 2 panels and another untitled work on the floor. Illustrated Sutherland 2010. Source: Brett Whiteley Estate.
The work can be partially seen in two period photographs taken in New York during the latter part of 1967 or early 1968, and another in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition catalogue. Known therein as Dylan – Attempt 1 1967, the precise details of this painting and collage are not known, apart from that contained in the catalogue entry, and its present fate is likewise a mystery – does it remain in a private collection in America, or was it destroyed by the artist prior to his departure? Dylan – Attempt 1 1967 is otherwise identical to the description given by McGrath, apart from her reference to an audience at the singer’s feet.
The photographs and McGrath description possibly represent the work which for a period hung in Wendy Whiteley's clothing store. A reproduction of a detail of this large painting and collage on canvas, or an early version thereof, showing Dylan playing a guitar with oversized, crab-like hands, appeared in the University of New South Wales student newspaper Tharunka on 26 March 1968, as part of review by local artist Tim Johnson of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. Its publication in Australia early in 1968 indicates that Whiteley’s notoriety was increasing and mere presence in New York deemed newsworthy. In fact, an exhibition of Whiteley’s work was held at the Bonython gallery, Sydney, in June-July of that year, featuring paintings and drawings from Australia 1965-6 and the Tangier postcard series of 1967. No American works were included. Whiteley’s second Dylan-themed painting titled Dylan – Attempt 2 1968 – is a more traditional work, featuring a head view from the side, with a collaged photograph of the singer with raised head singing into a missing microphone. The palette of this work is almost identical to Not Me – I 1967 with dark orange and brown featuring. Interestingly the same collaged photograph featured in Martin Sharp’s famous psychedelic Blowing in the Mind poster of September 1967.
Figure 38 Brett Whiteley, Dylan - Attempt 2 1967-8. Private Collection, Australia. Illustrated Sutherland 2010.
Another Bob Dylan related work, entitled Dylan – Attempt 3 and comprising a single altered photograph of Dylan, alongside two reproductions, is illustrated in black and white within the Marlborough-Gerson catalogue.
Figure 39 Brett Whiteley, Dylan - Attempt 3 Slightly altered photograph (Changed Photographs) 1968. 6 x 12 inches. Supplementary page to Marlborough-Gerson catalogue, 1968, cat. No.7.
One of the reproductions is a copy of Whiteley’s self-portrait drawing Remembering Lao Tse (Shaving off a Second) 1967, whilst the other is a page of text from Wilhelm Reich’s book The Function of the Orgasm (1961). Dylan’s head is cleaved in the middle, perhaps indicative of the world’s attempt to get inside it and better understand this profoundly gifted writer, poet and songsmith. The work can also be seen in two of the Landshoff photographs, with the order of the three photographs once again changed, and the text image featuring a large cross. The fate of two of Whiteley’s New York Dylan artworks is unknown. He would later come back to the subject whilst living in Australia, but mostly in the form of large drawings in pen and ink, and rough sketches, rather than the paint, collage and mixed media style he favoured during the New York period.
Though apparently no great reader and preferring the visual and aural, Whiteley had literary sensibilities and immersed himself at the time not only in the pop culture musings of artists such as Bob Dylan, but also in the life and work of radical nineteenth century poets including Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. As an avid student of art history, he also devoured through illustrated books, exhibitions and galleries, the works of painters such as the French Impressionists and early twentieth century masters including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. When Whiteley left London in September 1967, for example, a large library of his art books was handed over to an Australian friend, who subsequently found that most were overdue borrowings from libraries and did not belong to Whiteley. One Picasso related piece from the New York period is known, being a study after his Fisherman of 1918.
Figure 37 Brett Whiteley, Study after Picasso's Fisherman 1968. Charcoal on paper, signed, dated and inscribed lower right: Study after Picasso's 'Fisherman'/ (after a photograph 1918) / Brett Whiteley 1968, 73 x 63.5 cm.
An exhibition of works by the artist was held at the Museum of Modern Art during October - December, 1967, shortly after Whiteley’s arrival. During 1968 Whiteley revealed an interest in the lives of both Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin through works exhibited as part of the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition. The two artists had a fiery friendship which came to a head at the Yellow House in Arles, France, during the summer of 1888. Following an argument there, Gauguin fled the scene and returned to Paris, leaving a distraught Van Gogh to engage in a solitary act of self-mutilation by cutting off his ear with a razor. In preparation for the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition Whiteley began working on paintings which would reflect his research into the life and times of both artists. Whilst Van Gogh had been a strong influence since school days, it was Gauguin who would resonate with Whiteley during his American period in regards to both art and lifestyle. A preliminary study for a large work featuring that artist is known.
Figure 41 Brett Whiteley, Study for Gauguin 1968. Pencil, ink, collage and adhesive tape on paper, 35.5 x 55.7 cm. Illustrated Pearce 2004, p.46.
The study is a drawing featuring two collaged photographs – a famous one of Gauguin seated and looking pensively to his left, along with that of a young Tahitian woman. The subject of the finished painting is substantially the same as the study, apart from the replacement of the second photograph by a naked, fleshy female body whose head cannot be seen, similar to that seen in New York 1 1967-8. Whiteley’s finished work exhibited the dominant New York yellow. Its subject was, in part, Gauguin’s attempted suicide by arsenic following news of the death of his daughter, with a small bottle representing the poison attached to a top right hand corner extension of the canvas.
Figure 42 Brett Whiteley, Paul Gauguin on the Eve of His Attempted Suicide, Tahiti. 1968. Oil, photograph and poison on board. 152.4 x 264.1 x 5.1 cm.
The work was given to the Chelsea Hotel at some time prior to Whiteley's departure in July 1969, as payment for outstanding rent. It was subsequently offered for sale by the Chelsea 24th Street Corporation, former owners of the Chelsea Hotel, in May 2014 and eventually returned to Australia where it sold for $1.7m later that year.
Another highlight of the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition was Whiteley’s work entitled Vincent 1968.
Figure 38 Brett Whiteley, Vincent 1968. Oil, ink, mirror and razor on board, signed and dated 'Brett 68' lower right; inscribed '. The departure of Gauguin from Arles, December 1888...' upper left, 221.5 x 167.5 cm
Referencing the traumatic departure of Gauguin from Arles in December 1888, it features a yellow table in a yellow room – perhaps the famous Yellow House – and red blood flowing from Van Gogh’s head where his ear had been severed. On the table is a candle, a pipe, a razor and a letter from Van Gogh’s brother Theo. This is perhaps the most lyrical of the exhibition’s grotesque works – Read’s so-called ‘chamber of horrors.’ Vincent 1968 was the first major manifestation of Whiteley’s obsession with the artist, and had perhaps been inspired by increasing interest in Van Gogh within America at the time. Also, the yellow colour of New York was strongly associated with Van Gogh during his latter period. This is a pivotal work in regards to Whiteley’s New York period, for it reflects both the yellow of his first impression of the city and the move towards the use of blood red to reflect the violence and trauma of everyday life there. It was subsequently purchased by the Abraham’s family during the artist’s time in America. The tragedy of Van Gogh’s so-called “madness” – represented by yellow, the colour of madness - is clearly present in the work, which sold at auction in 2007 for more than $1 million. Whiteley’s cheeky sense of humour is also seen in the painting, with his signature ‘Brett 68’ reflecting Van Gogh’s use of ‘Vincent’ as the only element of his signature.
Another work possibly from this period and reflecting the influence of Van Gogh is the undated Chelsea Flower Show.
Figure 39 Brett Whiteley, Chelsea Flower Show, oil on canvas.
Formerly part of the Beryl Whiteley collection, the title of the work is a play on words of the famous British flower show, though in fact the artist is referring in this instance to his time at the Chelsea Hotel. It may have been painted whilst in New York as a gift for Ning. It features a palette similar to Vincent 1968 in its use of yellow and red highlights, though it does not seek to replicate Van Gogh’s distinctive brush strokes.
Figure 45 A bleary-eyed Brett Whiteley in New York, 1968. Photograph: Tony Woods (Gaynor 2013).
Booze, drugs and the New York scene
The Marlborough-Gerson exhibition could be said to mark the end of the first phase of Brett Whiteley's New York / American experience with works such as Vincent 1968 pointing the way forward. The lead up to the show saw a flourish of activity and production of works featuring the colour yellow. Following this, things changed for Whiteley and he appeared somewhat directionless. As a result, the violence and horror of American society at that time began to take its toll on his physical and mental health. Drug-induced paranoia was increasingly displayed in his behaviour. Red became a dominant colour in his work, reflecting blood, flesh, the red balloons used to store drugs such as heroin, and the red/yellow colours of the street – red’s dramatic Stop!, the scream of an ambulance siren, or the continuing warning of yellow that danger was ahead and one needed to be prepared to pull out at any moment. Orange – red and yellow combined – was the colour of napalm, used to devastating effect in the Vietnam war. To deal with this stress and uncertainty, Whiteley states that he set out on a path of oblivion through the consumption of alcohol and recreational drugs. This of course only made matters worse, for it increased his paranoia and led to hospitalisation three times for alcohol poisoning. Wendy noted in a recent interview how one time, during one of his extended binges, she had to break down the door of his studio as she thought he was dead (Tunnicliffe 2013). A number of friends and family members stood by and observed his gradual slide towards a nervous breakdown following the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition. One of those observers was Tasmanian artist Tony "Seagull" Woods. In August 1968 Woods arrived in New York on a Harkness Fellowship and took up residence in the Chelsea Hotel (Gaynor 2013). One day he happened to walk by Wendy Whiteley's shop and noticed a large Bob Dylan work in the window. Knowing immediately who the artist behind this painting was, he introduced himself and subsequently met Brett, who took a liking towards him. From this point on Woods, Whiteley and Noel Sheridan – husband of Liz - became regular drinking mates at the nearby Star Bar, located beneath Brett’s studio. Woods also set up a studio nearby on 24th Street opposite Brett's and that of fellow Australian artist Robert Jacks. At the time Whiteley smoked Camel cigarettes and Woods Marlboroughs. Whiteley also turned the Tasmanian on to Zen Buddhism and its teachings in regards to the element of chance in the creative process i.e. to see what happens, and if one is unsuccessful as a result of chance, then destroy the work and move on to another.
On his first visit to Whiteley's studio Woods was made to wait as the artist prepared the space. As he noted: He was very big on presentation. You couldn't just walk in and find a mess. You had to get the full impact. It was his commercial art background. He knew about the value of presentation and packaging... He'd painted the walls, waxed the floor, everything was lit beautifully... I was just like a show. Superb (Hilton and Blundell 1996). One day Whiteley turned up at Woods' studio with Jason Holliday, an African American gay hustler who was star of a 1967 avant garde documentary entitled Portrait of Jason, filmed entirely in the Chelsea Hotel by fellow resident Shirley Clarke (Brody 2013).
Figure 40 Portrait of Jason, 1967. Director: Shirley Clarke. Interview recorded in the Chelsea Hotel.
According to one reviewer Jason was a 'monologist of mercurial, Falstaffian genius.' This is perhaps what attracted the similarly erudite Whiteley to him (Brody 2013). Woods also recounts an episode where he and Whiteley inadvertently que-jumped a snooker game and nearly suffered at the hands of the local Puerto Ricans, but were able to talk their way out of it with reference to the Australian world champion Walter Lindrum (Hilton and Blundell 1996).
In September 1968 Brett's sister Frannie visited New York for approximately one month. During that period she stayed with her mother Beryl, and also socialised with Brett and Wendy. For part of that time the couple were enjoying a summer excursion to the coast at East Hampton, near the tip of Long Island. A detailed account of the visit is included in Hopkirk’s 1996 biography of Brett. In it she outlines the hospitality of Beryl and her partner Gio, her brief but extensive engagement with the cultural life of the metropolis, and the parlous state of her brother's health. The latter was due to his workload, an increasing focus on The American Dream, a growing disenchantment with the dark side of United States culture and politics, overconsumption of alcohol and drugs, and a developing nervous collapse. Her account is lively, raw, honest and personal. She notes of her arrival at the Chelsea:
The lobby of the Chelsea Hotel was dingy and charmingly shabby. There were paintings everywhere with a Whiteley over the reception desk and various other works which included, I believe, examples of the Hudson River landscape school. There was black leather furniture and, in the middle, a round settee with a palm on top of it. Although, sadly, I never slept there, I knew that the Chelsea was like a microcosm of American culture, that everybody had stayed there at one time or another, usually when they were young but not yet famous. Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Edgar Lee Masters, Gore Vidal, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, various travelling rock bands, and a lot of painters. One of its attributes was that it was inexpensive. A single room could be had for twenty dollars. The Whiteleys occupied the penthouse suite that had access to a roof garden in which Ning, who had been living there also, took a great interest. (Wendy once told me that Beryl was at her most adorable when, dressed in shorts and hair uncombed, she was busy in the roof garden of the Chelsea.) The also kept a flock of ducks on the roof.
When I arrived in September 1968 Brett's nerves were raw, America was freaking him out. He was drinking a lot, smoking grass and taking acid. The violence he saw around him in the culture was distressingly keyed to his own violence. The opposites in his nature were unreconciled with the contradictions in American society. At the same time he related to the dualities, he held the mirror of a sick and divided culture up to his own image. Brett had had a particularly nasty experience one morning when he'd ducked out for a hamburger. A junkie was holding up the lobby of the Chelsea. People were lying face down on the floor while this guy, out of his brain on something he was blending with hate, fear and power, was pointing the gun at everyone in turn and shouting, 'Stay down motherfucker.' Brett, who was forced to lie down with the others, thought his number was up, that this man was crazy enough to kill everyone. He described it as one of the terrifying moments of his life. The fact that one can suddenly encounter extreme violence on an ordinary morning brought the reality of 'sick' America into a more personal context for Brett. One day out in the street I startled him by coming up behind him quickly. He jumped violently. 'Jesus Fran, I thought the revolution had started!' I'd never seen him like that before. Brett had a kind of personal frenzy going in America. Wendy retained her earthy calm, but he was in another dimension. He was absolutely turned onto the whole angst ridden Vietnam-Pop-Fear-of-the-Bomb hysteria of New York, of the country generally. The sensitive, gentle aspect of his nature, the lyrical, poetic side of him was in conflict with the culture in which he found himself. He had taken some years to become ready for New York, he had thought about it for a long time, prepared himself, but it still assaulted him. He decided to act in the only way he knew how - to paint a picture [i.e. The American Dream] (Hopkirk 1996).
Of the visit to the sunny East Hampton retreat, she notes that the Whiteleys’ friends from London - the recently married David Schaffer and his very young-looking bride Serena - were in attendance. The couple also stayed with the Whiteley's at the Chelsea as they worked hard to conceive a child. They later moved permanently to New York in 1977. Also visiting them at East Hampton were Piers Paul and Emily Read, Noel and Liz Sheridan, and the Crichtons.
Hopkirk’s account reveals the Whiteleys' engagement with the vibrant New York underground music scene through their regular attendance at clubs such as Max's Kansas City and the Electric Circus. Both venues were frequented by musicians, artists, the Gay community and drug users and dealers. It was exciting, crazy and dangerous. The writing was on the wall, however, that Brett was heading towards a breakdown, all the while seemingly oblivious to the impact his behaviour was having on those around him. On another occasion the American artist James Rosenquist became intimidated by the Australian's aggressive wordplay during a conversation at a dinner party. As a result he headed off to the sanctuary of his friend and colleague Roy Lichtenstein. Much of this aggression was brought on by the overuse of alcohol and drugs and the nature of life in New York. As Robert Jacks noted:
The Chelsea Hotel was the centre for all the artistic drug trade in Manhattan, especially catering to musicians... All these marvellous weirdos would stream out onto the streets. Look out your window and you would see bands like The Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead... The music scene was probably Brett's downfall - the over the top excitement. He wouldn't have been particularly liked in the art scene because New York artists were very cool. They smoked a bit of weed but it was a drinking town. I think that ended up being Wendy's downfall and also Brett's (Hilton and Blundell 1996)
During the second half of 1968 and through to 1969 Whiteley engaged in a blinding binge of alcohol and drugs, in order to both deal with the environment around him, and also to help him - as he thought - with his art. This belief in the use of artificial stimulants as a crutch for his latent talent would remain with Whiteley through to his death. On one of the panels of The American Dream there is a note: "1/5/69 LSD first time." If this is in the American dating style then it refers to 5 January 1969; if in the Australian style then it refers to 1 May 1969. Whatever the case, this cannot be read as the first time he had used LSD, or Acid as it was then known, for his sister Frannie noted that he was taking it during her visit to New York in September 1968. It is highly likely that Whiteley had experienced it during his many years in London prior to September 1967 when he arrived in America. LSD had first appeared in that city during the middle of 1965, when it was still legal. It rose to prominence the following year and was in widespread use at underground clubs by the time of the release of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP in May 1967. Whiteley also indirectly experienced heroin use whilst at the Chelsea, as explained in an interview with Janet Hawley in 1989, just prior to his own fatal overdose:
I know heroin is lethal .... I saw evidence of that when I lived in the Chelsea Hotel ... with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and others into extremes. I'd use booze and grass to expand my consciousness, but never touch heroin ... I never embraced it and said, let's get the bags in and go to the horizon ... There has always been this urge in me to be supernaturally sober (Hawley 1993).
Wendy Whiteley, in a 2013 interview, noted in regards to heroin that:
We had been in New York for a couple of years but you didn’t really see it in New York and it certainly hadn’t hit the middle class. It was a ghetto thing, a Black ghetto… We’d smoked opium once before in New York (Tunnicliffe 2013).
In an interview with Andrew Ollie of the ABC, Whiteley reminisced further about his time in New York – using terms such as ‘joyful’ - and of his engagement with famous personalities involved in heavy drug use (Ollie and Pullan 1992):
Olle: I think you spent some time in the States with people like Dylan and Janis Joplin in the wild old days, didn't you?
Whiteley: I don't know him [Dylan] that well. No one knows him that well: he's too put-upon and too mercurial a poet... Jimi Hendrix was there, too, shy Jimi with his little hat on. He preferred just to play riffs on his guitar rather than get up and do the full black rock 'n' roll thing. It's funny the way people's public persona can be the dead opposite of their private persona.... It was too blurry, and wild and extraordinary - I mean, I just quite frankly can't remember, living at such a joyful, experimental, existential level....
Whiteley's public statements concerning drugs and his desire to be ‘sober’ must be taken with a grain of salt. In such interviews, when the subject of drug use arose, Whiteley could be brutally honest or evasively dishonest. Those around him could also be oblivious to his drug intake, with much of it masked by alcohol and the artist’s normal frenetic nature. For example, following a marijuana bust in Fiji during October 1969, he stood up in court at his trial and stated:
I have not taken a drug for two years. I am personally not interested in them. They bore me (Hilton and Blundell 1996).
In fact, drugs were, and would remain, a significant part of his life through to the time of his death at Thirroul in June 1992. Whiteley's long term addiction to heroin began around 1973, following his return from Fiji and commencement of a successful career based in Sydney, with those many years of travelling behind him. However prior to this he had used opium and it seems likely that he experimented with a veritable cocktail of drugs whilst in America. Another observer of the New York drug scene during 1968 was Martin Sharp. He and OZ editor Richard Neville travelled to New York for a book launch at some point during that year, meeting up with luminaries including Andy Warhol. In an interview for the Hilton and Blundell biography, it was noted in regards to Whiteley and heroin:
Martin Sharp saw [Whiteley] as a willing victim to his own seduction. 'The whole climate in America at the time made having a "taste" of heroin fashionable, he said. 'The innocent, smiling face of marijuana suddenly became something sinister. Heroin just moved in saying "I'm alright too. You can trust me as well."
As observed by Frannie Hopkirk, the Whiteleys spent a lot of their leisure time whilst in New York attending venues such as Max's Kansas City and the psychedelic, experimental art space / disco the Electric Circus. The latter was located in a large ballroom which, during 1966, was converted by Andy Warhol into the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with the Velvet Underground as house band. The following year the venue was expanded to two floors and renamed the Electric Circus and people were invited to "play games, dress as you like, dance, sit, think, tune in and turn on." Contemporary avant-garde classical music was performed there, alongside bands such as the Grateful Dead, Deep Purple and the Doors. It also featured a spectacular light show, circus performances and toleration of drugs such as LSD. The building had been painted inside with day-glo colours and psychedelic designs; the walls were curved rather than angular; and there were numerous nooks and crannies in which couple or groups could sit, chat or make love.
Figure 41 Inside the Electric Circus, New York, circa 1968.
As Jimi Hendrix noted on 17 July 1968: We all went out to see the Electric Circus club in the Village, which just completely blew my mind. Shortly thereafter Martin Sharp produced an electrifying image of Hendrix playing the guitar, with a mixture of Jackson Pollock splatter paint over a photograph from a New York concert by Linda Eastman. The image was later reproduced as a poster. It first appeared in OZ magazine, London, in September 1968, labelled ‘The Electric Circus’ in a font which replicated that used by the New York venue in its advertising. Undoubtedly Sharp had experienced the Electric Circus first-hand during his New York visit – perhaps accompanied by Whiteley or even Hendrix, with whom he was acquainted, having previously dined with him in London.
Figure 48 Martin Sharp, The Electric Circus / Jimi Hendrix, OZ magazine, London, September 1968.
Whiteley and Sharp had a long term and often fiery friendship which saw them, for example, working together in the Sydney Yellow House experimental art and performance space during 1971 and sharing Palm Beach holidays. The relationship was also competitive at times in regards to their art. Whiteley was a drinker; Sharp a smoker. Whiteley’s reaction to the psychedelia of the late 1960s was subdued, whereas Sharp embraced it naturally, arising out of his love of collage and familiarity with the work of the Dada and Surrealist artists of the 1920s. His use of LSD during 1966-8 resulted in the production of classic, brightly coloured posters such as the 1967 Bob Dylan Blowing in the Mind and Donovan’s Sunshine Superman, along with his own Vincent 1968.
Figure 42 Martin Sharp, Blowing in the Mind 1967
Whiteley’s reaction to LSD was in a manner more surreal and darker than Sharp, with use of day-glo colours uncommon and psychedelia a secondary consideration. 1968 marked a year in which the work of both artists changed as a result of their use of drugs and alcohol and their engagement with the contemporary music scene. Both were huge fans of Dylan, electrified rock music, women and the opportunities offered by the so-called sexual revolution, and both young men frequented nightclubs in search of excitement and inspiration. It is also interesting to note their overlapping interest in both Dylan and Van Gogh, almost to the point of obsession.
New York’s Electric Circus was in many ways similar to the famous London underground and psychedelic nightclub UFO where bands such as Pink Floyd performed all night amidst wild light shows and stoned audiences. The London scene of late 1966 through to the middle of 1967, just prior to Whiteley's departure for New York, was an exciting and vibrant one, giving rise to the term Swinging London. There was an explosion within that city of colour in art, graphic design, fashion, music and building facades, whilst new psychedelic bands such as Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience reflected the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, hashish and marijuana. These rock groups and musicians were at the vanguard of a move amongst the youth of the day to embrace individual freedom and rebellion against the stifling conservatism of the established order and its acceptance of police corruption and antiquated censorship laws. The libertarian in Brett Whiteley embraced this new world of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, seeking to reflect its elements through his art. He became a ‘pop star’ of the art world, ultimately rejecting the ‘cool’ of the New York scene for his own Australian brand of libertarianism. Venues such as New York's Electric Circus helped him connect with the prevailing zeitgeist and experience first-hand all it had to offer. Hopkirk described scenes she encountered with the Whiteleys at both Max’s Kansas City and the Electric Circus during September 1968:
Brett and Wheet discussed the New York ‘scenes’ they knew I’d dig. Max’s and Electric Circus were top of the agenda. Max’s Kansas City was the great hangout in the Sixties. It was an artists’ restaurant located at Park Avenue South and Seventeenth Street; the guy who owned it had picked the address with an eye for a clientele of painters and writers from downtown who could frequent the place without fear of being mugged. During the Pop era it was the most famous joint in town and a terrific scene to walk in on, with its non-stop hard, loud, driving rock ‘n’ roll and its high, reckless energy. Max’s was pure theatre and we, like everyone else, dressed for it. People in coats and ties would be kept waiting on the sidewalk while artists and scungy people were given tables immediately. Max’s was the first public place where homosexuality was openly expressed in New York City. With the advent of Warhol, the gay scene had become very out-front, direct and theatrical. There was also a seedy side with people openly doing drugs, shooting up coke, speedballs, dropping all manner of pills and, of course, acid. Someone remarked on the drug contest, ‘How many could you drop at Max’s and still walk out?’ … I guess that Brett and Wendy were trying various substances, how could they not in that overt drug culture?...I loved the image of Brett and Wendy dancing in their peculiar tuned-in and turned-on to each other manner. Wendy wearing her low slung hipster pants, her flat belly swaying, her beautiful face alive with pleasure – young, erotic, full on. They were good theatre and they knew it. Max’s represented what remained of the Sixties chic counterculture. It was an exciting scene that lived up to all my expectations; dancing all night in that place was pretty damned incredible. If you had to describe the scene you might use works like desperation or hysteria; it was also sensitive, intense or just plain hilarious. It was a fabulous, highly-charged atmosphere of prancing frenzy and somehow I felt right at home. It was quintessential New York 1968. It was fucking wonderful!
Figure 43 At Max's Kansas City 1968, New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
The other ‘’scene’ was Electric Circus, a great cavernous ballroom with lofty ceiling painted black. Images of riots Vietnam, politicians, Hiroshima, movie stars – the current American iconography – were projected on giant screens around the place. Strobe and other complicated lights flashed and changed colour, and smoke blew to continuous mind-smashing sound, giving the impact of a live rock concert in which you were taking part. Like Max’s the atmosphere was dense, noisy, charged, electric. A circus. Years later some of us were discussing where we’d had our most outrageous fucks. Brett and Weet said for them it was while dancing at Electric Circus (Hopkirk 1996).
Figure 51 Brett Whiteley, Still life with milk bottle and avocado 1968, charcoal on paper, 38.1 x 55.8 cm. Illustrated Sutherland 2010. Collection: Brett Whiteley Estate.
In the winter of 1968 Wendy Whiteley and Liz Sheridan opened a second shop inside the Electric Circus. This followed on a store which had been in existence there since the venue first commenced operating the previous July. Also around this time - November '68 - Whiteley had a conversation with Piers Paul Read in which he urged the British writer to get a black mistress, then attacked him for being 'wet and empty', before apologising and explaining that his aggression was the result of concern over his relationship with his wife Wendy (Wilson 2014). The strain and drug-induced paranoia was beginning to show. Frannie records a frightening episode where, following a night on the town, a heavily intoxicated Whiteley took his friends on a wild ride home in his car:
One night we went with the Sheridans to a play that had been well reviewed. Starring James Earl Jones and called The Great White Hope, it was based on a true story of a prize fighter. It was a particularly nihilistic, depressing but powerful piece that examined the predatory violence of the boxing ring. The work was loaded with social metaphor and had a dark realism which affected us all, especially Brett. As powerful theatre it was a triumph. Halfway through, Brett disappeared. Noel said he'd gone out to the bar. He reappeared briefly, but the play was getting him down so he went out again. By the time it had finished and we went to look for him, he was loaded and the violence of the play had well and truly rubbed off on him. He was drunk and belligerent. Driving back to the Village, Brett started swerving towards oncoming traffic; braking violently so that we were all thrown forward; fighting with Wendy; talking compulsively and obsessively about American culture and society, the play, Vietnam and God knows what else, while we, his terrified hostages, thought we might not make it back to our loved ones. He was drunk and losing it, driving too fast while flogging us and the air with his negative outpourings. Everyone was begging him to slow down. Liz started screaming. Noel, ashen-faced, was talking quietly in his ear, reasoning with him. Watching Noel's expression reinforced how serious the situation was. We just prayed that Brett would come to his senses. It was, I realise now, a breakdown.
Figure 52 Brett Whiteley, No! 1968
We eventually arrived safely at our destinations. Brett and I were staying in Noel's loft, Wendy and the Sheridans were staying elsewhere. The evening had been a frightening disaster, but worse was to come. Quite early next morning we were still sleeping, me in a bed and Brett on a couch, when I suddenly realised Noel was there. I heard muffled voices which briefly became louder, then Noel abruptly left. Suddenly Brett was standing next to my bed with blood all over his face and a look of total horror and misery in his eyes. I sat bolt upright. 'Jesus Christ Brett, what happened?' 'Noel punched me in the face,' he said incredulously. He was terribly upset and could scarcely speak but I managed to get out of him what had happened and why. He had been sound asleep when Noel had walked quietly over to the couch and hit him hard in the face before he was properly awake. Noel, still dressed in the white cotton clothes of the previous night, said to him in a low, deadly voice, 'You're a fucking irresponsible bastard, you might have killed us all last night.' When we joined Wendy and told her what had happened, she and Brett went into the most absurd Freudian guesswork as to the motive behind Noel's dawn attack. Noel had gone home and, not being able to sleep due to the dramas of the night, had sat up seething and brooding over his friend's behaviour. For him it exemplified the sick, violent society they were passionately decrying. His action came out of simple rage and indignation that Brett, posing as an intelligent, civilised man, was no better than a common hoodlum. Brett and Wendy went over and over it until it became boring; Brett justifying his own behaviour, perceiving himself as the victim, suggesting that jealousy was behind it. They went on and on, neither accepting responsibility for what had happened, although Wendy had in no way influenced the events. The Brett-Noel relationship cooled off after this. The violence and the madness in The Great White Hope had opened up a wound caused by the city itself, by America. It was a night that didn't let anybody off. After I left America we heard that Brett had disappeared for a few days on some kind of bender. He ended up in hospital. It was discovered years later when he was having a check-up that earlier in his life he had had a small heart attack. He concluded that it might have happened during those lost days in New York….. New York produced a crisis of spirit, an attack on the mental and physical harmony of the man who loved nature, whose truth was beauty. Brett was a romantic in catharsis. American culture with its social chaos, politics gone mad, the war, the bomb, riots, had in a sense melted down his core. The essence of fragmentation, explosion, uncertainty, madness which fuelled The American Dream took Brett to the extreme edge of what remained of the boy from Longueville. New York had worked a dangerous alchemy of spirit; the later Fiji idyll and its extraordinary escapism, and the work which flowed from that Gauginesque search for ecstasy and silence, was to prove that he had survived, wonderfully survived, the hell inside his head (Hopkirk 1996).
Whiteley was to spend almost another year in America in this heightened state of excitement and aggression before hopping on a plane out of New York. It was a year during which he worked on The American Dream and continued to engage with the people and events around him.
During November - December 1968 the Marlborough-Gerson gallery hosted an exhibition of works by Whiteley's friend and noted British artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992). Both were part of the Marlborough stable and it was Bacon who had introduced Whiteley to multi-panelled work and the idea that panels could be changed about like screens. He also began following Bacon’s framing technique of gold frames and paintings under glass. According to Pearce, the two artists spent much of the evening of the exhibition opening together, drinking whiskey and talking in a back room. Whiteley never owned a Bacon, however Bacon at one stage had possession of Brett’s Rembrandt 1967 painting. He studied it for three weeks, then apparently told him that he had failed, though another account stated that he loved the work (Collerton 2012, Pearce and George 2015). Eventually it was returned to the artist and was to remain in his private collection. Despite this, the two remained friends until the time of their respective deaths in 1992.
Figure 44 Brett Whiteley taking a portrait of Francis Bacon in the latter's London studio.
According to Wendy Whiteley, Bacon did not like American painting, or America, and during the New York exhibition 'there was a phone call and a very odd exit' from the city (Hawley 2013) . Following Bacon’s departure for England, it seems that Whiteley returned to his work on The American Dream over the Christmas period of 1968-9 and on into the new year. He would perhaps have enjoyed the festive season with the support of a number of Australian friends in the city and at the Chelsea, it being a brief respite from the trial of The American Dream.
On 12 March 1969, the Australian Women's Weekly magazine noted the following in its social column: In a letter from Rome this week, Jeffrey Smart tells Mervyn Horton that he has just returned from New York, where he'd been invited to discuss a one-man show. At The Chelsea, where he stayed, were Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley and Tony Woods, all Australian artists. Other Australians known to have been at the Chelsea around the same time as the Whiteleys included Albert Tucker (1967 and 1969) and fellow Harkness Scholarship awardee Richard Crichton. In addition, Robert Jacks had his studio near Whiteley's, and his friend, art critic Robert Hughes, was about to become art critic for Time magazine, based in the city. Also in town were Australians Ian Burn, Sidney Ball, Michael Johnson, Robert Hunter, Patrick McCaughey and Clement Meadmore. Johnson was one of Whiteley’s earliest artist friends, the pair having attending art school in Sydney together and engaged in expeditions around Sydney Harbour in search of landscapes to sketch during the late 1950s.
Figure 45 Albert Tucker on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1967. Photograph: Richard Crichton.
Figure 55 Richard Crichton at the Chelsea Hotel 1967. Photograph: Albert Tucker.
Tucker and his wife Barbara resided at the Chelsea for almost a year during 1967, painting for exhibitions at New York's Poindexter Gallery and the Instituo Nacional de Belles Arts and Galeria Antonio Souza in Mexico City. They also returned briefly during 1969, spending time at the Chelsea with Sidney Nolan and the Crichtons in their 2 bedroom tenth-floor apartment. Crichton noted of his time at the Chelsea that, in regards to his two friends, 'Tucker and Whiteley, both with redoubtable verbal skills, circled one another; Whiteley often baiting Tucker, much to his annoyance. At a dinner at the home of Harold Mertz, the collector of Australian art, Whiteley drew Tucker into such a lengthy argument that it defeated their host, who retired to bed' (Burke 2013).
Another Australian acquaintance of the Whiteleys during their New York stay was writer, historian and Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Lillian Roxon (1932-73). Famous for her pioneering Rock Encyclopaedia (1969), she was part of the New York social scene and a regular at Max’s Kansas City.
Figure 46 Lillian Roxon
In a 1969 letter to her, possible written in America, Whiteley wrote:
Dear Lillian,
You really don’t have to be so sad about the colour white. It’s the colour of opportunity! Your letter was no surprise. I am predictably aware that The Sydney Morning Herald can’t, won’t, shouldn’t print my pictorial essay on love, for the usual unnameable fear, one being that it may offend the delicate middle-class mind – responsible more than any other factor for the atrocities in Vietnam by its very indifference, responsible for such human unhappiness by its embalmed frightened sexual morality, responsible for the deadening of almost all attempts at original inquiry into Life Force … and your newspaper, beings its mouthpiece, is running true to form. I urge the photograph be reproduced because it describes lovemaking as something infinitely NEW and gentle and precious, not as some blistering replay or assertion to power so characteristic of the Australian man-woman relationship. As a photograph, it was meant to balance the Crucifixion and Martin Luther King, let alone Kennedy or any number of blind filthy disillusioned deaths inflicted on men recently. But this isn’t our problem, it’s describing it that is …
Yours from the suburbs (of fury)
love X Brett
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The letter makes reference to two important works included in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition, and reveals Whiteley’s intense feelings in regards to the conservative Australian society he was wary of returning to. His ‘pictorial essay on love’ was perhaps referring to the two explicit drawings and paintings of a couple making love which featured in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition but which, due to the antiquated and strict censorship laws then operating in Australia could not be reproduced in a daily newspaper such as the Sydney Morning Herald. Roxon would have been an important contact for Whiteley during his New York residency.
Figure 47 Inside the Electric Circus
Red
Life at the Chelsea Hotel proved to be exciting for the Whiteleys, even if the glory days of the building were supposedly behind it. Throughout the twentieth century the Chelsea was well known as an accommodating, alternate lifestyle and drug-friendly zone for artists, writers, musicians and drifters. According to one account, its thick walls, wide hallways and large rooms facilitated privacy and perversion, individuality and eccentricity. It was made use of by writers during the 50s and 60s, abstract painters in the 70s and musicians in the 80s. The people Whiteley met there included pop stars such as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix - both of whom were said to have baby-sat their daughter Arkie at various stages.
Figure 57 Stanley Bard, manager of the Chelsea Hotel, in the foyer with Brett Whiteley’s In Search of Brendan on the wall in the background, above the reception desk.
The manager at the time - Stanley Bard - was an art collector and had no qualms about accepting artworks as payment for accommodation, or allowing artists to pepper the walls of the building with their works. As a result he acquired a large collection of paintings and sculptures, many of which could be seen in the foyer or on building's grand stairwell. The Chelsea was a veritable art gallery. Bard died in February 2017 and his large personal collection, when dispersed by Freemans the following May, included works by Sidney Nolan. Whiteley was apparently a favourite of Bard, with the latter happy to place his works on prominent positions about the foyer and lobby area.
According to Bard, who was interviewed following the death of Whiteley in 1992, Whiteley stayed at the Chelsea ‘on and off over the past 20 years.’ He also, he felt, did ‘some of his best work here. He was serious, extremely intelligent, productive, articulate. He taught me a lot about art. He got very friendly with certain people that like to drink and who were creative and in to excesses – but interesting people’ (Lee 1992).
In an interview for the 2004 television program Australian Story profile of Wendy Whiteley, Bard noted as he stood before a Whiteley hanging in the Chelsea Hotel:
This is a Brett Whiteley, who lived here as a young man, and I went to see all his shows at Marlborough. Lived here for many years, married to Wendy, and Arkie was a little child when she came here. She was beautiful as a child (Jones 2004).
The artist had provided at least three paintings as payment for his stay in the building, or on loan, with one work seen by Frannie Hopkirk in September 1968 hanging prominently in the foyer above reception. These included the following:
1. The New York Scene 1968 – at one stage this was hung above the reception desk in the hotel's foyer. It is the work known as New York 1 in the Brett Whiteley Estate collection and can be seen in situ in a number of documentary films on the history of the Chelsea Hotel, including one produced by the BBC in 1981, another from 1994 in a Leonard Cohen film clip for his song Chelsea Hotel, and a 2001 documentary feature. The work was only ever on loan to the Chelsea Hotel and returned to the Brett Whiteley Estate around 2012.
2. In Search of Brendan 1968 - this hung above the reception desk at one stage before it fell down and nearly hit the receptionist, at which point it was removed. The work was sold by the Chelsea Hotel estate in 2011. It appears in situ in a number of photographs from the 2000s.
3. Paul Gauguin on the Eve of His Attempted Suicide, Tahiti 1968 - this was sold by the Chelsea Hotel estate in 2014. It is unclear whether it was ever publically exhibited in the hotel.
4. Unknown – a report in 2017 indicated that a Whiteley painting was hanging in the foyer of the Chelsea Hotel. No further information in regards to the work or its provenance is known.
Figure 48 Sydney Daily Telegraph Mirror 1992
The triangular work In Search of Brendan 1968 which was part of the Chelsea Hotel collection is distinguished by its red colour, which suggests it was one of the post Marlborough-Gerson exhibition works, produced around the time that Whiteley commenced The American Dream, which features a similar blood red central section. The title refers to the Irish poet Brendan Behan (1923-64).
Figure 59 Brett Whiteley, In Search of Brendan 1968. Oil, paper collage, wood, metal and plastic flowers on canvas mounted on panel. 67 by 81 by 10 1/2 in. 170.2 by 205.7 by 26.7 cm. Former Chelsea Hotel collection.
Bard talks about introducing these two extreme characters to one another in the Chelsea and noting how they would sing together. This would likely have been back in 1962 during Whiteley’s initial, brief visit, though it is possible that he undertook another visit prior to the poet’s death in March 1964 (Hawley 2007). A description of the work was produced for its auction sale during 2011. It reads as follows:
The main compositional component of A Tribute to Brendan is very close to the fiery red, central element in The American Dream and may, therefore, have been a preliminary study for this portion of the painting. At the center of A Tribute to Brendan is a collaged newspaper photograph of Brendan Behan, the celebrated, hard-drinking Irish poet, playwright and novelist who died in 1964, but who had also stayed for a time at the Chelsea Hotel. It is possible that Whiteley and Behan had met there during Whiteley's earlier visit to New York in 1962. Whiteley would certainly have admired Behan's radicalism and raw, creative genius. Alongside Behan in the collage is the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. At the base of the composition, a cluster of plastic daisies emerges from a tree pit, possibly an offering to the dead author. Also emerging from the base of the painting are several sperm-like white forms representing perhaps the indomitable vitality of the poet; one of these forms is labelled 'sure'. Other elements include a collaged photograph of Ed White performing the first US spacewalk (Gemini 4, June 1965) and another of a highwire acrobat, perhaps a visual pun on the astronaut's dramatic mission. The equivalent segment of The American Dream also contains collaged human images as well as a photograph of a space craft launch (Sothebys, New York, 10 November 2011).
Red also featured in works such as the sculpture Almost Once which saw its first manifestation in London during 1967 as a small, side box element of the large painting Her 1967 (Sutherland 2010). The use of juxtaposed burnt and unburnt matchsticks resonated with the artist and he would continue to develop the theme in both paint and sculpture.
Figure 60 Brett Whiteley, Her 1967 (detail)
A likely precursor to the sculptured version was his small sketch The Match 1968, located in one of the New York sketchbooks.
Figure 49 Brett Whiteley, The Match 1968. Illustrated McGrath 1979.
In addition, within one of his notebooks he had this to say about matches and their significance:
Matches. Some work perfectly, others fizz and break. National metaphysic? Within an hour of arriving in a new country, check the television and the matches. Landscape out of Nairobi is random Tuscany, natural chaos and rhythm, terrible possibilities of individualism freaking. One feels that tribalism is an older democracy than we call it. Africa is lazy hot Harlem. Rural Gargantuan. In Africa you can see the Indian in the African, in America you can only see the African in the … African Americans? Negroes? Blacks? (McGrath 1979).
Figure 62 Brett Whiteley, Almost Once 1968. Sculpture. Finished in 1991, Art Gallery of New South Wales collection.
A large version of the original 1968 work was completed following Whiteley’s return to Australia and in 1991 installed as a feature in Sydney's Domain park, adjacent to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A smaller version also famously marks the entrance to Whiteley’s Raper Street, Sydney studio. The Match 1968, and the associated sculptures, reflects Whiteley's Pop Art sensibilities. These were often subsumed beneath his surrealistic abstractions, as seen in both figurative works and landscapes. Despite residing in an important centre of the modern Pop Art movement, Whiteley tended to follow his own path whilst in New York, not wishing to tread on turf soundly held by artists such as Warhol, Rauschenberg and Rothko. In addition, Almost Once reflects the artist as human - both burnt out but also fresh and ready to fire anew. This dichotomy was to become more visible during the first half of 1969 as Whiteley intensified his commitment to, and interaction with, a single work - one that would be large, panoramic, dramatic and provide a beacon to America; a way forward, from the violence and turmoil Whiteley saw in both the Asian war and the life of the city. This single-minded quest would, as we have seen, take its toll on both the artist and those around him.
Sketches
A number of works in Whiteley’s two extant New York sketchbooks address the Vietnam war and violence issues such as race riots. One of these shows, for example, a bloodied Black American youth, below which is a cartoonish drawing of a yellow car speeding away, with the words ‘Now! Right Now Baby!’
Figure 63 Now! Right Now Baby!, New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
The juxtaposition of a graphically horrific photograph with a cartoonish drawing reflects the situation Whiteley found himself in. The content of the sketchbooks is more immediate than the finished paintings, revealing the everyday thoughts and actions of the artist. As such they are usually untitled, of unknown context, whilst of interest in expanding upon our knowledge of the New York experience. For example the Benalla Art Gallery sketchbook contains ten pages taken from what appears to be a spring bound A3 sized folder. The items are as follows, with titles allocated by this author based on the artist’s inscription or the content of the work:
1. Now! Right Now Baby! - Collage photograph and ink drawing with colour. Title from inscription.
2. Mary! - Portrait of a young Black woman. Watercolour and ink. Title from inscription.
3. At Max’s Kansas City - Head of a man. Ink drawing. Title from inscription.
4. No Left Turn - Oil and plastic. Possibly one of the panels from the work Just Recently... 1968.
5. Two Sculptures - Collage of design for two phallic sculptures.
6. One Sculpture - Collage of a design for a phallic sculpture.
7. Barbed Wire Sculpture - Collage of a design for a large sculpture.
8. President Johnson in Television - Collage and ink drawing.
9. Art is soul money for going through the same thing twice - Text in ink on paper.
10. America in flames - Photograph and circuit board on paper. Image comprises a map of the United States with flames superimposed, whilst the lower half is a circuit board. A label on the top half says ‘US” which the lower half is labelled with the Japanese script for Time / Now, as previously used by the artist.
Being largely unrelated to the works included in the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition, these sketches expand upon what we know of Whiteley’s time in America. In some instances they contain elements or motifs which are seen in the finished paintings. For example, the President Johnson in Television collage contains an ink drawing of a face of a female with a black, 12 pointed star covering part of the face, similar to the chrome mirror seen in New York 1 1968. All those sketches in the Benalla Art Gallery collection are undated. Six items from the sketchbook in the Brett Whiteley Estate collection are known as follows:
1. Preliminary sketch for New York 1 – Collage comprising a photograph plus ink sketch of New York skyscrapers.
2. Sketch of New York 2 – Pencil sketch of later New York 2 painting, with top and bottom extensions, as displayed.
3. George Wallace – Collage comprising photographs and ink inscription.
4. Two Birds – Ink drawing.
5. Johannesburg 1969 – Collage comprising photographs and ink drawing plus inscription.
6. The Match 1968. Ink and watercolour sketch.
It is likely that other sketches exist in Whiteley’s extant notebooks, letters and manuscripts of the period. These will form an important part of the story of his American residency and add to the overall picture which has to date been largely formed by his multi-panelled The American Dream.
The American Dream
In America in 1969 he created the seventy-two foot "American Dream" which burnt out - both the dream and the war. (Brett Whiteley, Biography, unpublished manuscript by the artist, 1979. Quoted in Hawley 1993)
Figure 64 Brett Whiteley, The American Dream 1968-9. Oil etc. on 18 wood panels, 244 x 2196 cm. Collection: Art Gallery of Western Australia. Illustrated Pearce plate 80.
When one comes across a reference to Whiteley’s American period almost invariably it is focussed around his work The American Dream which is, after all, the primary artefact of that experience. But it is not the only one, and there was much more happening beside during the latter part of his Harkness Fellowship. Early in 1969 Wendy wrote a letter to Brett’s mother, outlining some of the difficulties facing their relationship at the time:
Trying to choose how to be more at peace with myself and Brett’s duality, and his plunges into the deeps of despair and nihilism, my temper feels smoothed and I feel more able to handle the desperate moments with calm and a bit more detachment. None of his theory has yet been tested but at least it’s there in feeling. We’ve been pretty much emotionally separate at times, but somehow it always winds up in some sort of rebirth, rejoin…. (Wilson 2014)
At one stage Brett brought a young female drug addict back to the Chelsea and, when Wendy found them together in the shower, the woman was kicked out. Life with Brett was difficult, and it was not going to get any easier as 1969 rolled on. As he recorded in his notebook:
Absolutely not easier after 10 years of drawing & painting almost every day. The commencement of another piece or another try at an existing piece is the same unknown blank struggle. Technique hasn’t oscillated any taken for granted smooth trick; no ‘mastery’ like a language or habit, just always the old unknown, a little bigger, a little broader in implication, more hints, but no acquired sense of knowing what one’s doing to begin [with], that the cherished glimmer of beauty can ever come about in the same spirit that it’s seen (Wilson 2014).
Figure 68 Brett Whiteley, Weet - Portrait of Wendy Whiteley 1968. Illustrated McGrath 1979.
He became increasingly depressed by the turn of events as 1969 approached and gradually unfolded, reflecting this in his notebook: the death of Marcel Duchamp in October 1968 and his own uncle early the following year; and the ongoing war in Vietnam; the graphical symmetry of the character 69 and a growing rejection of American culture and art. He wrote to Jasper Johns and called him ‘weak’, when in fact Johns – a fellow resident of the Chelsea at the time – had been a major influence as Whiteley sought to include contemporary Pop elements within his work, away from the dominant abstract expressionism which was so much a part of his early work. Johns was a quiet spoken artist who rejected art as an expression of one’s individual emotion. His works were in and of themselves – meaningless apart from any meaning given them by the viewer. Whiteley was undoubtedly challenged by this view and the thought of the artist isolated from his environment. In a letter to Beryl written from the Chelsea, Brett’s torment is clearly revealed:
…the usual aches of ambition, boredom, rejuvenation of matrimonial meanings, plus ribbons of violence squeeling from the TV about a country divided … Life is revolution! Spelling still remains a problem; but that came for me out of a fright of words, to know words to master & use them as instruments of survival. No, I never wanted to master them or even use them. [I] had no use for them. For they would & could …. wanted to confuse others by its monumental Might & duality. So I stumbled over words. If it’s love then I would have assimilated them & hungered on for me – all of them, but I didn’t want to ‘know’ them so I refused to obey them, my love refused to obey them – my sight, my eye would stare at a word & feel every chromeazone (see what I mean!) shimmer, every pocket of implication I would glee about insatiably & in the end refuse the word & most especially its spelling (Wilson 2014).
To deal with the increasing sense of doom and seek some sort of escape, on a few occasions the Whiteleys swapped places with the Crichtons, who had left the Chelsea for a rented house at Bridgehampton. At one point whilst they were away a fire broke out in their hotel room and some of Brett’s artworks were damaged. Talk of moving to Fiji was also in the wind.
During the second half of 1968 Whiteley began work on a large, multi-panelled painting which would reflect his feelings about America and its then current state of turmoil; one that was ‘so anti-war, so repugnant, it would shake people out of war’ (Hilton and Blundell 1996). Perhaps the work was inspired by the Francis Bacon exhibition and Whiteley’s conversations with the British artist around that time. Bacon’s art had always tended towards the horrific and confrontational. His Crucifixion 1944 triptych was a landmark in modern British art, and his later 1962 version reflects the heavy use of red and gory imagery which would be seen in Whiteley’s 18 panel work of 1968-9. In many ways Whiteley was Bacon's antipodean acolyte. Wendy Whiteley spoke of his work on The American Dream in her interview for Australian Story during September 2004, noting:
Brett started work on the 'American Dream' some time in 1968 and he worked on it for about a year. And it was on 18 panels, so it was a major picture in a sense that he built himself and the work up into a kind of major exploration of morality, politics, and he wanted it to have meaning. The American dream can also be an American nightmare, and he was stressing himself out very, very badly, so it became a bit of a habit to drive himself into a kind of like unbelievable state with alcohol and try and solve problems with the painting.
The work appears to have been completed to a stage where Whiteley was prepared to show it and offer it for exhibition by April-May of 1969. In this form it begins with the simple image of a bird; at its core the intensity, emptiness and turmoil of the New York days takes control; and on its farthest extremity the artist looks towards an escape to a beachside paradise. It moves, in colour, from the yellow and ochre of his early years and first months in America, through the blood red of his later New York experience and on to the ultramarine and green of his future Fiji and Australia-based work. The middle section is violent, bloody, brutal, documentary and ultimately repugnant, and it is this which caused most controversy. The horror and ugliness of the centre is bookended by the beauty and tranquillity of nature – of birds and beach – which would be the only salvation for both artist and humankind. With this work the devil is most definitely in the detail, and Whiteley is channelling dark forces.
Hopkirk saw Whiteley during 1968 and noted the deterioration of his physical and mental state, along with the environment that drove him towards focussing on a single, multi-panelled and large work:
His humanism, his idealism for a better, fairer world motivated him to paint The American Dream. This enormous work of eighteen panels was his first really major painting; he naively thought it would 'make a difference'. It didn't, any more than Guernica did. I think when Brett realised that art can't change things, can't turn humans or politics or history around, he resumed, or refound his innocence. The American Dream, which took him a year to complete, was technically, intellectually and spiritually demanding. It drained his life force and his emotions, it wrecked him and in some ways he never truly recovered from its excesses. It was painted as a kind of exorcism of what he perceived to be the political and social fuck-up of American life. In this work Brett experimented with a range of media and Pop gimmickry he hadn't used before, although he had fooled around with it a little in the New Zealand 'masterpiece'. Electricity, photography, paint, steel, perspex, plastic, fibreglass, weaponry, pieces of musical instruments, fur, cloth, barbed wire were used; this enormous creative and anguished outpouring formed an entire environment. One could enter and experience a whole theatre of graphic expression, ranging from the apocalyptic to the romantic and lyrical. Brett wanted it to be cathartic, he wanted it to matter. He thought he could affect the horrors around him. The heart attack at the centre of this picture reflected his own state of being, his anger and pain, the unravelling of his Longueville innocence. Looking at it in 1970, where I first saw it as part of an Australian Galleries show in Melbourne, I felt that no one could have painted The American Dream and later Alchemy and survived. That huge painting with its tortured doses of surrealism had bled him (Hopkirk 1996).
Supporting this consummate assessment by his sister, a number of references by the artist to The American Dream and the general context around its creation are found in McGrath (1979). They reveal Whiteley's disenchantment with the United States, his horror at the violence being perpetrated around him, and also his own inability to deal with the experience as he would like, or as he planned. The quotes below from artworks, notebooks and interviews reveal Whiteley’s confused and questioning state of mind, both at the time of the painting’s execution and subsequent to that, where he looked back on his achievements. It begins with his statement concerning the work, written around the time of its first exhibition at the Bonython Art Gallery, Sydney, in June-July 1970:
* Statement concerning the work: Arrived in New York November 1967 for a two-year Harkness Fellowship. The first year was spent producing an exhibition of easel paintings for the Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. By the second year I was determined myself to produce a monumental work of art that would summarize the sensation of the impending the necessity for America to own up, analyse and straighten out the immense and immediately seeable MADNESS that seemed to run through most facets of American life - of little use for continuing. There appeared in much behaviour, a stark sort of unnecessary cerebral violence, to which I was completely unaccustomed and of which I was in considerable fear.
As the work began I still considered myself an outsider, a foreigner, a white Asian staying in America for a short time, capable of being able to objectify the separation I felt from needing to behave as most Americans did. But as the work progressed I realised that anyone who steps foot off a plane in New York instantly becomes an American and cannot remain indifferent or aloof by presuming he belongs elsewhere.
The existential experience was so hungry that one quickly became possessed with a struggle to reconcile the forces of good and evil just as possessively as most Americans were doing. They said it was no use talking about the abstraction of a whole nation, everyone had to do it on their own. So as the work progressed it developed into a struggle within myself to own up, analyse and straighten out . . .
But the further I went the more difficult it became. The more American I felt, the more painful the dual nature of everything became. All hope of peace seemed to break apart with the evening television news. There seemed no sign of reconciliation between old and young, black and white, hip and square, etc. And the eyes of the riot squad bespoke of everything one had ever imagined of human collapse. Day after day the ache and panic edged up a little - for the MADNESS was now itself upon me, and I, I who had benignly dared to point to America that she was sick and getting everyone else sick, had fallen quick victim without even so much as a misty vision for any solution, beyond dreaming of nature and a simpler life.
So I drank more and smoked more, hoping that if I felt Hell and could report it up, that would be of benefit, and turn something of the tide ... But alas, I just got unhappier and unhealthier until physical and mental fatigue forced me in July 1969 to abandon the work and fly to Fiji to live.
This painting is a record of a struggle and my inability to resolve it. It is an admission of failure. Of course, romantics are only ever concerned with Beauty.
* [The American Dream] is a multi-layered picture, using electricity and collage, sound and light effects. It is a complete conglomerate of every technique brought to a flat surface combining oil paint. It is the biggest picture I've ever done, and the most trying. I was deranging myself a lot on booze and acid. It was a period of fantastic turmoil and unsureness ... doubt for me, and seemingly for America as well. It was very unpleasant. Finally, I just couldn't stand it anymore and jumped an aeroplane for Fiji. I had painted something of Fiji in The American Dream - a scene of boats and water and tranquillity - that became my dream.
* [The American Dream] is a clarion call to a society in which [Whiteley] saw ‘ribbons of violence squeling from the TV [and] the dying capitalism of Bull America disembowelling itself.’
* I thought at the time, that there would be a catastrophe beyond anything I could imagine, except in the blackest nightmare. I believed deeply that unless there was a change of mind it would happen. The worst part seemed to be that no one wanted to know. I wanted to shock, I wanted people to wake up, to be, in short, transmuted.
* What is required is more than a passionate outcry of outraged humanity. What is required is more humanity. (Brett Whiteley New York notebook)
* Madness is caused only by the recognition of one's own unique possibilities. Sanity is called pursuing some of them - The reason why the Americans are feeling the strain first is that they charge not to fear immensity. (Brett Whiteley, from New York notebook written beside a photograph of a burning Buddhist monk).
It was working as a statement of my own existence - which had become violent, helped by drugs and drink and the temperature of New York (Featherstone 1989).
A local artist and journalist Elwyn Lynn, attended the first public exhibition of The American Dream at the Kim Bonython gallery in Sydney during June 1970. He referred to the work as the ‘savage, tortuous panorama of America’ and went on:
Whiteley’s view of America from coast to cast is about 25 yrds. Long: the West is fine, sunny and graced by a large yellow bird; then the storm breaks in a large photograph, the men of anguish – Dylan, Francis Bacon, Mailer and Van Gogh – announce the nightmarish maelstrom of sadism and violence that must be Chicago and New York, with an actual flashing red light and siren; the work drives through a pool of exposed nerve ends, some pale grey smog and the coastal bush to the bright sea, but its blue sky above presents fresh problems. It is a splendid, reckless 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’s interspersed with flashes of sheer loveliness as Pilgrim in the Slough of Despond sights the promised 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; 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. Then, art is about old themes.
Figure 65 Brett and Wendy Whiteley in America 1968-9.
The mythos of The American Dream has to date subsumed Whiteley’s other American works, as its presentation, restoration, and re-presentation continues to draw controversy, acclaim and bemusement (Bevis 2015). It seems that whilst The American Dream consumed Whiteley, it was not his only work during this later period. For example, at some point he executed a portrait of Wendy Whiteley. Whilst the Harkness Fellowship provided the family with a basic income over a two year period, supplemented by funds from Wendy's clothing store and the sale of works through Marlborough-Gerson, it was nevertheless a struggle living in an expensive city such as New York, and engaging in its fast-paced lifestyle.
The work was to take a toll on him physically and mentally, resulting in a nervous breakdown following on the refusal of the Marlborough-Gerson gallery and Leo Castelli to show it. The American Dream eventually returned to Australia where it was purchased by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1978. It figures large in any discussion of Whiteley's time in America, and to date has tended to overshadow his other work there. The American Dream is obviously significant in the context of his overall body of work, however it should not be seen to represent the totality of his American experience between 1967-9. It is of its time, whilst reflecting the past and looking towards the future. There was no sense of attachment to the earth in New York, no familiarity with the landscape, no ‘anthropomorphising natural forms to suggest their human physicality’ as on offer in Australia and Europe (Sutherland 2014). It was overwhelmingly an artificial environment, apart from the little roof top garden. New York was the defining modern metropolis, with wall-to-wall skyscrapers, overpowering technologies, and humanity in all its varying forms. For a professional observer such as Whiteley, who had spent the last decade with his eyes wide open to the world around him and to art in particular, New York was a veritable gold mine. The art museums, galleries and studios were significantly enhanced by the ‘scene’ – the people, events and connections. For bohemians like the Whiteley’s – they were not hippies – it was the University of Cool, the living archive of the Beat Generation; home of heroes such as Sinatra and Ginsberg, with Brett the jive talking amalgam of Doby Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs. Unfortunately the ‘cool’ of the late 50s and early 60s was replaced by the white light / white heat of which Lou Reed sang in September 1967 as Whiteley stepped off the boat from London. It could only end badly.
Escape from New York
As the finances got tighter, supposedly during 1969 Whiteley secured a commission from the Australian airline Qantas to produce a series of posters. Unfortunately the finished works featured planes crashing and were immediately rejected by the company. His Sydney dealer Kim Bonython noted: It was typical of Whiteley that at a time when Brett was struggling to survive, he should bite the hand that was feeding him (Hilton and Blundell 1996). The present whereabouts of the works, or if they even survive, is unknown.
In June 1969 writer Norman Mailer ran for the New York City Democratic Mayoral primary on a ticket seeking to turn the city into the 51st state of the United States (ref: New York City: the 51st State, Wikipedia). Whiteley was excited by this. The 51st state idea had first appeared during 1968 and the Mailer campaign generated slogans such as "I would sleep better if Norman Mailer was Mayor" and "The other guys are a joke." In this environment the artist was moved to produce a poster for the campaign.
Figure 66 Brett Whiteley, Norman Mailer campaign poster, 1969. Illustrated McGrath 1992.
The image was similar to some of his earlier New York pen and ink sketches. It featured a background drawing of a perspective looking down from above towards a skyscraper with a collaged photograph of Mailer and his running mate Jimmy Breslin featuring in the foreground. From the back of Mailer's head a flourish of black lines fanned upwards towards the buildings. After the Mailer poster was forwarded to the campaign office it was not made use of and subsequently disappeared. Mailer only got 5% of the vote and return to his career as a writer and commentator. Whiteley was upset by the rejection, though at this stage his mental state was fragile. The production of the poster was significant as it marked his direct, public involvement in politics – something he had heretofore stayed clear of, and would do so into the future. Though he had strongly held views on a wide variety of political and social topics, his saw his role as an artist not to lead the protest or publically take sides, but, through his art, to make people think and perhaps act. The Mailer rejection and the overdose of politics which was America at that time turned him off it for life.
On 17 June 1969 Whiteley sat glued to his small black and white television set in the Chelsea apartment, surrounded by Australian expatriate art critic Robert Hughes and his friend Seagull. They were watching the first episode of The Johnny Cash Show on CBS, featuring a performance by the reclusive Bob Dylan.
Figure 50 Bob Dylan live on the Johnny Cash Show, 17 June 1969.
Dylan had been recording in Nashville, and his collaboration with Cash was a highlight for both musicians and fans alike. Following the viewing, the three Australians discussed attending a Black Panther meeting at the Apollo – apparently Whiteley had joined the organisation and previously attended such meetings. However, according to Woods, on this occasion they decided ‘the Blacks likely to be there were all sort of tough and Hughes, Brett and I were all – well, a bit scared, so we didn’t go’ (Hilton and Blundell 1996).
Robert Hughes, who first met and interviewed the artist in London in 1964, could also be aggressively critical of Whiteley, especially in his later years when he felt that the artist had squandered his talent to the demon of heroin addiction. Of their time together in New Year during 1969 Hughes noted:
I thought he was going to pieces, which is something that people do; it happens to all of us. Brett had a taste for extreme situations, but the only good art has been produced in conditions of solitude and tranquillity (Williamson 1980).
Shortly thereafter, in July 1969, Whiteley decided to depart New York for Fiji. His decision was unexpected and supposedly a surprise to family and friends. Robert Hughes and Seagull saw him off in a cab from the Chelsea; Wendy and Arkie were nowhere to be seen. The impetus for this decision was the collapse of Whiteley’s American dream and his desire to escape from New York and seek calmer shores. His Harkness Fellowship money was also coming to an end. Whilst the escape to Fiji did serve its purpose of allowing the artist to recover from the almost two years in New York, he was not able to completely escape the consequences of that period. For example, whilst in Fiji Whiteley was visited by a representative of the Marlborough Gallery checking up on their client. And on more serious note, their flagrant use of an American flag got the Whiteleys into trouble with the local Fijian authorities. As Wendy Whiteley noted in a 2007 interview:
We were staying in a motel in Suva while [the local exhibition] was happening and I hung the American flag over the balcony. That was a big no-no and the American Consulate went mad and then about three days after, it was front page on the newspaper, the Suva Times: the American flag, how dare they, we are more like the British, the Americans are not like the British, we don’t let our flag touch the floor and how dare they use it as a bed cover! And hang it over the balcony, who do they think they are ….. (Pearce and George 2007)
In an earlier interview with Barry Pearce for the 1995 book on the artist, Wendy Whiteley commented at length on some aspects of the New York episode, the significance of The American Dream, and Brett’s departure:
Barry Pearce: Is it too harsh to say that New York was a shipwreck in terms of Brett's art, even if only in the sense of Baudelaire, that there had to be destruction in order to reconstruct?
Wendy Whiteley: New York in the late sixties was floundering. America was politically polarized, and there was a lot of intolerance and anger. But in the arts there was a great deal of experimentation. Both Baudelaire and Rimbaud were the poetic heroes, in the feeling that the old order had to be destroyed to make way for the new. Calamity had to happen. Brett pushed himself as they had done, to the absolute extreme, and that took its toll. The American Dream was Brett's response to New York and what was going on there. The centre panel looked like he vomited all over the canvas, which was painted in a kind of drunken state of rage and fear. In that sense he was fearful of analyzing too much, of going into therapy or counselling, unless there was someone to trust who would ride with him. So we counselled each other.
BP: Michael Johnson said that he admired Brett's greed, his 'want' to find out and to work at fabricating his own magic.
WW: He wanted to know what alchemy was about, that sense of transformation which was both a joy and a curse - a desire to know everything, fascinated with a mystery but not being prepared to accept that there are a lot of things you many never know. The process of transformation was certainly involved in Brett's case, but he was looking for it in too many directions at once. He couldn't concentrate on one thing at a time and became really overloaded in New York. Marlborough's refusal to exhibit The American Dream certainly didn't help, it just catapulted him into absolute and fearful paranoia. He pushed himself to a physical and emotional limit with The American Dream and when his uncle died - Clem's brother - it was both an enormous shock and a catalyst. His decision to go to Fiji saved him.
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As Wendy Whiteley points out, the painting eventually consumed her husband to such a degree that he had to flee New York to escape its pull. This was a tragedy, because it cast a shadow over his time in America and left his other important work there scattered to the winds. As he sat on the plane which took him away from the city, the artist penned a letter to his mother Beryl, noting:
Maybe Gio's right about NY causing a love when you're away from it... Maybe I've become more American than I can account for at the moment. Hope not. I think I hate it or at least find it intolerable... (Wilson 2014).
From New York he flew to Fiji where he stayed until a local arrest for drug possession saw him escorted off the island on to a plane back to Australia early in November. Undoubtedly one of the most important accounts of his time in America, and of The American Dream, is found in his first published Australian interview following the forced exit from Fiji. Adrian Read of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper wrote the following for the edition published on 3 November 1969:
He climbed into his picture
Some time ago Brett Whiteley was painting a huge 18-panel, 75 ft long picture. It was to be in a circle - like a bull ring. Every day he would open one of the panels and climb inside to be completely surrounded by his creations - and, as it came to be, himself. The picture is unfinished. He was in New York, with his wife Wendy and his little daughter Arkie, on a Harkness Fellowship. The painting was to involve a kind of heaven and hell, but heaven didn't get much of a look-in as the picture became an emotional statement about living in an extremely violent society - Whiteley's America.
'The panel wasn't working as a symbol', he said. 'It was working as a statement of my own existence - which had become violent, helped by drugs and drink and the temperature of New York... I was trying to derange myself sufficiently to be at one with the abyss I felt in America. I wanted to become that and then transform the sensation into a monumentally sized painting. But I couldn't connect totally to the sensation of being American. I can't be a black man. Perhaps I can get on to their cerebral time, but not their peculiar sting, the generational poison that's in their head.' So even when he tried being an active revolutionary, joining the Black Panthers and mixing with Negroes in bars, he couldn't solve the dilemma he felt in America.
'One morning I'd got to such a stage with the picture that I just walked on to a plane and ended up in Suva. I drove about 50 miles around the coast and away from the techno-world and found a small primeval village where for six months I led an incredibly relaxed and perfect life-style.'
He also painted - paintings that he says are explorations of gentleness, with no hint of menace. 'There was no longer any necessity to pore over the nature of pornography, of violence, of all the sources of the kind of devil thing' .... which he explains as involving Vietnam and other factors like the hideousness of our existence - billboards and even some kinds of food: 'The whole techno-American world.' A lot of Whiteley's choppy, undisciplined conversation is about America - he keeps coming back to it: 'schizophrening itself in circle,' a tragic and great nation at the same time, 'with some of the most creative people in the world and some of the most repugnant, incredibly fascist shit.' He slipped into straight Marxism for an instant with 'the problem is capitalism' and a little more, but he couldn't sustain the discussion on [a] conventional ideological level. America was paranoiac - 'It's so feelable just on the street - a sense of expendability ....' Cities simply didn't work as human inventions - and the hippies were trying to regain 'a primordial sense of nature - catching their own fish; lighting their own fires.'..... He suddenly seems to realise the flight to Fiji might look like escape from an intolerable dilemma. He denies it, then quotes someone who had said the revolutionary poet produces poems about peace and love.
Following his escape to Fiji, Whiteley wrote a letter to his mother where he revealed the relief he felt at having left New York:
We were born into hell and have pressed 10 conscious years …. All of us, into getting around it, getting into it, trying to salvage, trying to salivate! And all we have apart from wrinkles and yellow tongues is a kind of speedy humour about survival. I am glad to leave there (Pearce 1979).
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Figure 69 America in flames. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
A more recent re-assessment of his American experience was present by Barry Pearce of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2006. Whilst it repeats his general view as expressed back in 1995, it also adds a few new elements:
Inevitably, he wanted to try his hand in America, and on the strength of a Harkness Fellowship set sail from London to New York in 1967. He and Wendy, with daughter Arkie in tow, headed straight for the notorious Chelsea Hotel. Whiteley was now one of the Marlborough stable, and it seemed that his conquest of the international scene would be complete. Yet it was not quite to be. The energy of New York intoxicated him. But he also felt its destructiveness, and his reading of the milieu was an infatuation that soon turned sour. America was then an agonised cauldron of change: old values were challenged by new; edifices of political power and ideology were undermined by protests and assassinations; alternative lifestyles were promoted by the writers and poets of the beat generation. The Vietnam War was at its worst and lines of battle were drawn between Americans themselves.
Whiteley’s first reaction to New York was to see it as a big piece of living sculpture, punctured by flashes of yellow, the colour of optimism and madness. But he soon began to fear America: its internecine violence and its potential to ruin the soul. Most of all, however, he hated its indifference to cultures outside its own boundaries. It was, to his amazement, provincial. As he laboured to fit into a cultural pattern with which he felt uncomfortable, Whiteley’s focus in New York showed signs of dissipation. Reviewers were good-natured about the apparent moral consistency of his political messages, written, printed or collaged with calculated irony, and admired especially his drawings of copulating couples. But unfortunately the tenuous combinations of material, including fibreglass, oil paint, photography, electric lights, steel, barbed wire and, in one instance, rice and a hand grenade, consigned a good number of his works of this period to oblivion.
His American interlude came to a spectacular end with the creation of the vast multi-panelled The American dream 1969. This work, which his dealer refused to exhibit, proclaimed his anger and frustration, born partly of his futile ambition to change society which he saw descending into insanity, and partly of his domestic life. Drugs and alcohol may have offered the promise of perceptual enhancement – although he was still a few years from serious heroin usage – but already their influence shadowed his existence.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Whiteley’s period in America was his development of persona, or more aptly, heroic alter-ego paintings, which he continued after his return to Australia at the end of 1969 following a brief but calamitous stay in Fiji. In New York he had constructed a composition on the theme of van Gogh, depicting a floating head, copied from a self-portrait of the Dutch painter, connected by a serpentine blood track to an open razor. Zoom lines linked the head to Arles landscape drawing, and a collaged, double-headed arrow pointed to the words ‘life’ and ‘art’ in symmetric opposition. Sometimes this strategy of symbolic homage worked, and sometimes it was prosaic: an obvious illustrative device which could border on cliché. But he was determined to push on with the genre. Hence Whiteley returned to Australia carrying a baggage of interests in cultural personae from Europe and America – Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Gauguin, Brendan Behan, Bob Dylan – around which he constructed hugely ambitious drawings and paintings. It may be that these works are ultimately most fascinating for the questions they raise about Whiteley’s regard of himself.
Why did he need to declare such a pronounced interest in these luminaries of art, literature and popular music? Envy? Did he feel some sense of self-dissatisfaction deep within? Some of his hero portraits he destroyed to give birth to far more engaging creations. For example, one based on the Japanese revolutionary writer Yukio Mishima was turned into Alchemy 1972–73, another vast, multi-panelled painting like The American Dream which explored nothing less than the artist’s entire psychic and biological life to the moment transmuted into art. References to other artists abound in these homages, but it must be said in his favour that Whiteley never denied his influences. As artist Lee Krasner said of him earlier: ‘When he sees a painter he admires, he meets his work head on, and paints through the middle of it’. In attempting to project the charisma of a host of famous personalities, most of whom he considered shared his addictive nature, he was in fact constructing and exploring his own alter-ego through much the same process (Pearce 2006).
Brett Whiteley was in many ways a traditional artist, raised in a post-war period where abstract expressionism dominated the world stage, and personally attracted to European Renaissance masters of the 14th and 15th centuries such as Piero della Francesca. He was not, therefore, one of the new Pop artists like Warhol or Blake who meaningfully rejected, or were ignorant of, art historical tradition. Warhol, like Whiteley, came from a graphic arts background in advertising and was the very antithesis of the hard drinking, testosterone driven American abstract expressionists such as Pollack and de Kooning. He was gay, wild and free in his thought and views of art. As such, Whiteley’s New York residency was in some ways doomed from the start for the Australian was entering a world very different from the nurturing environment he found in London and Europe. He tried hard to get inside the New York art scene, but it proved impossible and The American Dream was the result. With so much horror and violence around them, the last thing the Americans wanted was a large, Guernica-like canvas dripping with blood and gore, reminding them of their failings. The American Dream was no proudly patriotic critique, but rather a vicious kick in the guts from an outsider who was angry at his own country’s descent into the heart of darkness alongside the United States, rather than with the United States itself.
Brett Whiteley - Catalogue of American Works 1967 – 1969
Utilising information from the Marlborough-Gerson exhibition catalogue of 1968, historic sources and extant items in galleries and private collections, a preliminary list of Whiteley's New York works can be constructed. This list includes paintings, sculpture and works in notebooks and sketchbooks. It is arranged chronologically, however this is tentative as Whiteley did not usually date his works with any precision:
11. Ning, Chelsea Hotel 1967 / Pencil on beige ruled paper / 32 x 19 cm. Collection: Brett Whiteley Estate, Sydney.
12. Kiss 1967 / Charcoal on paper / 54 x 63 in / 137.2 x 160 cm. Location: Unknown.
13. The Infinity Machine 1967 / Oil and fiberglass / 43 ½ x 9 x 4 ½ in / 110.5 x 22.9 x 11.3 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
14. US 1967 / Oil on ply. Location: Unknown.
15. Dylan – Attempt 1 1967 / Oil, photography, electricity and piano keys on ply / 84 x 112 x 2 in / 213.3 x 284.2 x 5.1 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
16. Dylan – Attempt 2 1968 / Oil and photograph on ply / 20 x 27 in / 50.8 x 68.6 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Private collection, Australia.
17. Dylan – Attempt 3 1968 / Slightly altered photograph / 6 x 5 in / 15.2 x 12.7 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
18. Preliminary sketch New York 1 1967-8. New York Sketchbook. Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
19. New York 1 1968 / Oil, photograph, chrome and taxi / 79 ½ x 92 x 46 in / 201.9 x 233.6 x 116.8 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
20. Preliminary sketch - New York 2 1968. New York Sketchbook #2. Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
21. New York 2 1968 / oil, plastic and red blinking light / 55 x 36 in / 139.7 x 91.4 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Private collection, Australia.
22. New York 3 1968 / Charcoal, pencil and ink on paper / 48 x 52 in / 121.9 x 132 cm. Location: Private collection, Australia. Exhibited at the Brett Whiteley Studio, May 2016.
23. The Grin and the Hymn 1968 / Oil on ply / 58 ½ x 48 in / 148.6 x 121.9 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
24. Vincent 1968 / Oil, ink, mirror and razor on ply / 87 x 65 ¾ x 15 in / 220.9 x 164.4 x 38.1 cm (illustrated b/w and in colour on the cover). Location: Private collection, Australia.
25. Chelsea Flower Show [1968]. Location: Private collection, Australia. Also dated to 1970 upon auction.
26. Study for Gauguin 1968. Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
27. Gauguin 1968 / Oil, photograph and poison on ply / 60 x 104 x 2 in / 152.4 x 264.1 x 5.1 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Private collection, Australia.
28. The End and the Beginning (or the Beginning of the End?) 1968 / double-sided object / Oil, fiberglass, photography, steel, barbed wire, grenade and … rice / 82 ½ x 146 x 20 in / 209.6 x 370.8 x 50.8 cm (illustrated b/w + detail in colour). Exhibited Dodds et al., 1969, illustrated p.100 (b/w). Location: Unknown.
29. …No ! 1968 / Oil and photography on ply / 20 x 23 in / 50.8 x 58.4 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
30. Indefinable 1968 / Oil, photography and plastics on ply / 92 x 72 x 2 in / 233.6 x 182.9 x 5.1 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
31. … Yes … 1968 / Oil and ink drawing on ply / 48 x 66 ½ in / 121.9 x 168.9 cm. Location: Unknown.
32. Mindlessness 1968 / Oil, fiberglass and photography / 64 x 22 x 5 in / 162.6 x 55.8 x 12.7 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
33. Sailor on Leave 1968 / Wood, chrome and perspex / 54 x 11 x 11 in / 137.2 x 28 x 28 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
34. The No in Yes 1968 / Fiberglass and Perspex / 97 x 24 x 12 in / 246.3 x 61 x 30.5 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
35. Yeah … That’s Her 1968 / Fiberglass, steel, fur and flower / 67 ½ x 34 x 35 in / 171.4 x 86.4 x 58.5 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
36. Blackness – Version 1 1968 / Photograph and shade / 20 x 20 in (approx.) / 50.8 x 50.8 cm (?illustrated on back cover of catalogue). Location: Unknown.
37. … True 1968 / Oil and opal / 20 x 8 x ¼ in / 50.8 x 20.3 x 0.6 cm. Location: Unknown.
(no illustration known)
38. Just Recently … 1968 / Oil, ink and photographs / 53 x 73 ½ x 13 in / 134.6 x 186.8 x 33 cm (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
39. To Martin Luther King 1968 / Oil, photography, aluminium, Perspex and fresh care / 82 x 84 x 72 in (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
40. Crucifixion 1968 / Wood, fiberglass, Perspex, rubber band, nails and St. Matthew / 96 x 72 x 24 in (illustrated b/w). Location: Unknown.
41. [Electrical Ear] 1968 / Oil and phone connection on ply. Location: Unknown.
42. Study after Picasso's Fisherman 1968. Location: Art Gallery of New South Wales.
43. [Sketch #1 – Now! Right Now Baby!]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
44. [Sketch #2 – Young Black Woman]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
45. [Sketch #3 – At Max’s Kansas City]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
46. [Sketch #4 – No Sign]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection. Possibly one of the panels from the work Just Recently... 1968.
47. [Sketch #5 – Two Sculptures]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
48. [Sketch #6 – One Sculpture]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
49. [Sketch #7 – Barbed Wire Sculpture]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
50. [Sketch #8 – President Johnson]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
51. [Sketch #9 – Art is soul money for going through the same thing twice]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection.
52. [Sketch #10 – US map and circuit board]. New York Sketchbook #1, Benalla Art Gallery collection. Page from A3 spring bound folder.
53. Governor Wallace 1968. Source: New York Sketchbook #2. Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
54. Two Birds 1968. Source: New York Sketchbook #2. Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
55. Weet - Portrait of Wendy Whiteley 1968. Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
56. The Match 1968. Collection: Brett Whiteley Estate.
57. Almost One 1968. Location: Unknown. Numerous versions known. 1991 version in The Domain, Sydney.
58. QANTAS posters 1968. Location: Unknown.
(no known illustration/s)
59. Untitled Drawing 1968. Location: Unknown.
(no known illustration)
60. A Tribute to Brendan 1968. Location: Private collection, Australia.
61. The American Dream 1968-9. Collection: Art Gallery of Western Australia.
62. Vision of Johannesburg – Nixon’s 69 1969. Source: New York Sketchbook #2. Location: Brett Whiteley Estate.
63. Norman Mailer campaign poster 1969. Location: Unknown.
This listing reveals the breadth of Whiteley's American work and highlights the fact that there was more to his time in the country than the production of The American Dream for which he is best remembered. The topical nature of many of the works is notable, and exceptional for the artist. It reveals the distracting nature of America from Whiteley’s determination and focus evident in his work before and after.
Archives
* Letters
A number of contemporary letters by, to and about Brett Whiteley are known, along with personal journal references. They include the following:
* Brett Whiteley letter to the Commonwealth Fund, 6 March 1967.
* Brett Whiteley letter to ‘Richard and Angela’, 15 October 1967.
* Brett Whiteley letter to Beryl Whiteley, early 1968.
* Memo by Dr. John E. Harris of the Harkness Fellowship re interview with Brett Whiteley, 25 March 1968.
* Brett Whiteley to Piers Paul Read and Emily, 9 May 1968.
* Piers Paul Read letter to his mother, 20 May 1968.
* Piers Paul Read journal note, 20 November 1968.
* Wendy Whiteley letter to Beryl Whiteley, early 1969.
* Brett Whiteley letter to Beryl Whiteley, July 1969.
* Interviews
A number of contemporary and later interviews with Whiteley and his family and associates were made use of in compiling this account. For example, as part of producing both the Hilton and Blundell (1996) and Wilson (2014) biographies it is noted within each work that specific interviews were taken in regards to Whiteley’s time in America. These and others are listed below for reference:
* Bass (Shaffer), Serena (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
* Bonython, Kim (Margot Hilton 1996)
* Crichton, Florence (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
* Crichton, Richard (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
* Hopkirk, Frannie (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
* Jacks, Robert (Margot Hilton 1996)
* Read, Emily (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
* Read, Piers Paul (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
* Shaffer, David (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
* Sharp, Martin (Margot Hilton 1996)
* Smith, Terry (Graeme Blundell 1996)
* Van Wieringen, Ian (Margot Hilton and Graeme Blundell 1996)
* Whiteley, Brett (Robert Hughes 1965) / (Anonymous 1967) / (John E. Harris 1968) / (Adrian Read 1969) / (Sandra McGrath 1979) / (Janet Hawley 1989) / (Don Featherstone 1989) /(Andrew Olle 1991)
* Whiteley, Wendy (Pearce 1995) / Caroline Jones 2004) / (Barry Pearce and Alex George 2007) / (Peter Thompson 2009) / (Wendy Whiteley 2012) / (Janet Hawley 2013) / (Wayne Tunnicliffe 2013) / (Ashleigh Wilson 2014) / (Cuthbertson 2014)
* Woods, Tony (Margot Hilton) / (Gaynor 2004) / (Ashleigh Wilson 2014)
Appendix 1
[Janet Hawley, Chelsea Mornings, The Age, Melbourne, 21 April 2007.]
It has been home to Brett Whiteley and Sidney Nolan, and was where Sid Vicious's girlfriend Nancy was killed. Janet Hawley traces the weird and wonderful history of New York's Chelsea Hotel.
The first time I hear about the legendary Hotel Chelsea it is the '70s, and Brett Whiteley is reminiscing about the wild, weird and wonderful time he spent there at the end of the '60s. For two years, Brett, his wife Wendy and their young daughter Arkie lived in a penthouse at the downtown New York establishment. While there, according to Whiteley, he did a lot of "drinking and smoking dope" in a bid to feel America's pain as he painted his tortured political magnum opus, The American Dream.
"The Chelsea was like a colony for people like us who belonged to the artists' tribe," explains Wendy Whiteley now. "You weren't picked on there for being different. In those days, Brett and I both had big hair, dressed in weird or extreme glamour clothes, and we both stood out like sore thumbs - except at the Chelsea. It was an artists' haven."
The Chelsea has long been the favourite hangout of the famous and the freakish. Its history is chequered, the things that happened there as notorious as some of its guests. In 1978, punk rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols allegedly stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in Room 100, then infamously told police: "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." Songwriters found inspiration within the hotel's walls: Leonard Cohen remembered well his liaison there with Janis Joplin "giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street"; Joni Mitchell described a "Chelsea morning" and Bob Dylan penned many lyrics there, including Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Habitual visitor Andy Warhol directed Chelsea Girls, a film about his Factory regulars - including tragic heiress Edie Sedgwick - and their lives at the hotel. Arthur Miller sought sanctuary there after divorcing Marilyn Monroe and stayed for six years, during which time he wrote After the Fall. Meanwhile, on another floor, Arthur C. Clarke was toiling away on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those sozzled Celtic writers, the Welshman Dylan Thomas and the Irishman Brendan Behan, held court in their Chelsea rooms, expounding in mellifluous voices. Indeed a plaque on the street front notes that Thomas "laboured last at The Chelsea, and from there sailed out to die". And the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and the Ramones all partied hard there.
Recently I got my own chance to stay at the Chelsea. For years I had wondered if Whiteley exaggerated when he spun magical tales about the bohemians who got their seminal New York art experience there. Now I was about to discover that, at this hotel, the truth is far better than fiction. Walking into the lobby, with its air of faded opulence, I see that every inch of the walls, and much of the ceiling, is covered in paintings left or loaned by former or current residents. A red Whiteley graces the wall behind the cluttered, caged reception desk, buried under staggering piles of papers. (Only Jerry Weinstein, the friendly front desk clerk with the New York accent, can understand the filing system.) Lined up at the desk are three couples, all wearing black leather "haute bohemia" and black glasses. The men strike an attitude that suggests they are all famous rock stars/artists/writers, the women on their arms their gorgeous hollow-cheeked muses. Occupying armchairs are three lobby regulars. David in dark glasses sits daily in the lobby reading and writing to pass the time. An artist, Robert, sits jawing with David. The other lobby fixture, who I see floating down the marble staircase looking like a startled ghost, is a spaced-out lady in black pyjamas with violent red hair. The host, the Chelsea's managing director and managing partner, is a thin, passionate Hungarian Jew, Stanley Bard, now in his 70s. He can proudly reel off every famous and wannabe famous person who has lived in the Chelsea, including his favourite Australian artists: the Whiteleys; Sidney Nolan, who with wife Cynthia and daughter Jinx took over the penthouse when a somewhat ravaged Whiteley left to recuperate from America's pain in Fiji; and Albert Tucker and his wife Barbara.
"I introduced Brett to Brendan Behan, and they'd sing together," Bard says. "Brett loved anyone who was extreme."
Affectionately described as having "the worried look of an insomniac parrot", Bard at first worked beside his father, David, who was part of the group that purchased the hotel in 1939. When his father died in the early '60s, Stanley took over.
The Chelsea, which bears the name of its local neighbourhood, was built as a private apartment co-operative and opened in 1884, when Chelsea was the heart of New York's theatre district. After the co-operative went bankrupt the building reopened as a hotel, then the theatres relocated and Chelsea became rather seedy. Ten years ago, the commercial art galleries began shifting from SoHo to Chelsea, gentrifying the streets, and now some 300 galleries are within walking distance of the hotel, which thrills Bard. "Right from the start of my father's day, we gave preferential rates to artists and writers," Bard explains. Half the Chelsea's 400 suites, which have up to five rooms and soundproof walls, are leased to long-term residents; the other half are kept for short-term stays.
"We love creative people," Bard beams. "I feel blessed that I've met so many of them because I learn so much from them. Artists are honest, tolerant people. Trouble? Never." His parrot eyes pop. "Arthur Miller was a gem, so unpretentious. He could live with the Grateful Dead in the next room and Allen Ginsberg smoking pot and reciting beat generation poetry down the hall, and it didn't bother him. "Arthur really loved Marilyn; I'd see her come here to visit him. Arthur talked to me a lot about her. I become very friendly with my guests - they treat me like the minister, ask my advice about personal problems..."
I'm staying in the "Jackson Pollock" room, which is painted with drips and splatters wall-to-wall. It is not the work of the Blue Poles artist, however, but rather that of a doting disciple. Willem de Kooning stayed in the same room but didn't leave any daubs. According to desk clerk Weinstein, a talking diary who started at the Chelsea just after the Nancy Spungen stabbing: "Everyone requests a room with history, and I reply that all our rooms have history. Punks and freaks always ask to stay in the Sid Vicious suite, but we had so much trouble with them leaving candles and offerings that we knocked it down and turned it into two rooms. "Poor Nancy Spungen ... Vicious was out on bail and fatally OD'd on heroin, so it never went to trial. "Arthur Miller's room, 614, is now a dental suite. We have a full-time dentist operating here; also a beautician. Julia Roberts comes here to get her hair done. "Leonard Cohen [424] is available, but Bob Dylan [225] and Dylan Thomas [215] both have permanent tenants. So does Jimi Hendrix.
"I'll tell you a story. Hendrix came back from a road trip and was standing at the desk while I found his key, and a customer checking in turns to Jimi and says, 'Boy, take my bags to my room.' And Jimi did take the bags up." Weinstein breaks down laughing. Later I ask Bard if the eccentric composer George Kleinsinger is still here with his menagerie. Wendy Whiteley, Barbara Tucker and Jinx Nolan have all given me elaborate descriptions of wacky George and his homemade zoo. "George and his magnificent menagerie," says Bard, smiling. "He had multicoloured birds flying free in his apartment, palm trees, a waterfall, pythons, a boa constrictor, iguanas, skunks, turtles, tropical fish. He'd come to his door with a snake draped around his shoulders. George's widow is still here, but he died in 1982 and she didn't want to take care of the zoo, so it was all given away."
Barbara Tucker, who in 1967 lived at the Chelsea with Albert in a room that also served as his studio, recalls: "George would sit at his piano, in the midst of his zoo, and play and compose - with a monkey sitting on his shoulder, crapping down his shirt, and a freshwater crocodile staring at him. Things got a bit wild around the hotel when George's snakes would escape." Tucker tells me of the "crazy-eyed radical feminist Valerie Solanas standing by the lift and shoving pamphlets into my hand headlined SCUM - Society for Cutting Up Men. She raved on that men were dreadful and deserved to be cut to pieces. Most of us tried not to annoy her, and kept out of her way." In 1968, Solanas infamously shot Warhol near the hotel but he survived. Another fey Chelsea resident Tucker would bump into was LSD guru Timothy Leary.
Wendy Whiteley recalls her time at the Chelsea, when Brett was in the US on a Harkness grant. "It was a time of great political upheaval. I'd take Arkie to anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, civil rights demonstrations. Feminism was a hot topic. We got involved in Norman Mailer's run for mayor, and Brett made a poster for him. A lot of serious discussion went on at the Chelsea."
Jinx Nolan, who first lived in a Chelsea suite with her parents in 1957, then later in the penthouse, mentions an especially tormented resident: "The haunted face of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atomic bomb. Sid [Nolan] always said that Oppenheimer looked as if he'd been to hell and back - and he had. "Quite a few artists committed suicide at the Chelsea, deliberately or otherwise; it went through a very druggie phase. We were never into drugs; as Sid would say, we were all as clean as the driven slush, er, snow. "When I was young, I remember coming down the stairs and saying loudly to the manager, 'Wasn't that Bob Dylan?' " and being told, 'Shhhhh, he's incognito!' "
There are paintings galore lining every wide hallway and staircase of the hotel's 12 floors, and stories galore of paintings being swapped for rent, but Bard looks horrified at that suggestion as he's showing me around. "Don't say such a thing, or you'll have me thrown into jail by the tax man. You're not allowed to do such things here. I buy the paintings, and sometimes grateful artists give me presents. "And they give me knowledge. Christo stayed here, and he wrapped up his wife in the foyer in front of me, then said: 'See, now you are really looking.' " Endless stories circulate of the kindly Bard getting into trouble with his business partners for being too tolerant of artists who'd fallen behind in their rent, and for helping out with money for their children. Droves of children have grown up at the Chelsea; 15 live there now. English artist David Remfry, 64, currently lives in the main penthouse. Instead of the ducks that Arkie Whiteley played with on the roof, he grows plants. "I owed Stanley nine months' rent once when I was working towards a big exhibition and didn't have a spare cent," admits Remfry. "I felt dreadful, but he wouldn't discuss it, he was happy to wait, the darling man." Remfry arrived 11 years ago for a few months, and has stayed since. "Jerry reckons most people leave here feet first, in a hearse, and that's true. A lady down the corridor just left in a hearse, after living here for 50 years."
In 1978, as part of a long essay about living in the hotel called The Chelsea Affect, Arthur Miller wrote: "The Chelsea in the '60s seemed to combine two atmospheres: a scary and optimistic chaos which predicted the hip future, and at the same time the feel of a massive, old-fashioned, sheltering family." It still felt that way to me: indeed rather than a hotel it had more of the flavour of an old-fashioned resort boarding house, where you'd expect to find maiden aunts with rouged cheeks and hairy chins in the tearoom. Except the Chelsea doesn't have tearooms, bars or its own restaurant or room service. (Twenty local restaurants deliver, though.) A New York writer friend had warned me off staying at the Chelsea: "It's a real rock'n'roll hotel. You'd have to be out of it or on something to enjoy staying there, and forget about getting any sleep," she declared. But the Chelsea was far quieter than a more upmarket New York hotel I'd stayed at earlier that week, where the lift was crowded with happy-hour drinkers carrying a glass of whiskey in each hand back to their rooms, and where cable TV boomed all night through paper-thin walls.
Stanley bard says he's forever being approached by writers who want to pen a book on the history of the Chelsea, but he declines their overtures, since he wants to write the book himself. "It's miraculous, the history and the people in the arts who've lived here: Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Mapplethorpe, Lillie Langtry, Stanley Kubrick, Dennis Hopper, Ethan Hawke, Jane Fonda, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Edith Piaf. I still haven't got around to it, but I have all the information, so my son David might have to do it." Somewhere Weinstein has all the lyrics of the dozen or more songs written about the Chelsea. His favourite is Joni Mitchell's Chelsea Morning. "Do you know," adds Bard proudly, "that Bill Clinton named his daughter after the song, so indirectly she was named after our hotel."
---------------------------------
References
1967 Ads revisited: The Electric Circus [blog], 18 November 2011
Anon., Art – Painting - Britannia’s New Wave – The Young Londoners, Time, 9 October 1964.
-----, Painting: Plaster Apocalypse, Time, 10 November 1967.
Bevis, Stephen, Whiteley’s Dystopian Dream, The West Australian, 12 August 2015.
Brett Whiteley - Recent work, Marlborough. Gerson Gallery, Inc., New York. May–June 1968 Catalogue no. NY5. Exhibition catalogue. [20] pages + [4}-page loose insert. 9 x 8 1/4” / 22.9 x 21 cm. Illustrated wrappers, stapled. Contains chronology, public collections, and catalogue of 23 works. Photo portrait with 4 lips-sealing staples, 15 illustrations (1 colour) + 4 illustrations on insert. Typography: Gordon House.
Brett Whiteley and Martin Sharp – homage to Van Gogh, Shapiro Auctions, Sydney, 8 December 2014.
Brody, Richard, "Portrait of Jason" and the life of movies, The New Yorker [blog], 17 April 2013.
Burke, Janine, Australian Gothic: A life of Albert Tucker, Vintage, 2013.
Collerton, Debbie, When Brett met Francis Bacon, [Blog] Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2012.
Cuthbertson, Debbie, Brett Whiteley painting used to pay rent at Chelsea Hotel up for sale, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June 2014.
Dickens, Barrie, black + Whiteley: Barry Dickens in search of Brett, Hardie Grant Books, South Yarra, 2002, 154p.
Featherstone, Don (director), A Difficult Pleasure: a portrait of Brett Whiteley [video], Don Featherstone Productions, 1989, 55 minutes.
Garson, Marvin, The psychedelic properties of banana skins, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley, 3 March 1967.
Gaynor, Andrew, Tony Woods: Archive, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2013, 239p.
Glatt, John, Live at the Fillmore – East and West, Lyons Press, 2016, 414p.
Gray, Robert, A few takes on Brett Whiteley, Art and Australia, 24(2), Summer 1986, 216-223.
Hawley, Janet, Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, 1993, 181p.
-----, Chelsea Mornings, The Age, Melbourne, 21 April 2007.
-----, Interview with Wendy Whiteley [video], Art Gallery of New South Wales, 9 January 2013, 26 minutes.
Henry, David Dodds, Peltason, Jack W. and Weller, Allen S, Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture 1969, Krannert Art Museum, College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois – Urbana, 1969.
Hughes, Robert, The Shirley Temple of English Art? Brett Whiteley’s splash in the mainstream, The Bulletin, 18 December 1965.
Hilton, Margot and Blundell, Graeme, Brett Whiteley : an unauthorised life, Macmillan, Sydney, 1996, 321p.
Hopkirk, Frannie, Brett - a portrait of Brett Whiteley by his sister, Alfred A. Knopf, Sydney, 1996, 453p.
Jones, Caroline, Wendy Whiteley [documentary + interview], Australian Story, ABC Television, 6 September 2004.
Jones, Caroline, Wendy Whiteley [documentary + interview], Australian Story, ABC Television, 6 September 2004.
Klepac, Lou, Brett Whiteley Drawings, The Beagle Press, Sydney.
Landshoff, Hermann, The Whiteley family at the Chelsea Hotel, 1968. B/W photographs x 10. Collection: Münchner Stadtmuseum.
Lee, Sandra, Famous ‘home’ in New York, Daily Telegraph Mirror, Sydney, 20 June 1992.
Lynn, Elwyn, How Pilgrim in the Slough of Despond sights Paradise, The Bulletin, Sydney, 27 June 1970.
McGrath, Sandra, Brett Whiteley, Bay Books, 1979, 232p.
-----, Brett Whiteley, Series: Imprint Lives, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992, 204p. [Withdrawn]
Mellow, James R., English artists, New York Times, October 1967.
New York City: the 51st State, Wikipedia, 2012.
Ollie, Andrew and Pullan, Robert, On Interviewing, ABC Books, 1992.
Pearce, Barry, Brett Whiteley : Art & Life, Thames & Hudson and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, 240p. New edition 2004.
-----, Brett Whiteley: 9 Shades of Whiteley – Education Kit, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2006.
----- and George, Alex, Spaces in Time – Interview with Wendy Whiteley, in Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007.
Pellow, Ashlie and George, Alex, Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007.
Read, Adrian, He climbed into his own picture, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 1969.
Reich, Wilhelm, The Function of the Orgasm, Farrar, Straus & Goroux, 1961.
Rolling Stone, 14 November 2016.
Sargent, Stefan, Brett Whiteley in his London studio, The Australian Londoners [documentary film], 1965, 56 minutes.
Sutherland, Kathie, Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67, Macmillan Art Publishing, South Yarra, 2010, 346p.
Thompson, Peter, Interview with Wendy Whiteley, Talking Heads, ABC Television, 10 August 2009, 26 minutes.
Tunnicliffe, Wayne, Conversation with Wendy Whiteley [video], Art Gallery of New South Wales, 13 May 2013, 33 minutes.
Whiteley, Brett, Another Way of Looking at Vincent Van Gogh, Richard Griffin, Melbourne, 1983, 68p.
Whiteley, Wendy, In Conversation re Brett Whiteley: On the Water exhibition[video], Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery, November 2012, 11 minutes.
Williamson, Kristian, Whiteley, The National Times, Sydney, 25 May 1980.
Willis, Gary, Inside Brett Whiteley's New York Haunt, Issimo Magazine.
Willis, Thomas, Variety is the spice of Krannert show, Chicago Tribune, 9 March 1969.
Wilson, Ashleigh, Brett Whiteley - Art, Life and the Other Thing, Text Publishing 2016, 432 pages.
