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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Nov 2016 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  11
• Lot Description:
  Brett Whiteley
  (1939-1992)
  Drawing a Man Drinking (Christie Series), 1965
  mixed media and collage on paper
  55 x 45.5 cm
  dated and inscribed lower right: 18th June 65 / this could be whiter
  § - Resale Royalty of 5% will be applied to the hammer price of this work.
• Provenance:
  The artist; Beryl Whiteley, gifted from the above; Bill Cocker, gifted from the above, (circa 1980); Important Paintings and Contemporary Art, Art+Object, Auckland, 27 November 2012, lot no. 39; The Eric & Jacquie Selwood Collection, Sydney
• References:
  Kathie Sutherland, Brett Whiteley: A sensual line, 1957-67, Sydney, 2010, p. 298, cat. no. 0018
• Notes:
  Brett Whiteley's achievement as an artist was underpinned by his extraordinary draughtsmanship, which enabled him to draw a line with the confidence and expertise of a master calligrapher. It was this artistic capacity that enabled him to endow his works with a mixture of aggressive boldness, poetic tenderness and enthralling sensuousness. Drawing a Man Drinking (Christie Series) inscribed with the date 18 June 1965, belongs to the group of key works painted by Whiteley when he and his wife Wendy were living in an apartment at Ladbroke Grove, London having moved from Sydney to the UK in 1960. Now a fashionable part of London, this area was then run-down and on the 'shady side'; moreover Ladbroke Grove was not far from the infamous 10 Rillington Place where the notorious sociopath John Christie had murdered several women including his wife in the 1940s and 50s by first gassing them. Whiteley had arrived in London at the age of 21, determined in his aspiration to be an artist of significance. To this extent his own innate virtuoso talent was nurtured by his great admiration for past masters such as Rembrandt and Van Gogh, but also for living artists, in particular Francis Bacon, who subsequently became a close friend. Bacon's expressive, powerful paintings representing the human form in states of suffering and anguish, clearly presented Whiteley with a direction whereby he would not be comprehended as an artist with a focus on beauty and sensuousness alone, but rather as an artist as Barry Pearce has written, who 'could scratch the minds of his audience out of their complacency'. 1There is a dichotomy in Whiteley's paintings of this time between works that celebrate the sensuous lines of the female form and Wendy Whiteley's body in particular and which extoll the joy of life itself, and those that portray with equal visual elegance and dexterity the more macabre aspects of the human condition. Drawing a Man Drinking (Christie series), 1965 belongs to the latter group of works that in the trajectory of Whiteley's brilliant ascendancy as an artist were seminal for his determination to understand life though engaging with its polarities. Frances Lindsay AM 1 Barry Pearce, 'Brett Whiteley', Australian Painters of the Twentieth Century, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2000, p.241
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 40,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.