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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  02 May 2016 ~ 6.30pm - Part 1 - Lots 1 - 47
  03 May 2016 ~ 2.30pm - Part 2 - Lots 48 - 320
• Lot #:
  2
• Lot Description:
  Brett Whiteley
  (1939-1992)
  Back I 1981
  ink on paper
  97 x 62 cm
  signed lower right: brett Whiteley
• Provenance:
  Private collection, Melbourne
• References:
  Related Works: Brett Whiteley: Recent Nudes, Artist's Studio, Circular Quay, 1981, (as Ink Sketch 1981), cat. no. 36, (illus.)
• Notes:
  Brett Whiteley's brilliance as a draughtsman and his devotion to depicting the nude were evidenced first in London in the early 1960s, when his work was beginning to shift from abstraction to figuration and he produced a series of drawings and paintings focused on the curvaceous body of his wife Wendy. These intimate, sensual works of love and desire were a prelude to what became a prolonged obsession throughout Whiteley's oeuvre of celebrating the female form in works that project and communicate the direct sense of the artist's touch. His nudes are vigorous and erotic, intimate and tender; and notwithstanding the exaggerated forms that characterize them, Whiteley's confident sensuous lines and rounded contours emphatically emphasize that they have been inspired directly from life. On one level they are deeply felt primal expressions of Whiteley's need to enfold and express the human experience of sensuality and sexuality through his brilliantly mastered calligraphic lines; on another, they reflect his relentless pursuit of what he referred to as 'the great nude' in art history, meaning the pinnacle of creative expression. As he commented in the catalogue of his 1981 exhibition, Recent Nudes, 'Most men, and certainly all artists, even if many never get around to actually painting it, carry in their heads the great nude. The Venus, the Bethsheba, the Bather, Diana, even the great centerfold, he carries all his life the idealization of his glands, carries it like some little uncut gem in his mind, waiting there to be given form'.1 Back 1 1981 was later produced as a lithograph with the current title in an edition of 35. It is an intimate and tender depiction of a soft and voluptuous nude figure with her back to the viewer, her buttocks resting on her right foot curled beneath her. Whilst her face is hidden, the massing of her loose hair with its deftly painted strands falling down her back, calls to mind Whiteley's admiration for the ink and brush technique of Chinese landscape painters and calligraphers, and to the fact that for him drawing was parallel to his work as a painter. Frances Lindsay AM 1 Brett Whiteley: Recent Nudes, Artist's Studio, Circular Quay, 1981
• Estimate:
  A$40,000 - 60,000
• 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.