39 Facts About Brett Whiteley

Brett Whiteley is represented in the collections of all the large Australian galleries, and was twice winner of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes.

Brett Whiteley held many exhibitions, and lived and painted in Australia as well as Italy, the United Kingdom, Fiji and the United States.

Much later, in 1988, Brett Whiteley wrote to Rees, who had been his friend and mentor for many years.

Brett Whiteley left Australia for Europe on 23 January 1960.

Brett Whiteley was the youngest living artist to have work purchased by the Tate, a record that still stands.

Brett Whiteley's farewell to abstraction, Summer at Sigean, was a record of his honeymoon in France.

Brett Whiteley painted Woman in bath as part of a series of works he was doing of bathroom pictures.

In 1964, while in London, Brett Whiteley became fascinated by the murderer John Christie, who had committed murders in the area near where Brett Whiteley was staying in Ladbroke Grove.

Brett Whiteley painted a series of paintings based on these events, including Head of Christie.

Brett Whiteley's intention was to portray the violence of the events, but not to go too far in showing something which people would not want to see.

Brett Whiteley appears as a character in the book Falling Towards England by Clive James under the name Dibbs Buckley.

In 1967 Brett Whiteley won a Harkness Fellowship Scholarship to study and work in New York.

Brett Whiteley met other artists and musicians while he lived at the Hotel Chelsea, where he befriended musicians Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan.

Brett Whiteley was very much influenced by the peace movement at the time and came to believe that if he painted one huge painting which would advocate peace, then the Americans would withdraw their troops from Vietnam.

Brett Whiteley became active in the great peace movements of the 1960s, with the protests against America's involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Brett Whiteley believed that many of his ideas came from these experiences, and he often used drugs as a way of bringing the ideas from his subconscious.

Brett Whiteley sometimes took more than his body could handle, and had to be admitted to hospital for alcohol poisoning twice.

Around him at the Hotel Chelsea, other artists and musicians took heroin, which Brett Whiteley did not take at that time.

Brett Whiteley took the van Gogh painting and stretched the lines of the room to a single vanishing point, creating an image which appears fast moving and extremely vibrant and dynamic.

Brett Whiteley loved painting Sydney Harbour views in the 1970s such as in his paintings, Henri's Armchair The balcony 2 and Interior with time past, which show an interior and exterior view starting with a room that leads through open windows to the harbour full of boats outside.

Brett Whiteley painted a view of his friend Patrick White as a rock or a headland in Headland; White had told Whiteley that in the next life he would like to come back as a rock.

Brett Whiteley painted other images of the Australian landscape, including a view of the south coast of New South Wales after it had been raining called The South Coast after rain.

Brett Whiteley did paintings of the areas around Bathurst, Oberon and Marulan, all in New South Wales.

Brett Whiteley painted abstracted images of bush scenes such as The bush and images which resulted from experimentation with various drugs, such as alcohol in the humorous Self portrait after three bottles of wine.

Brett Whiteley's reference to art history, including an image of the famous 1943 William Dobell portrait of Joshua Smith, won a court case against accusations that it was a caricature, not a portrait.

Brett Whiteley won the Wynne Prize again, in 1984, with The South Coast after rain.

Brett Whiteley was the subject of an ABC television documentary called Difficult Pleasure directed by Don Featherstone in 1989, which showed him talking about many of his main works, and his recent works such as ones done during a month-long trip to Paris; one of his last overseas trips.

Brett Whiteley showed his large T-shirt collection, and talks about his sculpture, which he said is an aspect of his work that many people do not take seriously.

Brett Whiteley became increasingly dependent on alcohol and became addicted to heroin.

Brett Whiteley's work was not always being praised by critics, although its market value continued to climb.

Brett Whiteley made several attempts to dry out and get off drugs completely, all ultimately unsuccessful.

Brett Whiteley began a relationship with Janice Spencer, with whom he travelled to Japan, among other countries.

Brett Whiteley spent time with friends including Mark Knopfler and John Illsley from the band Dire Straits.

In June 1991, Brett Whiteley was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia.

In 1999, Brett Whiteley's painting The Jacaranda tree, which had won the Wynne Prize, sold for 1,982,000, a record for a modern Australian painter at that time.

In 1999, Brett's mother Beryl Whiteley founded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in memory of her son.

Sandra McGrath's 1979 book Brett Whiteley, dubbed The Blue Book' for its dust jacket featuring the painter's The Jacaranda Tree, was the first major text on the artist.

In 2017, a feature-length biographical documentary about Brett Whiteley was released in Australian cinemas.

The documentary was made with the approval of Wendy Brett Whiteley, and was received with critical acclaim.