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 blowups, 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. 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 a 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 traveled and that it is dominated by the demonic force of history.

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. 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.”