Paris ‘Regard de Côté’

On view until: 8 May 2005

A series of gouaches drawings, and photographs made between June and July 1989. The only ground-rule was to try to try and produce one work a day, for sixty days. I rented an apartment in the Rue de Tournon and set out immediately on this adventure of side glances – these split-seconds of scribble.

How to make images of this city that are not cliché - millions of pictures have been painted - how to find a new vision is the challenge. What one is after is a high-octane visual poetic journalism, brief, essential and above all, fresh. This can best be achieved by drawing, and not by the heavy metier of oil paint.

To revive the sketch, to Zen in and out quickly, to stalk the streets with a tiny leopard camera, to try to look at the obvious obscurely, and to introduce into each view the right amount of humour, or irony, or Dada.

By adding a new image every day, the aim is to build a symphony of pencil, charcoal, ink, gouache, photography - each image contradicting or confirming the one before it, one bold, one fragile, one more in focus, the next more blurred etc, mass versus line….

Stylistically changing ear and shifting gear and shifting pace all the time, exciting the viewer by virtuosity, but keeping in mind a collective unity, so that the whole suite is bound together by one ravishing subject - Paris and its cultural heroes.

This series pays homage to that district of the École de Paris that Marquet, Utrillo and Nicholas de Staël opened up, but most particularly it is still Pablo’s cheek that gets one out of bed in the morning and off down the street with the sketch pad under the arm… the fifty-year-old art student recording this extraordinary city the way one dreamt of doing thirty years ago.

Paris 'Regard de Cote' by Brett Whiteley 1990 Australian Galleries, NSW 84 pages, 67 illustrations Paperback, 28 x 23cm $ 49.00 (incl. GST)  buy >

Brett Whiteley’s Paris

After staying in Paris in 1989, Brett Whiteley spoke of that great city as a kind of mistress, weaving its seductive powers on every street corner. His affair with it had begun three decades earlier: in 1960, at the age of twenty-one, he went there whilst a recipient of the Italian Travelling Scholarship. During this visit he sought out the haunts of Modigliani, one of his artist heroes, fascinated by the possibility that the genius of the past might somehow be ingrained in the very fabric of the streets and buildings. He wondered if he might gain, by proximity, further understanding of its nature. Paris and genius: these two ideas seemed to him inseparable.

In 1962 Whiteley was the first Australian to win the International Prize at the prestigious Biennale de Jeunes Peintres et Sculpteurs in Paris where he exhibited with Charles Blackman and Lawrence Daws in the Australian pavilion. Just prior to the Biennale, in October 1961, Whiteley attended a meeting a meeting of young painters, as the representative of the Australian National Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts. He later reported how painters had come from thirty countries, ranging across the northern and southern hemispheres, living together for one month in Sarcelle, a new suburb in Paris about ten miles from the centre, to exchange ideas about art in general and discuss with each other their personal ambitions.

Whiteley made many trips to Paris during his lifetime, many to see important exhibitions, such as that of another hero and mentor Francis Bacon, and his enthusiasm for it remained unabated. During his last visit in 1989, Whiteley wrote that the challenge was to find a new vision of the city, and his text for the exhibition catalogue Paris ‘Regard de Côté’ [reverse page] encapsulates at once his unwavering sense of discovery and engagement.. (excerpt from Paris catalogue Whitley Studio 1999) Barry Pearce, Head Curator Australian Art, Art Gallery New South Wales.