Description
Australia’s brightest, briefest flame. Ashleigh Wilson’s Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing is the definitive biography of the prodigy who won everything young — the Archibald, the Wynne, the Sulman, international fame — and burned out by 53: heroin, genius, and the Sydney Harbour studio that became a shrine.
Wilson writes with novelistic immediacy and deep research: the London triumphs, the New York years, the marriage to Wendy, the long decline. It is the great Australian art biography — as dazzling and devastating as its subject — and it never looks away from either the beauty or the wreckage.
For art lovers everywhere, not just Australians: a cautionary tale told with love. Whiteley’s drawings remain miraculous; this book explains the miracle and the cost. Superb. Wilson’s research is formidable and his storytelling superb: the definitive Whiteley, as brilliant and broken as its subject. The great Australian biography — essential well beyond Australia.
The definitive biography of Australia’s most famous artist
Brett Whiteley (1939–1992) remains Australia’s most iconic modern artist — the only painter ever to win the Archibald, Wynne, and Sulman prizes in a single year (1978), with his Self Portrait in the Studio cementing his legend. In Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, published in 2016, journalist Ashleigh Wilson — a Walkley Award winner — delivers what critics called “hard to put down,” written with unprecedented behind-the-scenes access.
Wilson traces Whiteley’s dazzling arc: the prodigy who conquered London and New York, the Chelsea Hotel years with his wife and muse Wendy, the Lavender Bay studio that became an Australian landmark, and the triumphs that made him a national treasure. He also confronts the “other thing” — the heroin addiction that haunted Whiteley and ultimately claimed his life at 52 — with journalistic rigor and compassion.
Handsomely illustrated with classic Whiteley artworks, this is the peerless, page-turning portrait of a genius who lived as boldly as he painted.
A must-read for
-
n
- Lovers of Australian art and its most famous figure.
- Readers of great artist biographies.
- Anyone drawn to stories of brilliance, fame, and fragility.
n
The biography that gives Whiteley the life he deserves.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet