This focus display brings the glowing finished representation together for the first time with sketches Whiteley made as the portrait took shape in his imagination. It brings to life, too, the incendiary association between two of Australia's blazing cultural stars.
Patrick White won the Nobel prize for ‘introducing a new continent to literature’. Coinciding with the one hundredth anniversary of White’s birth, the National Portrait Gallery will display eleven works centring on Brett Whiteley’s scintillating Patrick White at Centennial Park 1979–1980. The wild young artist painted White while the author was working on his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass; the two portraits, painted and written, developed together. The finished painting is one of Australia’s great portraits, but White felt betrayed by elements of the work. Drawn from the collections of the New South Wales State Parliament and the Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, this focus display brings to life the incendiary association between two of Australia’s blazing cultural stars.
