Whiteley on Trial Read online

  ‘Luna Park was in its old-fashioned state with the old wooden devil’s dip and things, and all that development along there wasn’t there, so it was a very quiet bay and it had little wooden ferries coming into it and fishing boats that you could go and buy fish from in the morning, and old baths, and everything, so it was a very different atmosphere, and the house was very different.

  ‘Eventually we bought the house in 1974, having decided to stay in Australia and let Arkie go to school properly and do all that kind of stuff. And in the beginning we just had this place, three of us squashed into here, into this one floor, and Brett painted in here as well, which we were quite used to, living like that, in London or anywhere. Some of the studios were big spaces, but we were used to squashing in around Brett’s studio basically.’

  The house was the first major purchase the young couple had made, apart from buying a Mini Moke. Moving to Lavender Bay marked the end of their gipsy-like existence—encouraged by Arkie, who pleaded with her parents to stay put for a while.

  ‘We both grew up on the North Shore so being on this side of the bridge wasn’t as traumatising for us as it is for some people on the other side, who get very traumatised crossing the bridge as though it’s another planet,’ Wendy said, with a mischievous laugh, poking fun at the tribal divisions that rise up in big cities. Brett grew up just a few bays along, in Longueville, Wendy in Lindfield.

  Wendy’s mobile phone rang—the first of many interruptions. With Wendy Whiteley and the Secret Garden, written by Janet Hawley, about to be launched and Wendy’s appearance (for the second time) on the ABC’s Australian Story imminent, there were many last-minute things to organise. While Wendy discussed extracts, copyright, and restrictions on cropping and editing Brett’s work, I walked to the balcony and took in the hypnotic view. The screams from Luna Park and the clinking of yachts drifted in on the breeze. In the garden below a wedding party swayed: men in neat shirts and trousers, women with fake tans and high heels, the sounds of alcohol-infused laughter and loud, uninhibited voices. A lone jogger was doing push-ups on a park bench.

  I walked quietly back to the table, waiting as Wendy finished her phone call.

  The view, I said, was not as it appeared in Brett’s paintings—he captured the essence or spirit of it, used poetic licence, rather than aimed for realism.

  ‘Brett never particularly worked staring at views,’ Wendy said. ‘Sometimes for the interiors he’d do a quick drawing, but he often worked just from memory, and he’d change things around. It’s not an accurate painting ever.’

  Brett’s land- and seascapes were heightened, ecstatic, fluid—he wanted to rival nature and ‘challenge God’, as he famously remarked in the Don Featherstone documentary Difficult Pleasure, made three years before his death. Certainly, the view from the house had changed in the forty-six years since the Whiteleys first moved there. A sprawling Moreton Bay fig now dominated the view from the balcony, its branches framing the Harbour Bridge, heavy green foliage obscuring the bay.

  ‘You’d stand on the balcony where you were standing just now and you saw over the top of that tree, so it was a pretty open view, across to Luna Park, around that bay,’ Wendy said.

  Wendy’s mobile went off again.

  ‘You’re busy,’ I noted when she finally finished.

  ‘Well, I’m doing the family archives, and somebody’s making a film, and there’s research going on for that, but there are people asking me questions all the time,’ she laughed.

  ‘I’m the only one left. I’d love to have someone to pass it on to, so I could retire,’ she said, her voice trailing off.

  Wendy and Brett’s only child, Arkie, blonde-haired and beautiful, with her mother’s eyes, died in 2001, from adrenal cancer. She had just turned thirty-seven. Her ashes and those of Brett are scattered in Wendy’s garden. As the ‘only one left’, Wendy controls the Whiteley Estate and copyright on her ex-husband’s art. She is the keeper of his legacy, defender of his reputation and the woman to whom people turn when dubious works appear on the market—her pronouncements are not always appreciated.

  Wendy recalled the day she visited the Mosman home of Sydney Swans chairman Andrew Pridham, owner of the contentious Big Blue Lavender Bay. In her witness statement, Wendy said that in April 2008 she was invited to ‘morning tea’ at Mr Pridham’s.

  ‘I was often invited to morning tea or lunches, so it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I was of the understanding that Mr Pridham was an art collector who had several paintings including a large Lavender Bay,’ her statement read.

  Wendy was never told the purpose of the visit—nor was she ever directly asked about Big Blue Lavender Bay, but her reaction that day was closely monitored by Pridham and his friend, Sydney art auctioneer and artist Henry Mulholland, who had organised her visit. Although Wendy had not been asked to authenticate the painting, she was concerned enough that she spent a little longer than usual looking at it. After her visit to Pridham’s home, Wendy called Brett Lichtenstein to ask whether he’d framed the painting, expecting him to say ‘no’.

  ‘I was very troubled about the Pridham thing … but I was hesitant, because Brett Lichtenstein thought he’d framed it. So I thought, Jesus, is that right? So I was really worried about it,’ Wendy said.

  But Pridham never asked her to verify his painting?

  ‘No. Listen, someone who’s paid that kind of money doesn’t want to be told about a fake, and so you want to be pretty sure about what you’re saying,’ Wendy said, hackles rising.

  ‘I was obviously uncomfortable, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I won’t either in the future without some corroboration. I’m not spending the rest of my life doing authentication for people. Nobody wants to pay you and I’ve got better things to do. I’m sick of it!’

  Wendy angry is electrifying, her fury boundless. In her biography, Hopkirk described Wendy’s ferocity during the ‘hideous spectacle’ of the couple’s divorce: ‘Wendy—wife, friend and greatest ally—proved to be a formidable enemy when the talents she had used to support him were turned against him.’ Wendy had reverted to being Brett’s greatest ally; a ‘post-mortem’ reconciliation as some have put it.

  I wanted to know more about her former husband’s technique; particularly about how much underdrawing he did for a painting.

  ‘Very rarely. He’d do it with paint. That’s why it looked so free,’ Wendy said.

  ‘Now Brett could change his mind with a painting,’ she went on. ‘I was looking at The Jacaranda Tree the other day, and I saw some photographs where he changed his mind and I’d forgotten about that.’

  The Jacaranda Tree (On Sydney Harbour), 1977, which sold at a Christie’s auction in Sydney in 1999 for $1.98 million, and once belonged in the Holmes á Court collection, features on the cover of Sandra McGrath’s 1979 book on Whiteley. An immense work, about 2 metres high and more than 4 metres wide, the painting won the Wynne Prize for landscape at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1977.

  ‘When I looked at the reproduction on the cover of the McGrath you can see where he’s overpainted, and he’s quite deliberately left it … so he’s obliterated, but you can see what’s there underneath, and what’s there underneath is also painted,’ Wendy said.

  Just as she described, if one looks carefully at the reproduction one can discern, on the bottom left-hand side of the painting, shadowy forms of palm trees that have been painted over in ultramarine, to create more space, to elongate the expanse of deep blue water. The palm trees have not been completely erased—they are visible below the surface paint. I asked Wendy: so there was no doubt in her mind that these three paintings being contested in court were fakes?

  ‘You’ve heard me in court. I don’t need to repeat that, do I? Absolutely no doubt whatsoever. And I’m surprised we’re still talking about it as if there is any doubt. What are those photographs about? They’ve got the photographs. Why are they still going to court?’ she said impatiently, referring to Morel’s images.
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  ‘I mean, it just seems to me to be a complete waste of time,’ she said, getting irritated.

  Justice needed to run its course, I suggested. Our legal system operates on the presumption of innocence.

  ‘They’ve got the evidence though,’ Wendy said. To her the ‘evidence’ was irrefutable.

  This was not the first time Wendy had needed to deal with suspected forgeries. Her most brazen nemesis was William Blundell, who created hundreds of works in the style of Whiteley and other artists. He was never charged with any crime. Blundell claimed the works were ‘innuendos’, made in good faith and never intended to be sold as authentic pieces by the artists he was copying. Paddington dealer Germaine Curvers, however, was selling them as authentic works to collectors in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, pocketing a healthy profit. After Curvers’s death, her estate, including many of Blundell’s innuendos, was put up for public auction. Wendy attended the auction and told people not to buy Blundell’s works—she bought the ‘innuendos’ herself and later destroyed them.

  ‘I trashed them,’ Wendy said. ‘Great fun. I’ve still got the bag of shredded fake Whiteleys. It would be a very good contemporary artwork, wouldn’t it? I’ll put them in the Whiteley studio with a big pink bow. Blundell faked everybody, but they were all bad. A couple of his Streetons were innuendos. He even told the cops about them and embarrassed the museums that had bought them.’

  In the case of Blundell, Wendy took justice into her own hands. Now she was dealing with a criminal trial involving an alleged $4.55 million deception, a possible fraud far more flagrant than Blundell and his so-called innuendos.

  ‘They were counting on the fact that Brett was dead, [Christian] Quintas [his studio assistant] is dead, and it’s a long time forwards,’ Wendy said of those accused of this latest crime.

  Just as she did during the committal, Wendy would need to be willing to stand up in court and be grilled. The prospect didn’t particularly bother her. Richter was an astonishing performer, I suggested, recalling his excruciating cross-examinations during the committal.

  ‘What’s astonishing about him?’ she asked, flashing me a look.

  He didn’t frighten her?

  ‘No, he’s just a little lawyer with a beard, a barrister with a beard. I’ve no particular fear of doctors or barristers or lawyers or anything, they’re just people doing a job. He’s doing a job and he’s pretty aggressive about it. And he might frighten some people but he doesn’t frighten me. I can only say what I feel and what I think and there’s no way he can disprove it or prove it one way or another, and to keep haranguing me like he did, with the same question, as though somewhere along the line I was going to completely change my opinion, it was pretty crazy.’

  In late 2009, when a very concerned Andrew Crawford arrived at Lavender Crescent with the dubious Orange Lavender Bay in the back of the truck ready for Wendy’s inspection, Wendy decided almost immediately that it was not a Whiteley. The painting was pulled into the light for her to see.

  ‘There was no point in them trying to clump it down the stairs; in fact, I gave them instructions that I didn’t want them to clump it down the stairs until I’d seen it,’ she said. ‘It was pretty instantaneous. I knew it was wrong. And Steven [Nasteski] was stupid. What he did was a bloody stupid thing to do, really.’

  He thought he was buying a bargain, I said.

  ‘Oh, but he’s a great Whiteley fan, so it’s a bit difficult to tell with Steven what comes first,’ Wendy said, now seemingly excusing his rashness. ‘He loves Brett, he wishes he’d known him, he wishes he was him, he’s in love with Brett, and he loves his work, and he identifies very strongly with him. He’s a manic, and he knows Brett was pretty manic too. He rings me fifteen times, or he rings me twice in one day, and I say, “Don’t ring me again!”’

  As she finished the sentence, her mobile rang yet again. It was the ABC, confirming the date of the Australian Story episode. Wendy was elated. While she talked, I strolled quietly around the house, looking at her ex-husband’s paintings, focusing on those that featured Lavender Bay in its many moods, acquainting myself with the ‘artist’s hand’. Above an Indonesian lion of carved wood hung Grey Harbour, 1978, a work of melancholy beauty, a sullen, overcast day so perfectly rendered that one could almost smell the moist, musty scent that lingers after rain. On an opposite wall hung Lavender Bay in the Rain, 1981, a view of palm trees, yachts and a hint of pier glimpsed through a partly open window, the glass pane streaked with drops of rain, thin white paint that Brett had allowed to drip evocatively down the canvas. Brett Whiteley’s visions of Lavender Bay are so celebrated that the view itself has been heritage listed—it’s called ‘visual curtilage’ in the numbing language of the bureaucrat. Whatever it takes, I thought, to save this beautiful part of the world.

  You must be happy here, I said to Wendy.

  ‘Happy? I haven’t got the time to be happy. I’m too busy to be happy or sad or whatever. It is beautiful, yes. There was one stage when it was really getting difficult between Brett and me I thought …’ She sighed loudly and paused. Recomposing herself she continued. ‘I bought a flat in London, I did all right, so I did both [Lavender Bay and London] for a while, and then Brett died, and I thought, I’ll just change my name back to my maiden name and stop being Wendy Whiteley and start all over again.

  ‘And then I thought, what the fuck are you talking about? Why would I do that? And anyway, whatever went down with us, you know, we were together for over thirty-five years or something or other, whatever, he’s part of my life, so …’ Her words fell away, Wendy lost in thought.

  ‘Arkie was much more difficult to deal with, her leaving. Anyway, I’m just making the best of it. And this helps, the garden.’

  I noticed her use of the word ‘leaving’, as though she could not think of Arkie being gone for good. She had left. That’s all.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ Wendy said gently as she let me out the bottom gate. It was the last thing I’d expected to hear from her. There was a softness in her voice.

  I walked through the garden, wandering down its slopes, up and around secluded, winding paths, stumbling across schoolkid lovers. I let them be, found another track, admiring ferns and flowers, lavender bushes and groves of palms. I headed down to where the wedding party was dissolving, and further still to the disused rail track, and under the rail bridge down to the jetty, all the way to the arched canopy that spelt ‘Lavender Bay’ at the water’s edge. A giant cruise ship was signalling its departure from the harbour, booming loud and long, smaller boats trailing plumes of white foam. The water was a gilded, stippled grey. It was early spring, too soon for big orange sunsets.

  Connoisseurship—or the knowledge gained from the intense visual and historical study of an artist’s work, from knowing an artist’s characteristic style, and his or her unique way of making an image—sits uneasily in the hard pews of the court. Barry Pearce discovered this early in his career, and the experience still haunted him. He had never spoken about it until we met.

  It was a sunny Saturday morning, 5 September 2015, the day after my meeting with Wendy. Pearce waited in the shade under the imposing, neoclassic portico of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He had worked within the gallery’s sandstone walls for thirty-two years, eighteen of them as head curator of Australian art. It was a job he cherished—and the artists he worked with cherished him in return. We spotted each other simultaneously—Pearce is a tall, soft-faced man, with pinkish cheeks and white hair. By phone, he can sound stentorian. In person, he was more like a kindly teacher—he bore his authority lightly. A leading expert on Whiteley, Pearce knows the artist’s ‘hand’ almost as intimately as Wendy herself. The two co-curated the first major retrospective of Whiteley’s work, Art & Life, which opened at the gallery in September 1995, three years and three months after the artist’s death.

  ‘We saw a lot of paintings up close and personal,’ Pearce said, as we walked into the gallery’s long entrance court.


  One of the paintings they were bound to include in the retrospective was The Balcony 2, a sweeping, hypnotic work, colossal in size: 2 metres high and 3.6 metres wide. It was the painting we had come to see, one of the most celebrated from Whiteley’s Lavender Bay period, painted in 1975. We approached the vast blue work on the ground floor galleries of Australian art.

  ‘I’m very fond of it. This is the first major Whiteley I got into the collection,’ Pearce said.

  In 1981, a mere three years into the job, Pearce urged the gallery’s trustees to buy the work. He recalled the first time he saw it, in the back room of Blue Boy Gallery in Melbourne.

  ‘I just about fell over,’ he said.

  The scale of the work floored him; Whiteley’s rare talent for composing on a canvas of such immense size, a feat few artists can achieve without signs of labour. Whiteley made it look effortless. He did not fear space.

  ‘It’s very hard to pull off a big painting,’ Pearce said. ‘Brett had that divine ability to make every part of a painting look interesting and lively, without losing the grip, the energy.’

  As Pearce spoke, people stopped to eavesdrop, entranced by his words. He had lost none of his passion for The Balcony 2; he considered it ‘the painting of the most sustained ecstasy in the history of Australian art’.

  ‘I know it’s a big call to say that, but I still believe it,’ he said.

  We stood in front of the work admiring it in its enormity and detail. The all-consuming expanse of water, painted in expressive sweeps of deep ultramarine, seemed to be moving, as though the paint were still liquid. The harbour flickered with life: a pelican shot across the sky; sailboats and yachts skimmed across the bay; a boat was moored at the end of a pier; in the left corner, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was suggested by a few quick lines of white paint. The entire scene spilt from the vertiginous perspective of the balcony with its fine curlicue fence.