Show Of Time And Space

The Age

Friday November 24, 1995

Greg Burchall

Wendy Whitely, self-appointed keeper of her ex-husband's legacy, is happy to get the focus back on art, writes Greg Burchall.

CIGARETTE AND ashtray in hand, Wendy Whiteley swept around the Deutscher Fine Art gallery in high excitement.

Brett Whiteley screen prints, etchings, lithographs and linocuts from the couple's London days in the early '60s, through stopovers in Rome, Bali, New York and their local park in Sydney are together for the first time. She is even depicted in some of them, albeit ``with a lot of artistic licence".

Wendy was happy as well as excited. After internecine familial court kerfuffles, the blocking of unauthorised books and in the face of the open-ended post-mortem of the artist's life and death, it was good to get the focus back on the art.

``I'm just so tired of it," said Whiteley. ``Bored. A very good idea to find out about an artist's life is to actually go and look at his pictures."

Wendy Whiteley got nothing in the who's-got-the-will? wash- up that followed her ex-husband's drug-related death three years ago, but she has become the self-appointed keeper of his legacy.

She still lives in the Lavender Bay house they shared - many of the prints are views from its windows - and co-curated the mammoth retrospective that has just closed in Sydney and is about to hit the road.

For 30 years she was the artist's wife, companion, model, mentor and critic. At the expense of her own art?

``I don't know, I've never been tormented by it," she said.

``People keep asking `When are you going to work again?' - what? Do I pick up the drawing and painting I was doing as an art student when I met Brett? I do still love drawing, though.

``But I've never seen it work. Two enormous egos working at close range. It's about time and space. I agree with the comment by another woman artist that the only time she ever wants to be a man is when she sees the way male artists are taken care of by their wives." The 150 works, all owned by the Christensen Fund, bought in 1981 and then added to, is now to be broken up and sold.

The show runs until 16 December.