[BRETT WHITELEY] Notebook (with collage elements added by Whiteley)

A$375 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

[Sydney : the artist, 1973]. Folio, illustrated card covers, 8 pp, printed in black and red ink with one small illustration in colour, edges rubbed with handling creases, a very good copy. As in a number of copies (but not all), Whiteley has added collage elements to the book, a photograph of a section of wallpaper to the inside of upper wrapper, and a Chinese vase in the centre of p. [7]. The original edition of Whiteley s notes for the monumental painting Alchemy (1972-73), with collage elements added by the artist. A facsimile edition was published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2006. When it was first exhibited at the Bonython Gallery in January 1973, Alchemy was accompanied by a catalogue assemblage of images and words from Whiteley s notebooks. Collectively this assemblage fails to make much sense, with quotes from Huysmans, Bacon, Dante, Dylan and many others, mingled with the artist s own aphorisms and anecdotes. However, there are occasional shafts of insight, in his own inimitable language, into the artist’s essential process: Alchemy is the business of seeing what doesn t exist he wrote; The quest is the transmutation of Self ; Most of this painting was first seen with the eyes closed in the pitch of night, awake ; or the often quoted Art should astonish, transmute, transfix. Work at the tissue between truth and paranoia [Barry Pearce, Brett Whiteley: art life , London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pg.34]. Copies are recorded in six Australian collections (St

• Binding: Hardcover

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