With charisma and clear vision

It is not at first sight entirely clear why the NGV set up Brett Whiteley (1939-92) and George Baldessin (1939-78) as a pair.

Brett Whiteley's Achmid getting stoned, Tangier (c.1964); and Remembering Lao Tse (Shaving off a second) (1967). Pictures: Art Gallery of Ballarat/Wendy Whiteley

It is not at first sight entirely clear why the NGV decided to set up Brett Whiteley (1939-92) and George Baldessin (1939-78) as a pair: they are neither obviously parallel in their artistic trajectories nor entirely ­divergent; moreover they were both ultimately loners, so they were not the followers or the leaders of rival movements.

At the most superficial level, both artists were young prodigies with a certain rock-star charisma. They were both born in the same year and died young, as the wall panel at the start of the exhibition reminds us: Baldessin especially young, in a car crash at only 39, and Whiteley prematurely though in middle age, from a drug overdose. But there must be more than this.

Above all perhaps, Baldessin and Whiteley were two of the main figures of some authority and artistic presence to emerge in the 1970s. This was a confused period between the waning of the abstraction that had dominated art for a couple of decades, culminating in The Field exhibition of 1968, and the onset of postmodernism in the second half of the 80s. Conceptual, minimal and performance art were the most original expressions of the period but, like contemporary feminist and more generally political art, these forms often remained ephemeral.

George Baldessin's Bedfellows (1974). National Gallery of Victoria/ © The Estate of George Baldessin

Two things that Whiteley and Baldessin shared, and that differentiate them from so much of the art of the 70s, were colossal energy and devotion to the practice of their arts, whether drawing and painting in the case of Whiteley, or sculpture and printmaking in that of Baldessin. For the 70s was the first time, at least since dada, that artists with little or no technical ability and at best a sporadic approach to practice could attract attention because of the ideological content of their work.

This was a tendency that grew more pronounced in the ensuing postmodern period, encouraged by theories derived from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, which implied, respectively, that cultural structures were inherently in the service of power, and that these structures were fundamentally unstable and capable of being deconstructed.

The ready-to-wear versions of these culturally nihilistic doctrines were eagerly adopted by feminists, post-colonial theorists and others to denigrate the culture by which they believed themselves to be oppressed.

Fortunately for Baldessin and Whiteley, they seem to have been blissfully unaware of the self-serving ideologies incubating in the less intellectually respectable corners of the academic world. In hindsight, even if one may have reservations about how ultimately significant either is as an artist, one can’t help sympathising with their boundless energy and dynamism, unhampered by false guilt and ideological hypocrisy.

That is not to say that their work is all about joyous affirmation. At the beginning of the ­exhibition we are confronted by one of Baldessin’s sculptures, of a seated figure, strangely slumped like a stuffed doll or a broken marionette. If we look more closely, we see that the figure lacks a pelvic girdle; it cannot stand up.

Nearby is another that should not be able to stand, teetering on one leg while the other is offset and detached from the torso. The offset limb has the characteristic forms of the femur and trochanter, but again there is no pelvic girdle to join the upper and lower halves of the body.

Baldessin’s Figures in enclosure (MM and friend) 1965. National Gallery of Victoria/ © The Estate of George Baldessin

The way an artist represents the world, what we can call style, is always about meaning, and these figures, with their painfully defective anatomy, speak of existential disjunction and malaise. Baldessin’s early prints evoke constant movement, but a movement that alternates between awkwardness and acrobatic grace. His figures exist between these two extremes, but not in a state of poise or self-possession.

The early images are scenes of circus figures, which appeal to Baldessin, as they did to artists before him, for their combination of mystery, pathos, beauty and ugliness. But they also reveal his interest in situating the figure in space. Again this is not harmonious, balanced space, but one made up of unsettling combinations of shallowness and depth, light and darkness; and he has a particular fondness for mak­ing beams or spars, graphically delineated, obtrude into the environment around his figures.

And this in turn brings us back to the craft of etching, especially enhanced with the use of aquatint to create areas of shadow and darkness of varying intensity. Baldessin was a master printmaker, and all of his printed work emerges essentially from his restless play with the possibilities of the medium. His love of deep shadows, for example, or of disconcerting spaces evoked by spars and window frames and other architectural elements, is simultaneously the expression of an aesthetic and moral vision and the exploitation of the resources of his medium.

Baldessin’s single most satisfying and memorable body of work is the MM of Rue St Denis series of 1976, produced not long before his death in 1978. MM stands for Mary Magdalene, the penitent prostitute who becomes a saint, and the rue St Denis in Paris, a respectable bourgeois quarter centuries ago, more recently best known for the prostitutes who ply their trade there.

His choice of Mary Magdalene as a generic protagonist brings with it layers of moral complexity and self-consciousness, but also justifies his dramatic use of the girls’ hair in the compositions. According to the legend, Mary spent years in the desert repenting her sins, and when her clothes fell into tatters, her hair miraculously grew to protect her modesty.

Here, the hair not only cascades from the women’s heads but erupts uncontrollably from all over their bodies, evoking sexuality and shame at the same time.

Baldessin’s Mary — a symbolic figure rooted in the artist’s Italian and Catholic artistic heritage — thus becomes another embodiment of the intoxication of desire, counterpointed by a sort of existential anxiety, characteristic of the 70s sexual revolution.

Whiteley is even more obviously an artist of the figure, and especially of the female figure. He started, for a short time, as an abstract painter, but already by the time of his paintings in ­Sigean, in the south of France (1963), we can feel corporeality trying to burst out of the still ostensibly abstract forms. But his most explosive evocations of the body are in the series of paintings devoted to the murderer John Christie that he produced in London in 1964-65.

Christie was an ostensibly harmless and unimpressive little man who in fact had an obsession with necrophilia. He had murdered a number of women by gassing them, raping them as they died and then concealing their remains. Whiteley’s drawings and paintings on this theme represent a journey into the extreme territories of perverse sexuality, as though in a Sadean quest to determine where the world of the erotic imagination really ended.

The Christie works are clearly Whiteley’s attempt to emulate Francis Bacon. Otherwise, his vision of sexuality is generally joyous and even ecstatic, though often marred by a sense of the priapic male using the woman’s body for his own pleasure, even when the female partners are more than willing.

This is also the trouble with the headless figures and the late nudes with tiny heads and grotesquely enlarged bottoms.

Baldessin, on the other hand, enters more intuitively into the eroticism of women, taking pleasure in their power to provoke desire, but with a concomitant longing for surrender and self-abasement; his women are represented as the subjects of their own complex experience rather than as the object of a man’s enjoyment.

One important point about the Melbourne exhibition is that it concludes with a substantial and ambitious work by each of the two artists, the implication being that these are important masterpieces that represent some sort of culmination of the earlier work.

In Baldessin’s case it is the series of prints, Occasional images from a city chamber, that he produced for the Biennale of Sao Paulo in 1975; in Whiteley’s it is the huge panorama-polyptych The American Dream (1968-69).

These are both impressive ensembles, and both will appeal particularly to the aficionados of each artist. The American Dream is a chaotic and ecstatic extravaganza of imagery that is characteristic of Whiteley’s delirious inspiration. Occasional images is an enigmatic series of plates that will equally appeal to lovers of Baldessin’s work, with its combination of a ­gentle, almost whimsically erotic note with virtuoso printmaking and the artist’s characteristic and one might say post-cubist love of creating imaginary or even impossible space.

But in the end, and in their very different ways, each of these works remains an accumulation of parts rather than transcending its elements to become a new and superior whole.

Thus Baldessin’s work, though impressive in its technical execution, could have been several panels longer or shorter without making any significant difference to the meaning. There is no sense of a whole in which nothing can be added or taken away.

With Whiteley, of course, it is even more obvious that he could go on adding bits or, on the other hand, take away any number of elements in this composition and still not make any appreciable difference to the overall meaning of the work, whatever that is. But this also draws our attention to Whiteley’s true gifts, which are shown off to their best advantage in the Art Gallery of NSW’s exhibition of his drawings.

Whatever ultimate reservations one may have about Whiteley as an artist, it is impossible not to be impressed by his ability as a draughtsman, especially when he is responding to the natural world.

The exhibition begins with a remarkable academic nude drawn in the life class at Julian Ashton’s, reminding us yet again that there are no shortcuts in art, and that performative freedom only comes after exacting discipline.

Among the later works, there is a chilling drawing from the Christie series in which women’s bodies are hung up like carcasses in a butcher shop. There are striking portraits too, from incisively naturalistic ones of himself and friends to the melting distortion in the features of a north African drug dealer smoking hashish.

There are landscapes too, though they are more exactly studies from life rather than landscapes that stand on their own as finished compositions. And there are exceptional images of animals as well, from a shrieking Tasmanian tiger — “one of the damned”, he notes on the page — to a pair of basset hounds racing towards us, or an emu with notations about the rhythm of its gait.

The animal drawings are a clue to the qualities also apparent in the studies of figures or the drawings of plants: Whiteley’s deepest instinct is for vitalistic energy, and he is at his best — and was no doubt at his happiest — when forgetting himself in his absorption in the vitality of another living thing, whether human, plant or animal.

Baldessin/Whiteley

National Gallery of Victoria, until January 28.

Brett Whiteley: Drawing is everything

Art Gallery of NSW, until March 31.