Brett WHITELEY [4456]

   Cause of his death was a heroin overdose.

  General Notes:

Brett was a well known and successful artist, often painting while using drugs which finally took his life.

Andrew HornerySydney's art circles are abuzz with gossip about the sale of Brett Whiteley's Naked Blue Studio. While the reported sale price of $3.4 million has been described by insiders as too high, the actual price is understood to be well over $3 million - a record far both a contemporary Australian artist and a Whiteley work.
Word is that Whiteley's widow Wendy had been making inquiries around town about how much the huge painting would be worth,
The Woollahra art dealer Michael Carr is said to have caught wind of
this and acted as a broker with Sotheby's, which eventually sold the Sotheby's, which eventually sold the work by private treaty. Carr would not comment. While the painting is expected to remain in Australia as part of a private collection, it is not know if it will stay in Sydney
The work had been on loan to the Brett Whiteley Studio, administered by the Art Gallery of NISW, but was in storage, reportedly because it did not
"fit in with the current exhibition" The 1.9-metre by 4.9-metre dip-tych is one of many works in the Whiteley collection, long the subject of disputes and courtroom dramas.
Wendy Whiteley inherited the valuable collection after her daughter Arkie died from stomach cancer in 2001, aged 36.
Arkie, who won the bulk of her father's estate after a legal contest with his former girlfriend, Janice Spencer, in 1993, left most of the $14 million estate to her mother. Wendy later told the ABCs Australian Story the loss of her daughter "just seemed very unfair. Much more unfair than Brett's death, she said, because she seemed like the innocent that was being
punished somehow, by a God I don't believe in"
Ref Sydney Morning Herald Oct 2005.

Brett married Living