George Noel Gittoes, (born 7 December 1949) is an Australian artist, documentary filmmaker, photographer, and writer. For the greater part of his career he has focused on human conflict, but always as a personal eye-witness. Since 1986 this has meant constant travel to war zones and areas of conflict, including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Somalia, Cambodia, Western Sahara and Algeria, the Middle East (including Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon), South Africa, Rwanda, Mozambique, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, China and Tibet, Bougainville, East Timor, Congo, and Iraq (both before and after the 2003 war), and troubled areas in the USA. Since 2007 he has worked particularly in Pakistan, Afghanistan and, since the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine. Having been a co-founder of the Yellow House Artist Collective in Sydney in 1970, in 2011 he opened a Yellow House Jalalabad in Afghanistan. Gittoes has worked in a number of media, including drawing, painting, photography, and film making. His work is held in major galleries around Australia, including the National Gallery in Canberra and the Australian War Memorial.I Witness, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 2014, pp. 117–118.
Gittoes has directed around 20 films, as well as collaborating on a number of Pashto-language dramas in Pakistan. His first wife, Gabrielle Dalton, collaborated as co-producer with Gittoes on many of his early films. His second wife, Hellen Rose, has been travelling with him and collaborating with him on many of his films made in conflict zones since around 2009. His most recent films have been filmed in Ukraine and in Afghanistan, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Early life and education George Noel Gittoes was born in Sydney, New South Wales, on 7 December 1949, the son of public servant, Claude Gittoes (who eventually became Secretary of the NSW Department of Main RoadsNSW Department of Main Roads, The roadmakers: a history of main roads in New South Wales (Sydney 1976); Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (Craftsman House, 1998), 10.), and potter Joyce Gittoes (née Halpin).”Joyce Gittoes”, Design and Art Australia Online, https://www.daao.org.au/bio/joyce-gittoes/biography/ Other significant family influences were his maternal grandfather, racehorse trainer and local identity, George Halpin, whom Gittoes credits with instilling the toughness he later needed to remain calm in the face of danger,Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 25–27, 77–79, 138–141; National Gallery of Australia: https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object/283657 and his seven-years older sister, Pamela, also a painter.“Pamela Griffith b. 1943”; “Pamela Griffith OAM”
Gittoes grew up in Rockdale, New South Wales, where at the age of 11 he would stage puppet shows in his backyard. When they became popular, he started charging for them, donating the proceeds to the Red Cross.
After an unhappy time at Kogarah High School,, he transferred to Kingsgrove North High School for his final two years. At school Gittoes became interested in Islamic cultures, and under his influence his art class specialised in Islamic art for the NSW Higher School Certificate in 1967.
In 1968 he commenced An Arts/Law degree at the University of Sydney, but abandoned it towards the end of the year to travel to New York after his lecturer, Bernard Smith, introduced him to the visiting American critic, Clement Greenberg. Greenberg encouraged Gittoes to visit America because he liked his minimalist abstract paintings, but once in New York Gittoes spent time at the Art Students League of New York, and worked with African American figurative painter Joseph Delaney. Influenced by Delaney’s concern with the civil rights movement, Gittoes’ art also became more political and he began the Hotel Kennedy Suite, inspired by opposition to the Vietnam War. He also met and briefly worked with Andy Warhol.
Career Overview Gittoes is a painter, water-colourist, drawer, performance artist, filmmaker, photographer, printmaker, and sculptor. According to Mitchell Fine Art, he has been described as a pop artist, a figurative artist, a modernist, and a post-modernist, but his work is all related to documenting. Gittoes' early travels include: US, 1968-69; UK, Europe, and US, 1984; Nicaragua, 1986; Philippines 1989; Africa and Asia 1993-95. He earned the designation "unofficial war artist", having travelled under the auspices of the Australian Defence Force, usually with and their protection and some assistance from them, but with no constraints on his work.
Gittoes and his first wife Gabrielle Dalton, who often acted as producer, collaborated on many films made in Australia.
Gittoes and his second wife Hellen Rose, a musician and performance artist, have become well known for making anti-war art together since around 2011. It has seen them travel to several war zones in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Somalia, and Ukraine, where they travelled to make a documentary film about local artists. Gittoes produces, directs, and shoots the films, while Rose co-produces, acts, and creates the soundtracks.
Work in Australia, 1970–1985 Returning to Australia in late 1969, a meeting with Martin Sharp led to the establishment of the Yellow House in the King’s Cross area of Sydney. Gittoes worked with another friend, Bruce Goold, to transform a two-storey building in Macleay Street, Potts Point, into a space in which artists, film-makers and performers could both live and exhibit their work. In an Australia whose culture had been seen by many as stifled and colonial, the Yellow House was a revelation. Gittoes’ own particular contribution was a psychedelic Puppet Theatre, in which he and assistants performed to enthusiastic audiences, using glove puppets Gittoes himself made. In 1971 Gittoes, unsympathetic with some of the directions the Yellow House was taking, broke away from the group. He had also been very deeply affected by the suicide of his girlfriend, Marie Briebauer. He had met Briebauer in San Francisco, and eventually she followed him to Sydney. But she was facing up to difficult issues with her family, and was not completely accepted by the Yellow House community.Joanna Mendelssohn and Martin Sharp, The Yellow House, 1970-72 (1990); George Gittoes, Blood mystic (Sydney 2016) 68–91. For Gittoes, Briebauer’s death was “a shattering experience”, memories of which would recur in his darker works.Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998) 24, 72–76, 135.
A keen surfer, Gittoes travelled for a while in a caravan up and down the south coast of NSW. Eventually he settled in Bundeena, New South Wales, a village between sea and bush south of Sydney. For a time abandoning the politically driven art inspired by Joe Delaney, Gittoes produced a large series of photographs, drawings and paintings, eventually leading to a short film, Rainbow Way (1977). These images were abstract, using ideas drawn from both Islamic and Aboriginal art (in the latter case, especially the creation myth of the Rainbow Serpent), but also created out of direct observation of the effects of light underwater. He also experimented for a time with holograms and with computer-generated images, working with CSIRO scientist Zoltan Hegedus and Melbourne artist Paula Dawson, and Jack Alexander of the University of NSW. Art historian Gabrielle Dalton collaborated with him on the film, and they later married. Gittoes’ interest in Aboriginal art and performance, which began with meeting dancers from Mornington Island in 1972, led in 1977 to a trip to the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Martin Wesley-Smith composed music for the film.Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 13–15.
Gittoes and Dalton were keen to bring art and performance to a wide audience. In 1979 they formed the environmental theatre group, Theatre Reaching Environments Everywhere (TREE), with Martin Wesley-Smith, Ronaldo Cameron, and Ian Fredericks. Between 1979 and 1984 TREE presented a number of huge theatrical events, mostly on beaches around Sydney, involving hundreds of local people. Gavin Fry has described these as “some of the most complete and spectacular art performances Australia has seen”.Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), p. 16. Gittoes and Dalton made a film called Wattamolla that was shown at the International Dance Film and Videotape Festival and Conference in New York in June 1981.
Around the same time, keen to return to social issues, Gittoes made Refined fire, a highly experimental but also “truly apocalyptic” film about misuse of fossil fuels and the danger of nuclear war.Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 15–16. Now, in partnership with Dalton, Gittoes turned to documentary film-making, first with Tracks of the Rainbow (1984), a film about a group of Aboriginal children from New South Wales travelling north to meet with tribal elders from Mornington Island. This was followed in 1985 with a trilogy of films about life, cultural confrontation, and art in the Northern Territory: Warriors and lawmen (about conflict between Aboriginal people and the white legal system), Frontier women, and Unbroken spirit.Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 17–18; https://www.daao.org.au/bio/george-gittoes/biography/
Broadening horizons, 1986–1993 Since 1986, Gittoes career has particularly focused on areas of war and conflict. He and Dalton conceived of a series of films on women who were active in war zones, titles Where she Dares. In 1986 Gittoes went to Nicaragua, intending to make a film about NBC reporter Jamie Gangel. When that proved politically awkward, he turned his attention to four women Sandinista fighters who also wrote poetry. The result was The Bullets of the Poets (1986).https://www.acmi.net.au/works/82368--the-bullets-of-the-poets/; Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 18–19.
This was to have been followed in 1989 by a film about women political prisoners in the Philippines, but changes to tax rules in Australia meant that funding dried up. Nevertheless, Gittoes made a number of powerful paintings focusing especially on the numerous atrocities being committed in the Philippines.Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 19–20.
The success of the Northern Territory and Nicaragua works led to an invitation from the Wollongong City Art Gallery to be an artist-in-residence, working initially at the BHP steelworks at Port Kembla. This led to a long series titled Heavy Industry, completed between 1989 and 1992, encompassing steelworks and mines in Port Kembla, Broken Hill, Newcastle (NSW), Whyalla (South Australia) and Ipswich (Queensland). As well as portraying the giant machinery of an industry in decline, many of the works were sensitive portraits of ordinary workers. One depiction of the Abedare Colliery in Ipswich, Queensland, Open Cut, won the Wynne Prize for landscape art in 1993.Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 20–21.
Also in this period, Gittoes won the 1992 Blake Prize for Religious Art for Ancient Prayer, a portrait of his old friend Ronaldo Cameron in the advanced stages of motor neurone disease.https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/entities/anuarchivesitem/4d99661e-fd3a-4e45-bec2-60610614ca86; Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998), 20.
The Gulf War of 1991 produced in Gittoes a strong sense of outrage, leading to a series of etchings, Empire State Suite, and a major painting, Baghdad Starry Night. It also inspired a new belief that the artist could “be an independent witness – to challenge the image making of the mass media."Gavin Fry, George Gittoes (1998) 21–22 (with quotation); I Witness, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 2014, 115.
Peacekeeping artist, 1993–2001