From bark and stone to board and canvas

Posted: 11 Aug 2011  |  By: Patricia Anderson - Editor

In past issues, aAR has featured Aboriginal artists — both traditional and contemporary. This issue provides some insights into how this remarkable and original work (while not lacking the usual complement of formulaic, copycat, derivative and bandwagon examples) has for some time now occupied centrestage of Australia's art world — and how it arrived in the international marketplace where seasoned collectors were not slow to recognise a unique phenomenon when they saw it.

We have only to visit the bright and elegant new spaces custom-designed for it at the national gallery in Canberra (discussed in this issue by Sasha Grishin), the appearance of traditional bark paintings in the rooms once reserved for Victorian paintings and sculptures at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (they were once sequestered in gloomy downstairs spaces), not to mention the number of private galleries that represent Aboriginal arts wholly and solely, to realise this efflorescence will not subside into mere fashion, nor be driven by it.

What a long way we have come from Australian museums collecting artefacts and paintings as curiosities or anthropological odds and sods, with scant recognition of their aesthetic qualities. And what a long way from the vicissitudes of our most celebrated Aboriginal painter, Albert Namatjira, whose reputation, even in the sleepy 1950s, was an international one. In 1970, American singer Tony Bennett, who was performing in Sydney, had seen prints of Albert Namatjira's work and hoped to take at least one of the deceased artist's paintings back to America with him. He invited anyone with one to sell to contact him at the Sheraton Hotel.

Today, American collectors still feature prominently among the international buyers of Aboriginal art, and it has certainly claimed the attention of international museums such as the Musée Branley in Paris, which mounted an adventurous exhibition of works by, among others, Paddy Bedford, John Mawurndjul, Tommy Watson, Gulumbu Yunupingu, Ningura Napurrula and Michael Riley in 2006. This year, in April the British Museum mounted an exhibition of Indigenous baskets called Baskets and Belonging. Jeremy Eccles has written about it in this issue.

Namatjira was born at the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission, west of Alice Springs, in July 1902. He was camel driving when, in 1934, he met the man who would teach him to paint western-style landscapes in watercolour: his name was Rex Battarbee.

Namatjira's progress was rapid. His first solo show in Adelaide, a sellout, attracted the attention of the Art Gallery of South Australia and it became the first state gallery to acquire one of his works. In 1945, his Sydney show grossed around £1,000 — an astonishing sum for any artist at that time. The daily newspapers reported on these events breathlessly.

Melbourne art critic Alan McCulloch was alarmed. ''In recent years the phenomenon of a group of aboriginal artists successfully learning to paint water-colours in a European manner has achieved great popularity. But among thinking Australians it is regarded as quite tragic.''

He pointed to an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, where traditional works of the original Australians virtually stole the show. ''Many people realised, for the first time, that here was an art form of absolutely pure origin, the art of the oldest man in the world. … And is this ancient art, with its unique symbolism, to be adulterated through contact with ourselves, the white Australians, who represent the youngest race in the world? … In any case the regrettable fact remains that the spread of this fashion among aborigines spells the death knell of aboriginal art. Artists, scientists and anthropologists throughout the world will mourn its passing.'' However, events in the 1990s and beyond would confound McCulloch's predictions. Apart from the sheer beauty and originality of the best works, the making of Aboriginal art, or rather the conditions surrounding the making and selling of it, would attract the attention of those both inside and outside the art world: art dealers, collectors, social workers, pastors and, alas, the bureaucrats.

In 1963, painter Russell Drysdale, who knew the remote outback regions intimately and had visited Aboriginal rock engravings in the north-west of Australia, was moved to write: ''It is conceivable that, while the builders of Chartres were raising their sublime cathedral, these early men were engraving their vision … upon enduring rocks of a cathedral elevated by the elements from the face of the earth.''