All of these organisations assisted ever-willing painters to blossom and market their art. Many were women. Some were the daughters and wives of successful male artists who had learned to paint by ‘assisting’ on large works. Some developed their own styles and innovations, and their works were distributed through these conduits to a range of outlets across Australia and abroad.
The most prominent of the men painting in and out of town were Dick Lechleitner, Barney Daniels, Wenton Rubuntja and Clifford Possum. The most notable women included Eunice and Pansy Napangardi, Gabriella and Michelle Possum, Dorothy Robertson Napangardi and Linda Syddick.20 But many others who were living in the surrounding communities brought paintings to Alice Springs. Some travelled further afield, beyond the centre, as Papunya Tula and the Aboriginal Artists Agency created greater promotional opportunities. About 20 artists continued to live at Papunya and paint for Papunya Tula. Those who also sold works directly to contractors and independent dealers included Maxie Tjampitjinpa, William Sandy, Don and Two Bob Tjungurrayi, Paddy Carol, Dinny Nolan and Michael Nelson Tjakamarra.
By the mid 1980s, Anthony Wallis, the former Aboriginal Arts Board project officer and Director of the Aboriginal Artists Agency, had become The Company’s Managing Director. He appointed Roslyn Premont, newly returned from working in the Australian Embassy in Paris, and her partner Mark Lennard to run the Centre for Aboriginal Artists. A regular stream of artists visited, painted and received encouragement, while 50 metres up the road Daphne Williams was the face of Papunya Tula in town. Field operatives collected the paintings that were piled high like rugs, in uniform sizes, around the floor.
The first really independent Indigenous art entrepreneur was Clifford Possum. Daphne Williams wouldn’t buy his works while he was living in Alice Springs, but he could easily get around this by simply walking down the road to sell to any gallery, independent dealer or tourist who had the money. Today, many of the works he sold at this time are offered to auction houses for resale. They may bear Clifford Possum’s signature, but they all need to be attributed by ‘experts’. Though he was the pre-eminent Anmatjerre male artist from the Mount Allan region, Clifford shared many Dreamings and painted with a similar style to several of his countrymen, such as Brogus Tjapangarti and Michael Tommy Tjapangarti, who were also fine artists. But they were not as accomplished or well known as Clifford, and could not command anything like his prices. So Clifford often took their paintings into town to sign and sell as if they were his own. He saw nothing untoward about this at the time. The paintings, and the Dreamings they portrayed, belonged to him. Today these paintings are referred to by many as ‘fakes’ but there are plenty of fine, totally genuine works of Aboriginal art amongst them. They deserve to be recognised as such, though they will never be as valuable as a work created by Clifford himself.
Today, checking the bone fides of paintings that were credited to Clifford Possum has become something of an industry in itself. As late as the mid 1990s, Clifford’s daughters, Gabriella and Michelle, and other members of his entourage meticulously filled in areas of dotting on many of his emblematic canvases. All of these paintings are considered to be controversial, and must go through a process of proper attribution as soon as they appear for public sale.
Gabriella, however, has proven to be a genuine talent in her own right. She was a finalist in the Alice Art Prize in 1983 at just 16 years of age, and over the following years she developed her own appealingly decorative style. By 1986 she had designed the record cover for the ARIA21 award-winning Aboriginal rock group Coloured Stone. She also received a professional development grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Travelling with her father and sister throughout the late 1980s, Gabriella visited galleries and painted publicly during exhibitions. These were organised by Alice Springs entrepreneur Joy Aitken, who euphemistically called the travelling group ‘The Possum Shop’. Aitken herself completed many of Clifford’s canvases during his regular disappearances. It was often the only way to get them finished, and to keep the show on the road.
Not every painter was as creative as Clifford, but many were developing their own style. Maxie Tjampitjinpa invented and perfected the flicked dotting technique that became the hallmark of his own work, and he went on to influence many other desert artists. This rapid stippling effect across the canvas could convey aspects of the land and its plant and animal life that lay submerged within the fixed iconography. The swarming of flying ants, the haze of heat and dust, and the movement of fire and drifting smoke were all subjects that inspired Maxie’s prolific output. His love of painting was evident in the patient way he built layer upon layer of vibrant contrasting colours to provide a sense of depth and complexity.
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra was just a young man at the time. He dreamed of a future as a great artist, and after hanging around the older painters he was formally asked to join Papunya Tula as a full-time member in 1983. His natural flair for inventive composition and zestful colour was to bring him national prominence. In 1984 he won the inaugural National Aboriginal Art Award.22 A number of major commissions which were arranged by Papunya art coordinators Andrew Crocker and Daphne Williams followed. Nelson’s next big career leap was facilitated by the Aboriginal Artists Agency. He was commissioned to create the 8.2-metre mural in the northern foyer of the Sydney Opera House. The following year he completed the mosaic forecourt of the new Parliament House in Canberra and was introduced to the Queen. And a year later, following his first solo exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Nelson participated in the Art Car Project by hand-painting a BMW M3 racing car, thereby joining the likes of Robert Rauschenburg, Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder.
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra signing his editioned print Four Snake Dreaming at Mount Singleton, at Coo-ee Gallery in 1995.
Linda Syddick Napaltjarri at the opening of her exhibition, The Windmill and the Witch Doctor, Coo-ee Gallery, 2006.
In spite of this early success the latter half of Michael Nelson’s career has been less spectacular. His early and mid-career works have languished in the secondary market and interest in his art has only re-emerged since developing a far freer gestural style in workshops with Michael Eather and Imants Tillers in Brisbane post-2000. Nevertheless, it was Nelson’s early high profile and groundbreaking commissions that cemented the presence of Western Desert art on the world stage.
Long before the international art world embraced Emily Kngwarreye, Pansy Napangardi was growing up in Papunya, watching the desert art founders as they painted. A totally unaffected, extremely pretty young woman, she became the first professional female desert painter amongst the Luritja and Warlpiri. She moved to Alice Springs after marrying, and sold her work independently until the late 1980s. In 1989, she won the National Aboriginal Art Award and had a solo exhibition at the Sydney Opera House. Another followed with Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne. Pansy’s reputation flowered at the very moment that the attributes of personal style and expressive ability had become highly prized by collectors. Unfettered by convention, she developed a technique of applying multi-coloured dots by dipping the point of her painting stick directly onto the meniscus of a range of complementary colours. She became the most prominent female artist at Papunya Tula during the early to mid 1990s, but later reverted to practising as an independent artist for a range of private dealers.
As a young child Linda Syddick was adopted by Shorty Lungkata, and grew up on the Pintupi homelands. In the 1970s she began assisting Shorty, Nosepeg Tjupurrula and Uta Uta Tjangala in Papunya. Tall and graceful, Syddick attracted the attention of Russell Sim, a former dentist from Melbourne with a PhD. They fell in love and moved to Alice Springs in the early 1980s, where she began painting works related to the sacred men’s Tingari cycle. This was a notable departure from tradition, but Shorty had given her permission. In the words of distinguished authority Fred Myers, she became ‘the first Pintupi modernist painter’.23 Syddick quickly evolved into a highly innovative artist, combining convention
al Pintupi iconography with figurative elements. Fusing Christian stories with Aboriginal tradition brought her fame in the 1980s. By the time I got to know Linda well, she was a sweet old lady. We staged one of her last exhibitions at Coo-ee Gallery. Even in old age and infirmity, Russell and Linda remained absolutely devoted to each other.
Though both Pansy and Linda were the first women of their respective clans to paint, Dorothy Napangardi is more important historically. Her early childhood was spent at Mina Mina near Lake Mackay. In the early 1980s, Dorothy lived in Alice Springs with her elderly husband, to whom she had been promised at a young age. She bore him four daughters and later, after the marriage broke down, gave birth to her youngest child, Annette, by another man. She began painting her earliest works in 1987 using vibrant acrylic colours. These depicted the bush plum and bush banana that grow in abundance near Mina Mina and dramatically change colour as they ripen. From the outset of her stellar career, she intertwined semi-naturalistic depictions of bush foods, creating rhythmic effects and demonstrating a superb sense of composition. These were inspired by the mimetic dancing of the Karntakurlangu ancestral women, a subject that would inform her Mina Mina saltpan paintings a decade later, and bring her international acclaim.
After leaving The Company’s Centre for Aboriginal Artists to start her own gallery, Roslyn Premont nurtured and promoted several artists to national recognition, including Linda Syddick and Dorothy Napangardi. From the outset, Premont’s Gallery Gondwana became the most important privately owned exhibiting gallery in Alice Springs. Her gallery manager, Bryce Ponsford, had formerly worked for Papunya Tula as a remote field officer and he had befriended Walala and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, the two brothers from the ‘lost tribe’ of Pintupi who walked in from the desert in 1984. After being taught to paint by his brother in the late 1980s, Walala preferred to work for Premont and Ponsford, while Warlimpirrnga remained loyal to Papunya Tula. Eventually both brothers, as well as ‘Dr’ George Tjapaltjarri (the medicine man who put them through the Law after their arrival in Kiwirrkurra), all joined Gallery Gondwana. Solo exhibitions in major galleries interstate followed.
ACROSS THE TANAMI – THE EMERGING WARLPIRI ARTISTS
A short drive north of Alice Springs the Tanami Track heads west, while the Stuart Highway, but for the odd meander, travels straight as a cannon ball the whole 1,500 kilometres north to Darwin. In the old days the car would drop gently off the bitumen onto Tanami gravel, but a sealed road now extends 130 kilometres northwest, before endless corrugations lead to Halls Creek in Western Australia. Accessible to the left and right lie sand dune and spinifex country, interspersed with shady riverbanks that turn to raging rivers in the wet. At first the track skirts Anmatjerre land where Aboriginal stockmen still work Napperby Station and Mount Allan. To the south Luritja, Pintupi, Warlpiri, Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara people settled at Papunya, Haasts Bluff and Mount Liebig along with dozens of tiny outstations scattered in between. Another 150 kilometres further up the Tanami lies the southern reach of Warlpiri land and its largest community, Yuendumu, to which the desert painting movement first spread in the early 1980s.
Before I began travelling to desert country almost 30 years ago there were limited opportunities to source works from my shop counter in Sydney. There were very few books about Aboriginal art, and to be honest I didn’t even know what ‘Papunya Tula’ was. Not having been to Alice Springs, one dot painting looked much the same as another to me. Once I discovered Jennifer Isaacs, beautiful book, Australia’s Living Heritage, published in 1984, I became so fascinated I bought 300 copies and resold them through Coo-ee. I used its amazing colour plates of Aboriginal painters as display material all over the shop. For the first time people in Sydney could actually see where the art came from and who had made it.
Back in Alice after a drive through the Tanami Desert in 1987.
One day Daphne Williams walked in. Impressively well groomed, she looked a bit like a representative of the Country Women’s Association, but swiftly engaged me in a lively discussion about desert art. I was impressed when she pointed out that a dot painting Jennifer Isaacs had referred to generically as a ‘Papunya’ painting in her book was, in fact, an example by a Napperby artist who was working in the Anmatjerre tradition. I knew they were different places, but I didn’t know that there were different sub-genres of desert art.
Another visitor who changed our lives was Janet Chisholm, who was in town to see her family. Janet had grown up in Paddington, not far from Coo-ee, and married into the Chisholm family which had run cattle on Napperby Station since the 1940s. She encouraged the local Anmatjerre people to paint canvases and tasteful gift items for the tourist trade. Inspired to boost the range and diversity of our stock, we soon developed a relationship with her, and on my very first trip to the desert we set off to visit the Chisholm family homestead. Lacking clear instructions, Anne and I veered off the Tanami Track at the Napperby Creek crossing, and pelted along beside the dry riverbed in a rented open-top Mini Moke. We blindly followed one bush track after another as the cattle tracks fanned out toward the horizon. All roads led to Rome, however, and in spite of our anxiety we eventually stumbled upon it. After a pleasant but rushed visit, we hurtled across the 80-kilometre stretch of unsealed dirt before the car conked out just as we reached the Stuart Highway. Luckily, a local priest towed us straight to the airport, where we abandoned the car and scraped onto the last flight back to Sydney, still caked from head to foot in fine red dust.
Those years spent rattling around in the bush were some of the best years of my life. Anne and I were newly married and loved swagging out under a sky thick with stars. The wonderfully eccentric and fascinating people we met kept us constantly entertained and inspired. I remember another trip when we drove down the dirt road and picked up an old jilpi who led us to the Yuelamu store at Mount Allan. It was run by a bloke called Peter Taylor, who operated the local Royal Flying Doctor Service as well as his own small private zoo. Emus, bush turkeys and dingoes all watched from behind the cyclone fencing as we pulled up.
In the absence of funding, the Mount Allan store sold canvas and paint to artists, then later bought the completed paintings and resold them to urban galleries. In 1988, the Yuelamu Art Gallery and Museum was opened, to local delight, by Hazel Hawke, who was at that time the highly popular wife of then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. Mount Allan was one of only a tiny handful of Aboriginal communities that accepted money from the Australian government during the bicentennial celebrations. Refusing to fly the Aboriginal flag, for reasons that have never been disclosed, the Anmatjerre men used the money to create a ‘men’s business’ room attached to the store. It contained their sacred objects, and women were strictly prohibited. We organised an exhibition at Coo-ee in Sydney, and later the community appointed Steve Ronayne, owner of the beautiful Aptos Cruz Gallery in the Adelaide Hills, to be their wholesale agent. Exhibitions and retail sales proceeded strongly for several years before the quality of the work declined and its markets dried up. The overly decorative Anmatjerre works of Napperby and Mount Allan became more difficult to market. Ironically, an art centre established just up the track on the southern reach of Warlpiri land at Yuendumu was destined to make a much more lasting contribution to the modern movement.
Painting at Yuendumu is widely believed to have only begun in the early 1980s. Even amongst key insiders of the Aboriginal art industry, very few people know how fast the influence of the Papunya murals spread into the Tanami Desert. Within months of their creation in the early 1970s, Warlpiri men had also painted on the walls of a community building in Yuendumu, the Yuendumu Men’s Museum, which was purpose-built as a keeping place for men’s sacred ceremonial objects. Geoff Bardon visited the community for the unveiling, before the Papunya murals were completed. Though neglected for more than three decades, these murals and the building that houses them were recently restored by the current art coordinators Cecilia Alfonso and Gloria Morales, at a cost of $750,000. These beautiful mu
rals can still be seen lining the interior walls of this historic building. Miraculously they have avoided the fate of the Honey Ant mural, which was painted over by the Papunya administrators during the 1970s.
But after Bardon’s visit it took just over a decade before the art movement as such was initiated at Yuendumu. In 1983, the new school headmaster, Kim Bridgewater, commissioned a number of men to depict their Dreamings on the 30 doors of the community school. This project had a similar inspirational effect on the artists and their families as the Honey Ant mural had in Papunya. The Yuendumu Doors were painted by Paddy Japaljarri Sims, Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson, Paddy Japaljarri Stewart and one or two others. The doors became the subject of a book in 1991 and, after being carefully unhinged and restored, they were exhibited at the South Australian Museum in 1995. They have since become an important part of its permanent collection and have travelled the world as a testament to the genesis of Warlpiri art.
Meanwhile, when a group of women working with the French anthropologist Francoise Dussart created artworks at Yuendumu based on their body painting designs, no one could have foreseen the impact these vivid collaborative canvases would make. Women would eventually become the dominant force in desert painting. The works also heralded the first of many new tribal painting styles, although at this early stage, men’s law was still considered the primary spiritual knowledge underpinning the most important works.
The Yuendumu art centre, Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association, was given its name by the female painters. It means ‘belonging to fire’ in Warlpiri. The art centre was incorporated in 1986, following its first, highly successful exhibition at Sydney’s Hogarth Galleries held during the previous year. A large collaborative work was sold to the National Gallery of Australia for what was, at that time, the enormous sum of $3,000. The sale of this and other major collaborative works by the women painters resulted in the purchase of a Toyota, an unprecedented and spectacular result for women living in such impoverished circumstances. To those of us involved at the time, it seemed simply miraculous.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 25