Riley’s relationship with Melbourne art dealer Beverly Knight and her Alcaston House Gallery certainly made a difference to his career. Alcaston held solo exhibitions for him almost every year throughout the 1990s, thoroughly documenting his work, and promoting him as an art star.
Acceptance brought Riley wide acclaim and a string of prestigious awards. In 1992 he won the Alice Prize for a series produced for the new Australian Embassy in Beijing. The following year he won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Commission Art Award. After these accolades he became the first Indigenous artist to be given a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1997.
For Knight this must also have been a tremendously exciting period. She had the vision to champion a truly original artist and the nouse to sign him up to an exclusive contract. But this restraint was to have far-reaching consequences. Two years after Ginger Riley’s retrospective at the NGV, the Indigenous art entrepreneur Fred Torres arranged a workshop at Ngukurr, during which Ginger painted 42 works for fellow artist Bill King. Torres was already at odds with Knight over a number of previous slights and disagreements, but when she found out about the workshop all hell broke loose. Knight immediately condemned the paintings as ‘fakes’, even though photographic and video documentation authenticated them beyond any reasonable doubt. These ‘unauthorised’ works, which are held in several private collections nationally, are never likely to sell for prices commensurate with those authenticated by Knight who still acts on behalf of the artist’s estate.
One of hundreds of photos of Ginger Riley painting for Bill King and Fred Torres during their Ngukurr workshop.
Moreover, Knight has refused to grant copyright permission to allow reproduction of these images in auction catalogues. This has effectively denied Riley’s family any hope of earning resale royalties upon their sale. The only one of these works that has ever been accepted for sale through a Tier 1 auction house was the very large Limmen Bight River Country (1999), which appeared at Deutscher Menzies in 2000. Carrying a presale estimate of $40,000–50,000, it sold for a mere $32,825, one-third of the value of an equivalent ‘authorised’ work.
STAR QUALITY
By 1995 Emily Kngwarreye had become the highest paid woman in Australia.3 At 85 years of age she was living in one of the Eastern Desert’s harshest regions and painting up to ten small canvases a day. Earth’s Creation I, her largest work, which was eventually sold for $1 million, was dreamed up out of doors, as she shuffled across the canvas, her brush dripping, dots multiplying, splodges of paint coagulating, and the sun blazing overhead. A year later Emily died, aged 87, leaving behind literally thousands of paintings.
There is a most compelling argument that without the success of Emily Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas, Aboriginal art could never have gained the status and ‘collectability’ that has driven the movement’s expansion during the past two decades. Their accumulated sales at public auction are almost double those of their closest competitors. Both exceed $17 million while Albert Namatjira and Clifford Possum have achieved barely $8 million. All four of these artists, the most successful of all time, created the majority of their paintings as independent artists, unfettered by contracts or exclusive representation. Some may argue that properly represented they would have made more money during their lifetimes, but I sincerely doubt it.
By the time Emily started painting in 1989 it had become all but impossible to run a professional and profitable Indigenous art gallery in Sydney without selling several $5,000 paintings each month. Fortunately these had begun to sell with greater frequency, but there was a glass ceiling at around $10,000. By 1990 only five works by Indigenous artists other than Albert Namatjira had sold at auction for more than $15,000 (though 33 works by Namatjira had exceeded that amount).4
After Rodney Gooch sold Emily’s first solo show in its entirety to Robert Holmes à Court in 1989, her paintings were shown in two highly successful commercial exhibitions in Sydney. They were also included in Abstraction, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the CAAMA/Utopia artists-in-residence program at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and shown at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne. While Gooch worked closely with Christopher Hodges, whose Utopia Art gallery was located in a rundown building on Parramatta Road far from Sydney’s cultural epicentre, Don Holt, the pastoralist whose property adjoined her Utopia homeland, placed Emily’s works in some of the best galleries around Australia.5 He and his wife, Janet, carefully nurtured the cachet of her works, and strategically donated key paintings to important state and national collections. Emily, meanwhile, shrugged off any attempt to dominate her output or claim exclusivity over it.
Emily had developed a style of painting by the mid 1990s that had become euphemistically referred to as ‘dump dump’ works. With prodigious energy she now painted wildly colourful canvases by double dipping large brushes into pots of paint, thereby creating floral impressions with alternately coloured, variegated outlines. Despite her age, her vigour was evident as she painted, often with a brush in each hand, simultaneously pounding them onto the canvas, spreading the bristles wide, and leaving the coagulating paint around the neck of the brush to create depth and form. Gradually, the runnels of dotted colour across the surfaces of her more abstracted works began to be more formally arranged in parallel lines. Although she created ‘line’ paintings as early as 1993, she began working in this style more during the last two years of her life. Solid lines of colour, stark and unadorned, often painted on multiple panels, powerfully represented the body markings that were created during Anmatjerre women’s ceremonies. Formal compositions comprising solid parallel lines eventually gave way to the meandering paths traced by the roots of the pencil yam as they forged their way through the desert sands.
Emily painting Earth’s Creation I, 1995.
Those who knew her well say Emily was a very strong personality. She was certainly not a frail old woman being manipulated by dealers and art advisers, as some would have it. She was a force of nature. Like the pollen of her totemic bush potato flower, she preferred her paintings to scatter on the wind. In a matter of just eight years this feisty octogenarian created no less than 4,000 and perhaps as many as 5,000 works of art.6 Almost from the moment she began painting her phenomenal success gave rise to the difficulties and complexities of becoming a major economic provider. Yet she took great pride in her ability to help her kith and kin.
I think it’s fair to say that the financial viability and vision of the entire industry made a quantum leap on the back of Emily’s work. By 1995 a lot of new galleries had opened. A number of established galleries were profitable for the first time and the independent dealers were drawn like moths to the flame. Galleries were now able to persuade clients that Aboriginal art was undervalued when compared to the work of mid-career white artists. The prices of paintings by dozens of artists, such as Anmatjerre, Alyawarre and Warlpiri women, accelerated exponentially on the heels of Emily’s success.
In this climate, independent dealers saw the potential of larger works, but the art centres crucially missed a significant opportunity. They continued to dole out relatively small canvases to even their most important and accomplished painters. Meanwhile dealers like Steve Nibbs, Peter Van Groesen, Hank Ebes and Fred Torres all commissioned big works by painters such as Maggie and Judy Watson and Emily Kngwarreye. Many of these are considered to be masterpieces today. Nibbs also worked with important men, especially Turkey Tolson and Mick Namarari. Tolson’s record price was, in fact, set by a work from this period. Originally sold through Kimberley Art in Melbourne, Straightening Spears at Illyingaugau (1997) achieved $180,000 when offered for sale by Lawson~Menzies in 2006. This was more than twice the price paid for any smaller work created by Tolson for Papunya Tula. Maggie Watson’s magnum opus Mina Mina Dreaming (1995) sold for $348,000 in 2008, just eclipsing the $336,000 paid in the previous year for her Digging Stick Dreaming (1995). Both of these works, as well as her sister Jud
y’s Women’s Dreaming (1995), which sold for $192,000 in 2008, were all created for Peter Van Groesen, the white husband of Maggie’s daughter.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Anooralya Awelye, 1996. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 151 x 90 cm.
In 1995, Fred Torres commissioned a number of major multi-panelled works including Emily’s Earth’s Creation I, which measured a massive 632 x 275 cm. While I was running the Aboriginal art department at Lawson~Menzies, I sold this work for the record price of $1,056,000. Three other large Emilys created for Torres and the Holts at Delmore Downs have since been sold for more than $1 million through private sale. No art centre has ever provided canvases to individual artists on this scale.
The success of women painters now had an extraordinary effect on the men. Pintupi men in Kintore and Kiwirrkurra began to abandon the graphic lexicon they had created with Geoffrey Bardon. As market interest in Tingari, men’s law paintings, slackened, several senior men made the conceptual leap to less descriptive, optically mesmeric designs based on their traditional patterns. This was especially so of Mick Namarari, Turkey Tolson and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa.
Shy and retiring, Mick Namarari experimented with often surprising results throughout the 1980s. In 1989 he attended the opening of the exhibition Mythscapes at the National Gallery of Victoria and two years later, in what was an important milestone both for Papunya Tula Artists and for him personally, Namarari won the eighth National Aboriginal Art Award. His stature continued to grow following solo exhibitions at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in 1991 and 1992, and with Utopia Art Sydney in 1993 and 1994. Namarari’s distinctive signature style reflected the microscopic life of the desert, its shimmering contours and ephemeral shifting light. When I look at the dazzling surfaces of these paintings, often composed of subtle currents of yellow and white fingertip stipple, they suggest an invisible ancestor palpably present in the paint. Namarari was the first recipient of Aboriginal Australia’s highest cultural accolade, the Australia Council’s Red Ochre Award, in 1994.
While he remained essentially loyal to Papunya Tula Artists, Mick Namarari painted a number of major works outside of the company during the mid to late 1990s. Several of these were masterpieces that found their way into important galleries and collections. His best sales results have been set since 2000, for those paintings he created toward the end of his life. This seems to have been sparked by the sale of a major black-and-white work originally commissioned by Steve Nibbs, of Yapa Art, in Alice Springs in 1998. The painting, exhibited in The White Show at William Mora Galleries in 1998, was offered for sale at Deutscher Menzies in 2000 with an estimate of $35,000–$50,000 and was picked up for just $28,200. One year later Sotheby’s persuaded the new owner to put the same painting up. This time it carried an estimate of $50,000–70,000 and sold for $100,500.
Ronnie Tjampitjinpa at work on a rendition of his Fire Dreaming, during 2006.
A wiry old cowboy with a quiet unassuming manner, Turkey Tolson was the chairman of Papunya Tula between 1985 and 1995. He was one of Papunya Tula’s best known artists, yet seemingly had no problem marrying this status with his desire to act independently. He painted for a variety of outside dealers from the early 1990s onward. Throughout his 30-year career, Tolson explored many themes, and although he could be extremely innovative and highly original, none of his works has achieved greater success than those featuring his most emblematic motif: the Spear Straightening associated with the site Illingaungau. It is present in every one of his ten highest sales at auction. Yet, to my mind he painted his most interesting works during the 1980s and these are greatly undervalued.
Ronnie Tjampitjinpa was a familiar figure across a wide expanse of country as he constantly travelled in his 4WD with his spears tied on top of the roof. Following his winning entries in several art prizes during the 1980s, he went on to create two successive solo exhibitions for Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi that were organised by Papunya Tula. From the mid 1990s onward, he divided his time between painting and ceremonial obligations. He was just as happy working for the artist’s collective as he was for a wide array of independent dealers. Papunya Tula supplied works for solo exhibitions at Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne in 1995, and at Utopia Art Sydney in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2002. Ronnie was elected chairman of the organisation in 2000. Even so, he continued to paint for anyone. Although he had begun painting as a young man when Geoffrey Bardon was still at Papunya, his highest sales results have been for works created during the 1990s. This is quite the reverse of the other ‘Bardon artists’. Early paintings by Ronnie are rare, and do not exhibit the visual strength of those created by many of the older men. His highest auction results are dominated by those with Papunya Tula provenance. Only large and extraordinary paintings created for private dealers have made it into his top 20 sales.
George (Hairbrush) and Willy Tjungurrayi are the other two artists who make up what I like to think of as ‘the gang of five’. Their paintings have been described as ‘distinct poetic abstractions’.7 George Tjungurrayi held his first solo exhibition in 1997 at Utopia Art Sydney and his next solo exhibition the following year at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne. This attracted a rapturous review in the Melbourne Age. Although George has painted occasionally for independent dealers, eight of his top ten results are Papunya Tula works. His brother Willy had his first solo exhibition at William Mora Galleries in Melbourne in 2000, and has acted independently since 2002. He only paints for Papunya Tula when living in Kintore.
This ‘gang of five’ carried Western Desert men’s painting far beyond the symbolic conventions devised with Bardon at the dawn of the movement. The magical power of their artworks draws on the fluted carving, keyed designs and fine parallel lines that embellish men’s ceremonial shields and sacred objects. Their works invite the viewer to enter a crucial cultural performance. As the eye travels over their painted surfaces the viewer is charged with an intensity that can become quite disorienting. From the moment of their conception, these paintings were compared favourably with those created by op art and simulationist artists such as Victor Vasarely, Ross Bleckner, Philip Taaffe and Bridget Riley. So neatly did they fit with Western notions of abstract minimalism that they created a bridge across which many contemporary art collectors ventured into Aboriginal art for the first time.
Many other male artists, however, did not make this transition. They included the formerly popular painters Long Jack Phillipus, Maxie Tjampitjinpa, Paddy Carroll Tjungurrayi, William Sandy and Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa. As these artists watched the work of a number of their contemporaries and other younger and emerging artists sell more regularly and at higher prices than their own, they supported the Papunya Community Council’s move to establish Warumpi Arts. This became an alternative support organisation and retail outlet for artists continuing to live in the Papunya community. Yet the paintings they produced earlier in their careers for Papunya Tula were generally their finest.
Maxie Tjampitjinpa is particularly worthy of mention. His Bushfire series, first exhibited in Sydney in 1992, was a major stylistic development. These paintings depicted the bushfire that raged across the Warlpiri country of his ancestors, leaving the blackened earth to await rain and renewal. Maxie became a star after being included in important group exhibitions long before solo exhibitions were common. He began spending more time in Alice Springs where he preferred to paint for Warumpi Arts and a number of independent dealers who supported him. He toured Europe in 1995 with the Robert Holmes à Court collection, but his prodigious contribution to the Aboriginal art movement was cut short by his untimely death from renal failure in 1997.
George (Hairbrush) Tjungurrayi, Tingari Cycle, 1998. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 210 x 200 cm.
One of the most important early desert painters, Johnny Warangkula, is often portrayed as a victim of the rapacious art market. His eyesight had begun to fail by the mid 1980s and thereafter he painted infrequently. By the end of the 1990s he was old and infirm. For a time he produced artboards for just
$50 each, selling them on the streets of Alice Springs. In 1997, however, an artboard that he’d painted 25 years earlier sold at auction for $206,000.8 Three years later, the same painting resold at Sotheby’s for $486,500. In 2000, this astounding figure was more than twice the world record price ever previously paid for an Aboriginal painting. Johnny had been destitute, and then almost overnight, quite miraculously, his work was in demand once more. He became completely preoccupied with meeting the demands of local and overseas dealers. He was a big name, and people bought anything he produced, no matter how messy the execution, or how child-like the imagery. Today, all but a handful of these raw and expressionistic late career paintings are shunned by the secondary market. Everything he painted after the 1970s is now considered crude and unworthy. The ultimate irony is that Warangkula earned far more from these than he ever did from his ‘finest’ works.
These then were the star male artists of the time, and a number of bitter demarcation disputes developed around them and their female counterparts. There were dealers who did what they could to monopolise their output, and dealers who would do whatever they could to entice them away.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
The following quotes published in the Art Market Report in July 2008 clearly demonstrate that these disputes continue to inform the entrenched positions and enmities that still exist between a number of dealers today. One went so far as to say that every effort that he ever made on behalf of Emily Kngwarreye was ‘one step forward and two steps back’ because ‘idiots came and ruined it’.9 In the same article the ‘idiots’, or rival dealers, are described as ‘some of the most disreputable people I have ever met’. Yet many of the finest works Emily ever painted were created for those very ‘idiots’. Although they all turned up for the opening of her solo retrospective exhibition at the National Art Centre in Tokyo, Japan, in 2008, the enmity between those who sought to monopolise Emily’s output, and those who preferred to see her act as a free agent, was just as fierce as it had been a decade earlier.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 35