The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  the art was not allowed to come naturally anymore. Even Emily was pushed into doing things that she didn’t want to do.

  He believed that the art became less ‘authentic’ when it changed according to market dynamics. The majority of new collectors, however, appeared to be responding in quite a different way.

  Emily Kngwarreye passed away in 1996, just as Aboriginal art was truly coming of age in the international arena. That same year important exhibitions of Emily’s work were held as far afield as Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Johannesburg, New Delhi and La Paz. A year after her death, Emily was one of three artists to represent Australia in the 1997 exhibition Fluent at the Venice Biennale, curated by Brenda Croft, Hetti Perkins and Judy Watson. It also featured contemporary works by Watson, and woven sculptural forms by South Australian fibre artist Yvonne Koolmatrie. In India, the exhibition The Eye of the Storm was a huge hit, and later exhibitions curated by Howard Morphy, Ace Bourke and Djon Mundine were held in Sri Lanka, Paris, New Delhi, Hanover and Cape Town. Aboriginal art was no longer ‘primitive’ and obscure. It was contemporary, international, and very, very hot.

  The Emily Wall featured in the Museum of Modern Art in Ishoj, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2006.

  ROVING IN THOMAS TOWN

  I f you offer most Aboriginal people a chance to revisit their birthplace, they’ll jump at it. So many have been forced by circumstance to live far from their original homeland that returning to ‘country’ is a dream for almost all of them. It gives them a chance to reconnect with their extended family, walk in the footsteps of their ancestors, revisit waterholes and other significant sites, tell stories, and keep their Dreaming alive.

  In September 1995, Kevin Kelly, while still the art coordinator at Waringarri Arts in Kununurra, took Rover Thomas and Rammel Peters, a member of Rover’s extended family, back to his birthplace, Yalda Soak. Over the years a lot of people have confused me with Kelly, which I’ve found puzzling as he’s a wiry Irishman, and I am not. We’ve disagreed on many things, but I’ve always found him very helpful and fair. Mind you, he did once direct Anne and me to a ‘spectacular’ campsite just over the Ivanhoe Weir, where we nearly got eaten by a seven-metre crocodile. I’ve always wondered about that …

  Rover’s ten-day trip with Kelly required two off-road vehicles to negotiate the unforgiving landscape. It was an arduous journey for an elderly person to attempt, but he was excited. The travelling group included a spare driver, a mechanic, a cameraman and sound recordist. The two vehicles laden with supplies headed south down the west coast to Port Hedland before cutting into the interior along the Bore Line Road. Passing an old abandoned mine site they reached Punmu, where Rover delightedly caught up with his brother and a large part of his extended family. After another day following donkey tracks to the east, they reached Kunawarritji and were joined by ten of Rover’s male relatives. Amidst celebration and ceremony, young men hunted food and gifts were exchanged. They poured water on each other and swished themselves with branches in preparation for visiting sacred places including the Wild Dog Dreaming site. Finally they made their way north to Yalda Soak, south of the Percival Lakes, where a series of subterranean tunnels link waterholes and burial sites. They dug out the old waterhole and were recorded telling stories around the campfire before the two vehicles turned up the Canning Stock Route and headed back to Halls Creek and on to Kununurra.

  During this trip Rover was fired with enthusiasm, despite the onset of a series of mini strokes that slowly ate away his strength, and finally claimed him three years later. At the age of 69, he was a puzzling combination of fragility and incredible reserves of tenacity and toughness. Rover had in fact been living on and off at Kelly’s place during that year. While acting as the art coordinator in Kununurra, Kelly had the typically symbiotic relationship with his painters that binds many art coordinators. The responsibilities that come with the job range far beyond providing canvas and paint. There are always welfare documents to be read, cash crises to be resolved, extended family members to be appeased, and of course ongoing medical and health issues to deal with. Kelly visited his artists’ families regularly, bringing them firewood, food and blankets.

  In June, several months before this expedition with Kelly, Rover travelled to Melbourne with Freddie Timms to paint a series of works during a workshop financed by Neil McLeod and Peter Harrison, owner of Kimberley Art Gallery.24 McLeod sought Kelly’s approval for the workshop during 1994 but it was denied. After Harrison asked once more in February 1995, however, Kelly relented and assisted with the travel arrangements.

  Over the years there has been intense speculation about the bona fides of the works produced during this workshop. Even though he was not there, Kevin Kelly was to become one of the most convincing voices to cast doubt on the number of works that Rover was credited with painting during a period just short of three weeks. But documentary material and a number of eyewitnesses provide compelling evidence that Rover painted the ten major works in their entirety, without any assistance. He was filmed and extensively photographed while completing many of the 55 to 60 canvases, the majority of which were relatively small.25 During the research for this book I have personally collected photographs of Rover painting more than 35 of these works, a tiny sample of which are reproduced opposite. The location is readily identified by the red ochre stucco walls of the studio at McLeod’s home in Melbourne. Video evidence also confirms that Rover could complete a 2 x 3-metre canvas in a morning if he was provided with all of the materials. While many photographs were taken of Rover working on smaller canvases, no video documentation exists for them as McLeod was busy tending to the artist’s needs when these works were purchased by visitors to the studio.

  There were more than a dozen witnesses to the workshop. They included Lin Onus, who was the prominent urban Aboriginal artist of his day and the former chairman of the Aboriginal Arts Board. Also present were Lin’s wife, Jo and son Tiriki, the artist John Bursill, art entrepreneurs Rex Keogh and Horst Wagner, Kimberley Art Gallery owner Peter Harrison, Mary Mumford, Joy Prentice, Neil’s family members Scott and Naomi McLeod, the eminent Sydney gynaecologist and art collector Dr Peter Elliott, art materials supplier Dragan Ivanovic, and many others. Collectively, they convinced me of the authenticity of the paintings.

  A small sample of the works Rover created during his 1995 Melbourne workshop for Neil McLeod.

  Tiriki Onus was only a small child when he first started visiting Neil McLeod’s home, but even in those early days he knew this was somewhere special, and much more than the home of a slightly eccentric madcap photographer.

  When asked recently to recall the period he wrote:

  From the beginning of the 1990s, Neil McLeod’s house was the sometimes home of a number of Australia’s greatest artists. Descending the gnarled and twisted tree root stairs into the lounge room, a visitor was assailed by the sounds of the soft bass of an old man singing to a canvas that was about to be painted. In a rhythmic gravelly chant, the stories of his country rose gently through a haze of cigarette smoke. Neil was completely different to any other art dealer or gallery owner I have ever met. His home was full of artists and their families both close and extended. Everyone lived together. At meal times, tables became crowded with wives and children. There were beds in every room and an open studio spreading throughout the house. Heaters blared even in the height of summer replicating almost every different climate in Australia. Artists came from the Central Desert, the Kimberley, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria often at the same time, sharing their stories and techniques with one another. Just a few of the artists that taught me to paint and told me their stories during my teenage years included the great Bobby Nganjmirra and his sons, Jonathan Kumantjarra Brown, Ralph Nicholls, Max Mansell, Freddie Timms and Rover Thomas. 26

  In the midst of all this was Neil.

  Without any funding from any organisation he brought artists down to Melbourne, sent payments to families back home, chartered planes
to Darwin in the wet season, bought them warm clothes, paid for food and entertainment, return airfares and upfront payments, and always managed to buy more art materials to keep everyone going. Rover Thomas visited on at least two occasions. I remember the speed with which he would block out and fill in a canvas, adding the dots later to, as he put it, ‘make it look flash’.

  I was not at the workshop, but I have seen more than enough evidence of the fact that Rover painted the vast majority of this material alone. If he had received any assistance on the others, it would have been well within the acceptable bounds of both traditional collaborative and Western art practice. On a different occasion at least two years later, in a different place, I watched Rover paint with some assistance. Even though he was unable to stand without a stick, he was in total command of the cartography of the canvas. I watched as he blocked in all of the major schematic elements and directed his assistant to ‘pill im up’, large areas with specific colours that were mixed to the intensity and texture that he alone approved before application. After every block of colour was applied Rover fiddled and finessed until the lines, spatial relationships and dots matched his exact vision. He had the same confidence and assertiveness I would imagine in the elderly Picasso or Matisse. It’s possible that in this way, Freddie Timms and other studio assistants may have helped him prepare some of the backgrounds and partially completed some of the dotted outlines during the Melbourne workshop. But I have no doubt whatsoever that Rover was the author of all the works.

  There is another layer to this story. McLeod made a number of trips to the Kimberley before, and after, the Melbourne workshop. He sat for long days with Rover, Queenie McKenzie, Jack Britten and Hector Jandanay, talking, recording stories and commissioning paintings. He made notes and diagrams in his field diaries. Many of the paintings he collected on these trips have been confused with those created in Melbourne. In both places he used exactly the same imported Bayer ochres and linen,27 which resulted in the impression that there were more paintings created in Melbourne than would have been possible during the time that Rover and Freddie spent there.

  Some years later, while I was acting as Head of Lawson~Menzies Aboriginal Art Department, I decided to offer a number of the Melbourne paintings for sale at public auction. Sotheby’s and Christie’s had consistently declined to touch them. I was made to pay dearly for my good faith. Before I knew it I had been publicly excoriated by Corrie Perkin, on the front page of The Australian. She accused me of dealing in fakes and I was forced to withdraw several works from sale, even though I provided Perkin with photographs of Rover painting them. No retraction was forthcoming, and the damage was done. When she finally left her position with the newspaper in order to open a bookshop in 2009, Perkin’s parting gesture was a number of puff pieces promoting the bone fides of those who we had always suspected were her principal informants.

  Rover’s final visit to his family and the country of his birth was facilitated by Maxine Taylor and Terry ‘Serge’ Brooks in October 1996, a full year after the Melbourne workshop. Taylor and Brooks had managed the community roadhouse from 1994 to mid 1995, and fell into buying and selling the work of local artists largely because no-one else was doing it. Later, with the approval of the town council, they moved into the community and lived in the old post office, from which they ran an unfunded art centre from June 1995 to December 1997. With their own private funds they purchased art materials and certified the finished paintings under the name Warmun Traditional Artists. Their trip with Rover to his country was an even more arduous one than Rover made with Kelly. They travelled via the Canning Stock Route. Camping all along the way, they visited Nullagine where Rover had an emotional reunion with his brother, Charlie.

  Rover Thomas, Jabanunga (Rainbow Serpent), 1996. Natural earth pigment and binders on linen, 180 x 270 cm. This magnificent work, still held in private hands, depicts the Rainbow Serpent penetrating the earth in order to return to the sea. The concentric circles represent his vital organs.

  To sum up, Rover was in Melbourne in June 1995. His two trips deep into the desert were made in September 1995 and October 1996. During the intervening year Rover had the energy and enthusiasm to create a series of amazing new works. They included a painting that I personally witnessed leaving the community for Melbourne (to great fanfare from all of the artists) in the truck that carried frozen goods to the Warmun shop. The Jabanunga (Rainbow Serpent), which was completed on 26 March 1996 for Warmun Traditional Artists, is in my opinion Rover’s last great masterpiece. He also completed works for a solo exhibition at William Mora Galleries in Melbourne later that same year. So much for the assertion that Rover, given the state of his health, was too frail to have made the number of paintings that he did during his Melbourne visit.

  FAKERY

  Up to the mid 1990s all you had to do to get good media coverage for an exhibition was to fly a desert artist to Sydney, pose him or her on Bondi Beach with their toes in the ocean, and wait for the congratulatory response. Commentators were happy to write soft articles but avoided critical reviews of the actual art, for fear of being labelled ‘racist’. A notable exception was Susan McCulloch, who was appointed as visual arts writer for Rupert Murdoch’s flagship, The Australian, in 1994. As a 14-year-old she had visited an Aboriginal community on a school trip to Hermannsburg, where she became friends with a Pitjantjatjara/Western Arrernte girl named Alice Swift (now Alison Hunt, a senior health and cultural leader and Mutitjulu elder). A year later her father, Alan McCulloch,28 one of Australia’s pre-eminent art critics and authors, curated an exhibition of bark paintings from the Museum of Victoria collections for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, in the United States.29 She was also exposed to Aboriginal culture through family friends such as Leonhard Adam, Donald Thomson and others.30 With 15 years’ experience in high-profile arts journalism and publishing, McCulloch was far more aware of Aboriginal culture than most of her peers. She would go on to spend the next ten years reviewing Aboriginal art exhibitions and the annual Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards, and writing profiles and features that included a number of sensational exposés that would crack open the fault lines in the Aboriginal art industry.

  Aboriginal artists were generating critical acclaim overseas, but until this time the media had played a very small role in mainstream discourse at home. This changed in October 1995, with the publication of McCulloch’s feature article ‘Authentic Forgery: The Faking of Aboriginal Art’. It was the first of a series of articles that would rock the art world for years to come. In it McCulloch quoted Rodney Gooch stating that up to half of the paintings credited to Emily Kngwarreye during the early 1990s were painted by other artists in her community.31 To say this blew the lid off a covert war that had been percolating for years between key dealers working with Utopia artists is an understatement.

  Gooch’s comments, supported by a statutory declaration, were made at a time when his exclusive access to Emily was under challenge from other dealers. The article scorched their reputations as well as the galleries they supported. Christopher Hodges and Don Holt were not on speaking terms, but they both immediately sought to distance themselves from the scandal by insisting that only their ‘Emilys’ could be guaranteed, whereas those handled by others, such as Michael Hollow, Tim Jennings, Fred Torres, Hank Ebes and Alan Glaetser, should be regarded with suspicion. These dealers, in turn, were absolutely infuriated.

  I have to say that just about every single person who ever worked with Emily has told me, at one time or another, that their competitors were responsible for ‘questionable’ works. Ironically, many of these same ‘competitors’ are now considered to have been the most reputable collectors of her paintings in the field.

  Emily is thought to have painted a staggering 4,000–5,000 works in the course of just eight years, most of which passed through the hands of Rodney Gooch, Don and Janet Holt, Tim Jennings, Hank Ebes and Fred Torres. As would be expected, the quality was uneven. If the intensity
and spontaneity of her best works were the result of her unpremeditated experimentation, it follows that she also produced many failures. The prominent academic Joanna Mendelssohn once suggested that Emily ‘should think of her long time reputation and stop painting for the market’.32 Yet the circumstances under which she lived and worked gave her little choice. Everyone was hungry for anything by Emily, and all of her works, regardless of their unevenness, were in demand. She had no control over this whatsoever.

  The intense demand also meant that many fraudulent look-alikes were passed off as ‘Emilys’, that collaborative paintings were sold under her name alone, and that other members of her clan created ‘School of Emily’ paintings. Almost without exception, however, these ‘fakes’ are obviously inferior works. Curators and experts in Emily’s oeuvre invariably discount them on aesthetic grounds. No reputable auction house will touch the vast majority of them, simply because they are not good enough. Nevertheless, they are still offered through eBay and private sale, and their existence has not even remotely dented Emily’s artistic legacy. Two years after Emily’s death, Susan McCulloch noted that ‘her works were copied and competed for like those of no other Australian artist’.33

  Forgery, however, is not any more prevalent amongst Aboriginal artists than it is in the Australian contemporary and international art world. These claims arose at the very same time as similar accusations were made about several ‘Sidney Nolans’ sold through Christie’s in London. There was a scandal about a dud Drysdale.34 An entire ABC Four Corners current affairs program was devoted to accusations made against certain paintings by the Australian impressionists Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts that were purportedly worth half a million dollars.