The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  This negative interpretation of our motives left me even more determined. At my own expense, I embarked on a six-month industry-wide consultative process, travelling to attend regional meetings in every state capital, and a large number of the remote art centres throughout the country. With help and encouragement from members of the interim committee, and the prominent art law specialist Shane Simpson, a draft constitution for a dealers’ association was prepared. Finally, after a historic three-day conference in Alice Springs in November 1998, the first elected board of the Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association (Art. Trade) announced that the 51 delegates had signed off on the first constitution and code of ethics ever written to govern the business practice of Aboriginal art dealers in Australia. A further 37 galleries and arts organisations tended expressions of interest and formal apologies. The inaugural board comprised seven elected members, each representing a separate region of the country, with two of the seven positions filled by Indigenous representatives. Prerequisites of membership were to be: a high standard of knowledge and industry experience; a commitment to uphold the extensive code of ethics; to provide active and sustained support for Indigenous artists; and to promote the role of artists and community organisations in the preservation and maintenance of cultural life. The association was incorporated in January 1999 and attracted more than 60 financial member organisations during its first year. Without any bureaucratic or financial support, how much more could have been done?

  Gathering of some of the delegates at the first Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association (Art.Trade) conference, Alice Springs, November 1998.

  After being elected the founding President, I remember feeling incredibly grateful that so many people had come together to address the problems facing the industry. But there was another fly in the ointment. One of the most prominent dealers in the country, Beverly Knight of Alcaston Gallery, had withdrawn from the interim committee, arguing that some of the inaugural members should never have been allowed to join. The rest of us felt that Art. Trade was offering an olive branch; that regardless of rumour and innuendo everyone should be given a chance to abide by the new code. We wanted Art. Trade to become the corporate identity of the industry, including any retail outlet that sold Aboriginal art and craft. But Knight and several others preferred their elite status as members of the Australian Commercial Galleries Association (ACGA). And so we all went our separate ways.

  Little did we know that an even more damaging scandal was about to break, and I was about to find myself directly in the firing line.

  INDEPENDENCE

  Now, in the final years of this turbulent decade, two scandals were set to split the entire industry asunder. Two distinct camps would become entrenched on either side of a deep philosophical divide. There would be those who would turn their backs on all works by independent artists unless they were represented by a gallery or agent according to the Western model. And there would be those who would continue to judge artworks entirely on their merit and form friendships and business relationships with those they believed were treating artists fairly and with respect.

  The first of these scandals involved the great Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

  By 1988, something had begun to go terribly wrong in Clifford’s personal life. Like so many other major artistic figures, including the great Emily Kngwarreye, the pressure to make money and to support a large and extended family had become burdensome. In addition to this, or perhaps because of it, he struggled with a drink and gambling problem. Clifford was surrounded by his daughters, their husbands and extended family and an ever-changing cast of hangers-on.

  He retreated more and more into the background as his canvases were completed with varying degrees of his input. These ‘School of Clifford Possum’ paintings bore his distinctive signature, most notable for the tiny o’s scattered through his name: ‘CLIFFoRD PoSSUM’. Produced in quantity they fed an ever-growing family business, supplying an eager market. Over the next ten years Clifford created many fine paintings without any assistance for Milanka Sullivan, Peter Los, Des Rogers and a variety of other dealers, but he was rarely free of controversy. Painting in my own gallery in 1990, he famously accepted money for a near-completed work, assuring the purchaser that it would be ready the next day. Upon her return she broke into tears when he told her that he had sold it to someone else, but she accepted his assurance that he would paint her another just like it in the days ahead.

  Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri signing his name on the margin of a completed artwork at Coo-ee Gallery, c. 1990.

  In February 1999, the British art dealer Patrick Corbally Stourton mounted a widely publicised solo exhibition of Possum’s work at the Christopher Day Gallery in Sydney, and simultaneously another at a Mascot warehouse. Like wildfire, word spread amongst knowledgeable dealers that there was something wrong with these paintings. Possum flew down to Sydney to verify the works personally, courtesy of Michael Hollow and Semon Deeb of Jinta Desert Art. Just as he was landing on the morning of Tuesday the 23rd, I was in Christopher Day’s office and on the phone to Corbally Stourton, asking them both the hard questions.

  Day had taken down the exhibition by the time The Australian published Susan McCulloch’s front-page article on Thursday the 25th. Corbally Staunton had gone into damage control and moved all of the works to his Mascot warehouse. The majority of the paintings in both exhibitions were subsequently found to be fakes. They had been supplied by the former house painter, horseracing track-worker and disgraced art dealer John O’Loughlin. A team of detectives extradited O’Loughlin to Sydney in October 1999 to face fraud charges. After a number of court appearances he eventually pleaded guilty to five counts of making a misleading statement in order to gain financial advantage. O’Loughlin was eventually sentenced to jail for passing off dot paintings as original works by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. It was the first successful prosecution of fraudulent behaviour in the history of the Aboriginal art movement.40

  Clifford Possum painting a rendition of Tjungurrayi and Tjapaltjarri Dreaming at Artspeak Gallery, Warrandyte, in 1998.

  During Possum’s February visit to Sydney, Semon Deeb, my daughter Mandala and I escorted him to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the presence of the curator, Hetti Perkins, he identified another five paintings as ‘not mine’. Clifford went on to single out six more works at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I wasn’t there to ‘cop the flak’, but it was a major embarrassment not just to the institutions but to the people who had donated the paintings to them. It also confirmed the widely held opinion that various people had been faking Possum’s works for years.

  In an even more bizarre twist, Possum subsequently accused Adelaide art dealer Chris Peacock of having forced him to sign paintings at gunpoint. Peacock marketed Aboriginal artworks with the stamp ‘bush myths’ and a code number that began with the letters ‘TOAAC’ on the back. Over time, it became clear that a number of former agents, including Joy Aitken, had completed many of Possum’s paintings during the late 1980s and early 1990s; that family members had contributed to works that were signed by Possum; and that Possum himself passed off works created by some of his countrymen as his own.

  None of this untoward activity should cast any doubt over Clifford’s genius as a painter. His best works are amongst the most highly desired Aboriginal artworks in Australia. Today, however, a rigorous verification process is necessary to establish the bona fides of most of his paintings prior to sale. There are unfortunately a great many art collectors who own works that may need reattribution to other Indigenous artists. Still more may prove to be worthless, having been created by non-Indigenous forgers. Possum continued to paint works entirely by himself throughout the 1990s and until his death in 2002. These were well documented and sold to a number of ethical dealers. While the majority of these paintings may lack the grand vision that distinguished his earlier works, there are amongst them many genuine masterpieces. When remunerated fairly and treated with respect, Cliffor
d was capable of producing works of the greatest quality to the very end.

  A few months after the Sydney exhibition, Susan McCulloch (by this time writing under her married name, McCulloch-Uehlin) was given a tip for another major story. After interviewing Turkey Tolson in Sydney, she travelled to Alice Springs to talk to prominent art dealer Michael Hollow, who had just become an Art.Trade member. The second major scandal broke.

  Clifford Possum Tjapatjarri, Dingo Dreaming, 1993. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 180 x 127 cm.

  ATTRIBUTION

  As the end of the millennium approached not a day seemed to pass without new unsavoury accusations in the media that shook the Aboriginal art world.

  Artists, traders, curators, academics and advocates all felt the industry was being ‘murdered by Murdoch’. The majority of these people had little to do with Alice Springs (at the time I did barely any business with private wholesalers there). It was just a pimple on the surface of an enterprise that stretched across a vast continent; yet here was a magnifying glass, concentrating all the force of the sun on a tiny strip of galleries, a few wholesalers and a couple of artists who painted for them.

  With the publication of yet another cover story by Susan McCulloch-Uehlin in The Australian on 7 April 1999, the fire was ignited once more. Under the headline ‘Painter Tells of Secret Women’s Business’, McCulloch-Uehlin wrote that paintings being sold as works by senior Pintupi artist Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula were in fact painted in their entirety by his female relatives.

  On page 4, alongside the continuing McCulloch-Uehlin article, The Australian published a statutory declaration from Turkey Tolson, relating to his dealings with prominent Todd Mall gallerist Michael Hollow, of Aboriginal Desert Art, and an unidentified man referred to only as ‘Henry’. McCulloch-Uehlin’s accompanying article clearly explained that family-assisted works are ‘perfectly acceptable’ in Aboriginal societies, ‘so long as the Dreaming story is owned by the person who authorises the painting’. She exposed, however, the extent to which certain dealers were manipulating this practice in order to buy cheap paintings and pass them off as those by ‘star’ artists. She quoted Michael Hollow, who insisted that if he didn’t buy the paintings created by Turkey Tolson’s female relatives, ‘Turkey gets upset.’41 Hollow had 20 paintings in his gallery that had been created entirely by Tolson’s daughters. These, he said, were waiting to be ‘reworked’ by Tolson. Hollow insisted that when the girls painted the works on their own, they were purchased and sold as theirs. If they were given to Turkey to rework the major elements in his own hand, they were sold as his.

  Grifters, like ‘Henry’, were said to pay the women as little as $50 for a painting, which Tolson would later sign when paid between $150–200. Similar paintings sold in Hollow’s Alice Springs gallery for $1,800, and for up to $4,000 in his affiliated Jinta Desert Art Gallery, in Sydney.

  Was this a case of the market manipulation of an old man being helped out in a culturally appropriate way? Many of Turkey’s supporters, including myself, assumed so. In the heated atmosphere of the moment we believed that the journalist had tricked the old man into saying that his relatives were actually creating fakes.

  Commenting in The Sydney Morning Herald on the developing scandal on 20 April, Sebastian Smee wrote, ‘speak to the various players in this story and you find yourself bashing through a thicket of conflicting accounts, all steeped in various degrees of self-interest’.

  The following weekend the cover of the Review section of The Weekend Australian was a faux-Aboriginal painting dotted with the title ‘FAKE’, and subtitled ‘The Crisis in Aboriginal Art’. Inside was an exposé also written by McCulloch-Uehlin, titled ‘The Hand that Signed the Paper’,42 which referenced the faux persona at the centre of the Demidenko scandal.

  In it McCulloch-Uehlin wrote that:

  behind the seemingly laid back face of Alice is a network of art dealings so complex and often desperate that the reputation of the Aboriginal art industry … is at risk of being damaged beyond repair.

  The article covered the faking of Clifford Possum’s artworks, the disputed authorship of Kathleen Petyarre’s award-winning painting, and the authenticity of Turkey Tolson’s entire output. The quite separate issues of authorship, attribution, fraud and fakery were glossed in the same article.

  As the President of Art.Trade, I was being called upon by journalists to put forward the dealers’ perspective every day. At the time, I knew that many well-known artists were assisted by their relatives in the completion of their paintings. But prior to these articles, I’d seen no direct evidence that clan members were fraudulently creating ‘copy-cat’ works, and passing them off as those of a famous artist. I hadn’t been working in Alice Springs but on those occasions when I passed through I’d seen several artists, including Turkey Tolson (but never his family), painting in the back of Michael Hollow’s gallery. Hollow had played a prominent role in exposing the fake Clifford Possum works that were exhibited in Sydney several months earlier. He had required a great deal of persuasion to join the Art.Trade association, and throughout this ongoing crisis he steadfastly maintained he’d done nothing wrong.

  McCulloch-Uehlin had been directed to Tolson by Steve Nibbs, whose motivation for blowing the whistle was the pressure he saw being brought to bear on Turkey by his family. Nibbs also felt that the demeaning practice of treating female artists as poorly paid indentured assistants, or creators of fake look-alikes, completely undermined their own abilities and potential to become successful artists in their own right.

  Tolson was 64 years of age at the time of the scandal. Had he remained living at his remote Kintore homeland, he may have produced only a handful of meticulous works each year. But, having moved to Alice Springs, his ‘star status’ created a voracious demand that was beyond his own physical ability to meet. Initially, his family were enlisted to become a part of his enterprise, but once they started painting without him and selling their works as his they became locked into a sorry business: they were paid a pittance compared to the prices reaped by those who originally marketed their works as Turkey Tolson’s, and by those who will continue to resell them as if they were his ad infinitum.

  One week after the front page exposé in The Australian, Tolsen told Sue Smith, of the Brisbane Courier Mail, that ‘they [the women] make them, I sign them … I do the markings first and give the canvases to the women to complete.’ Yet, further into the article, he admitted that scores of works he had signed were actually painted by his daughter, Nellie, and daughters-in-law Leanne, Pamela and Elizabeth. He told Smith that he had become utterly powerless to do anything about this.

  Turkey Tolson was right to attempt to regain control of his career, but this was a relatively rare practice occurring in a small part of the country. The negative publicity that was generated affected the standing of artists and dealers everywhere. All but a tiny handful had absolutely nothing at all to do with the copy-cat racket of the Alice Springs art trade.

  The knock-on effect in the market of the article in The Australian was immediate and dramatic. Of 28 paintings by important Central Desert artists for sale at a Joel Fine Art auction following the 17 April article, only four were sold. A 50–60% success rate had been expected. All the recent bad press, said Warren Joel, was leading people to question ‘what is happening to Indigenous art?’43 London dealer Rebecca Hossack was more forthright. ‘Each time articles like this appear in the national and international press, it kills the market in London stone dead!’44

  Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula on the roadside west of Alice Springs, c. 1996.

  At the time, no-one that I knew really believed that the issue was fraudulent behaviour, and none of the press coverage it subsequently generated referred to the fact that the artist himself had started the scandal. Instead McCulloch and The Australian were attacked, and the industry focused on the argument that the paintings were ‘Turkey Tolson’s’ because the ‘assistance’ rendered was appropriate according to ‘tradit
ion’.

  On 11 May, The Bulletin ran an article by Dennis Schulz, who had previously defended Kathleen Petyarre.45 Schulz quoted Margie West, the highly respected curator of Indigenous art at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, who said:

  The recent sensationalist articles merely reaffirm market prejudices which simply won’t acknowledge the fact that if people own a design, it is quite within their customary rights to allow other people to reproduce it under supervision. The whole issue of individual authorship does not sit very well with Indigenous art practices in Central Australia.

  In the same piece, Schulz accused The Australian newspaper editors of manipulating the interpretation of the front page photograph which accompanied McCulloch’s article. The caption read, ‘Tjupurrula in Alice Springs yesterday with daughter Nellie Tolson Nakamarra, painting a work he will later sign’. This was a set-up, Schulz insisted. When asked about the photograph, Nellie had told him, ‘I’m not paintin’. I’m just holdin’.’46

  The Bulletin resiled and published a retraction shortly thereafter. Yet it went largely unnoticed, and the backlash against McCulloch just grew and grew.

  I had no doubt that she had explained to Turkey that this photo would be placed on the front page of The Australian. Yet I sincerely wondered how an old man, who had never read a newspaper in his life, could have had any idea of the ramifications this would have on his career, let alone the damage a story like this would have on the standing of the entire industry.