Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

READING NAMATJIRA The Art of Albert Namatjira Rodney James Facing page Albert Namatjira Arrernte (Aranda) dan Australia 1902-59 Central Australian Gorge c.1940 Watercolour and gouache over pencil on thick wove paper 53.2x36.1cm Gift of Lady Trout 1981 Queensland Art Gallery Above Albert Namatjira. Photograph by C. P. Mountford, from C. P. Mountford's The Art of Albert Namatjira, Bread and Cheese Club, Melbourne, 1944 Right Trephina Gorge, Central Australia, c.1983. Photograph courtesy Elizabeth Bates A lbert Namatjira s watercolours created a great deal of excitement when they were exhibited in Brisbane in the mid to late 1940s. Although Namatjira had been exhibiting in the southern state capitals for almost a decade, organisers of the Brisbane exhibitions successfully promoted a view that positioned Namatjira and the Hermannsburg School as 'emerging' artists coming to grips with a distinctly European tradition. Some forty years later an exhibition of many of the same watercolours occasioned a reassessment of Namatjira and contributed, in part, to the rescue of the artists reputation from the critical doldrums. Set appropriately in the newly completed Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, the 1984 'Albert Namatjira' retrospective contained a comprehensive selection of Namatjira's watercolours, including five works from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection.1 Elwyn Lynn's catalogue contribution and an important contemporary re-evaluation of Namatjira by Daniel Thomas in 1986 refocused critical assessment of Namatjira's art. Whereas previously Namatjira's watercolours were praised (and, as we shall see, condemned) for their ability to convey a familiar sense of Central Australia to a white audience, the work was now read in terms of the artist's own attachment to country.2Thomas thus surmised: 'We now cannot but see Namatjira's paintings as a way of affirming his tribal territorial knowledge while simultaneously sharing with others his pride in his land's great beauty'.3 Thomas's fresh look at the complexities involved in the practice and consumption of Namatjira foreshadowed further interpretations in which concepts such as absence, negation, mimicry, appropriation and concealment were used to interpret the art of Namatjira and his followers in the Hermannsburg School. Implicit in the critical transformation from early unadulterated celebrations of Namatjira, through to anthropological, aesthetic, and modernist codings of the primitive, and beyond that to post-colonial theorisations of identity, ethnicity, regionalism and representation, remains the question posed by John Morton: 'Who, through their "Art" do we desire the Western Aranda to be?'.4 In Brisbane during the 1940s, Namatjira's watercolour paintings were singled out for their perceived aesthetic virtues, which, it was frequently claimed, equalled the stature of esteemed artists like Hans Heysen. Recent writers such as Sylvia Kleinert have persuasively argued that perceptions about the success of the artist in mastering these outside artistic traditions ran parallel with government assimilationist policies implemented between 1939 and 1963 — policies that advocated the desirability of working productively within the parameters of the dominant culture.5 From his first exhibition in Melbourne in 1938, through to the mid-1940s, Namatjira's solo exhibitions in the southern capital cities were generally 'sell outs'. The market for Namatjira in other regional centres or capitals such as Perth and Brisbane has been less well 168 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965