Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

documented. Four works by Namatjira from the 1946 Royal South Australian Society of Arts exhibition in Adelaide were selected by artist Max Ragless for a Brisbane showing later in the same year at Centennial Galleries. Following this, a solo show was organised by dealer Mary Corkery in the Commercial Bank Chambers in 1947, and in 1949 a large survey exhibition of the Hermannsburg School was brought to Brisbane by the private collector O. A. Wallent.6 Apparently each exhibition was a commercial success. One letter writer to Brisbane's Courier-Mail complained that only those people privileged enough to be invited to the opening of Namatjira's 1947 solo exhibition got first crack at the paintings since 'seventeen of the aborigines works went at the preview'.7 Namatjira's biographer, Joyce D. Batty, saw the purchase of Western MacDonnells C.1945 by the Queensland Art Gallery as a significant coup. As Batty was quick to point out: 'Surely the gallery was concerned only with aesthetic values'.8 This barb was presumably directed (albeit in retrospect) towards prominent critics of Namatjira, most obviously the directors of other state galleries.9However, such sentiments were also a common feature of the organisers' introductions to each exhibition and of the critical and popular responses to Namatjira's Brisbane shows. In each instance it was demanded that Namatjira's watercolours be judged solely by their virtues as works of art, drawing on canons of taste and judgement associated with the conservative standards of European watercolour painting and visual arts connoisseurship. Issues to do with the artist's cultural heritage and his social and economic circumstances were disregarded by some critics in their efforts to claim a space for Namatjira within mainstream Australian art. In an edited extract from the South Australian catalogue, Max Ragless assessed the works in terms of their competency of handling, originality of vision and variety in approach to the subject. Terms such as gems' were frequently used. Ragless wrote characteristically of a work entitled Right Albert Namatjira Western MacDonnells c.1945 Watercolour over pencil on cream smooth wove paper 27.2 X 37.2cm Purchased 1947 Queensland Art Gallery Albert Namatjira Red Bluff C.1938 Watercolour over pencil on smooth cream wove paper 22.3x37.5cm Bequest of George Cedric Tremayne Powne 1979 Queensland Art Gallery Ghost gum, that it was 'easily the best picture in the show and best tree of Albert's I have ever seen'.10 The 'learned eye' of Ragless is supported by extracts in the 1947 exhibition catalogue reprinted from reviews in the Melbourne Age and Sydney Telegraph. According to the Telegraph critic, 'In nine years of painting Albert Namatjira has achieved a standard of work that bears comparison with anything Hans Heysen has done in Central Australia'. While for the Age critic, the redeeming feature of the works lay in the absence of 'distracting detail', and the arrangement of parts in 'the proper ranking'. In her catalogue foreword, Mary Corkery was even more emphatic: One should judge his paintings solely on their artistic merits, not with a thought of anthropology and be in a mood to make artistic allowances. Albert Namatjira stands on his own artistic feet. His subjects are well chosen, the design excellent, and he subordinates with due regard to importance all his pictorial parts.1 The emphasis on Namatjira's increasing mastery of European traditions of watercolour painting had a variety of inflections during this period.12In the southern states, Namatjira's reputation was already being disputed by the mid- 1940s amid accusations that he produced potboilers for unscrupulous dealers and that his career lacked sustained activity. The celebration of Namatjira's artistic feats challenged this view and deflected criticism away from the equally pejorative decree that Namatjira was merely a 'robot', a mechanical recorder of what he saw, who had failed to develop beyond the example set by his teacher.13 The paradox for Namatjira, which was to have consequences throughout the 1940s and beyond, was that, in effect, Namatjira's success could be turned in on him — depending on what side of the political fence one sat. Thus the critic for the Courier-Mail remarked of his 1947 solo exhibition at the Commercial Bank Chambers: Namatjira is a meticulous painter with a natural gift for capturing atmosphere. There is heat simmering in every rugged landscape. His principal lack seems to be unified design. There is nothing placed to lead the eye 'into' his subject [my italics]. He is a topographical recorder ofwhat he sees ... he has ... absorbed so much of the academics of painting from his teacher, Rex Battarbee, and other well- known painters of Central Australia, that there is little trace of aboriginal art left in his work .. ,14 This guilt-edged criticism implied that Albert Namatjira had become too European, and yet he was still found wanting. Rex Battarbee, Namatjira's teacher and mentor from 1938, adopted an equally ambivalent response to the issue. According to Battarbee, Namatjira learned enough from him in two months to 'make him famous' but never developed beyond that dependency so that 'his last paintings were identical with the one he painted after two months tuition from me'.15 Battarbee's now infamous declaration clearly lent weight to the idea that Namatjira was a copyist, the producer of picturesque but ultimately disconnected (in the sense of his own heritage) views of the Central Australian landscape. There was, however, an alternative contemporary view, which Battarbee and others such as anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow and enthusiast C. R Mountford simultaneously proposed, that stressed the role of country and tribal heritage in the production of Namatjira's watercolours and in other paintings by the Aranda artists. Often, however, this was accompanied by a negative aspect. Battarbee was led to conclude that: After 25 years with these artists I am convinced that the aboriginal has a higher art background than the average white person. This is mainly in his power of observation, his sense of design and craftsmanship; these were characteristics which have been developed over thousands of years, during their tribal life. But this also means that they have their limitations, such as repetition of ideas and copying of designs, so no doubt these men are very good imitators of art, but unless they have some intelligent help from outside, they can get into a rut and stay there.16 Battarbee is clearly a man of his times, in this passage casting Aboriginal culture as essentially static, impervious to outside 170 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965