Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

really sure what to do with. To consider barks as equal partners in a 'fine art' collection at that time, despite the logic and good intentions, was premature for these players. In 1960 the Director of the Queensland National Art Gallery, Robert Haines, did not consider most of the Mountford barks worthy of inclusion in the ground-breaking exhibition 'Australian Aboriginal Art' (which was organised by and toured state galleries), despite a specific request from the curators.7 Nevertheless, this donation set in place some of the conditions that would allow change. Painting on bark for an outside audience was a relatively newphenomenon and these were among the first images on bark to be widely considered. Despite the growing appreciation of Aboriginal works during the 1940s and 1950s, stimulated by an increasing number of exhibitions and research projects, 'the Aboriginal art collections remained largely root-bound within the ethnographic sections of natural history museums, and the dichotomy between the ethnographic and the aesthetic was perpetuated'.8Those exhibitions that were shown outside museums primarily focused on decorative and formal elements. For instance, 'Australian Aboriginal Art and Its Application', at the David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, in 1941, was specifically assembled to inspire white Australian artists and designers in the use of borrowed Indigenous motifs. Of course, the shift from the ethnographic was partly driven by a belated response to the international art world's interest in the 'primitive', enthusiastically embraced by artists such as Margaret Preston, TonyTuckson, James Gleeson and others.9 The national distribution of the Mountford Collection not only provided the critical first step for many art galleries in the building of Indigenous collections, but also established a benchmark which makes it possible to assess future developments of Aboriginal art in terms of production, collection, exhibition and reception. Of particular interest is the large number of works from the expedition that were done on cardboard instead of bark, a pragmatic decision based on the scarcity of bark during the dry season and the inconvenience of transporting such large numbers of works. For similar reasons of portability and availability, art advisers at Gunbalanya in the late 1980s gave bark painters card and paper to produce their images. This more recent practice was met with opposition by those who viewed it not only as a corruption of authenticity but also as a threat to the bark painting industry. Mountford and his supporters in the 1940s obviously did not see any erosion of legitimacy in the use of card. The images, rather than the medium, denoted authenticity, a distinction that continues to escape some enthusiasts today. Admittedly, a more subtle problem is created by the use of a 'flat', and potentially less lively, surface. However, it is interesting to note that matching fears were expressed about the introduction of boards and acrylic paint to desert artists in the early 1970s. Works commissioned by the expedition were not only small but irregularly shaped, showing little concern for the refinement, 'polish' and scale that would be demanded by emerging commercial markets from the late 1970s. Most of the AASEALworks featured simple, often single, motifs of apparently everyday subjects like birds, fish, hunting scenes or camp life. Few of them described the ancestral and cosmological themes sought in subsequent decades. However, Mountford has been credited with being the 'first to record the geometric-style bark paintings associated with features of the Ancestral landscape' around Oenpelli of which there are three examples in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection: Ceremonial design, Mardayin or ceremonial designs used for body painting and on carved wooden objects and Swamp}0 Mostly figurative in style, they have a rawness and charm very different from the more complex, ordered and rectilinear bark paintings collected in the late 1950s from Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land by Tony Tuckson and art patron Dr Stuart Scougall. Three Expedition Camps The three campsites across Arnhem Land were selected according to their varying Left Milingimbi Community Australia Ceremonial design 1948 Natural pigments on paper mounted on card 58.5 X 45.7cm Gift of the 1948 American-Austra lian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1956 Queensland Art Gallery Right Gulbidja Bara Australia active 1940-50 Bara, the north-west wind 1948 Natural pigments on bark 58x38cm (irreg.) Gift of the 1948 American-Austra lian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1956 Queensland Art Gallery Artist unknown Australia Mamariga, the south­ east wind 1948 Natural pigments on bark 76.5x39.5cm (irreg.) Gift of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1956 Queensland Art Gallery 212 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965