Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

NAMATJIRA IN THE GUISE OF AN ELDER STATESMAN William Dargie Portrait o f Albert Namatjira Ann Stephen Facing page William Dargie Australia b.1912 Portrait o f Albert Namatjira 1956 Oil on canvas 102.1 X 76.4cm Purchased 1957 Queensland Art Gallery Right Trustees meeting, 14 May 1957, at which Portrait of Albert Namatjira by William Dargie was purchased by the Trustees for the Queensland National Art Gallery. Photograph courtesy Courier-Mail, Brisbane A conventional portrait — a seated half-figure painted from life — L which is disrupted by the subject's race. In mid-twentieth-century Australia, Indigenous people had rarely figured in a genre that confirmed the status of'elder statesman' upon its (mainly male) subjects. William Dargie's Portrait o f Albert Namatjira 1956 (Queensland Art Gallery) has subsequently become the most identifiable image of the artist, familiar yet reserved. His facial expression is withdrawn, his eyes look away, and the head is likewise turned from frontal scrutiny to form a three-quarter profile. The averted position of his head may have been set by the terms of Indigenous sociality in which it is customary not to meet the gaze.1Namatjira's self-contained composure resists revelations of character or psychological insights, yet there is a temptation to read the sombre face as a reflection of his own state of mind concerning recent events such as the death of his father and the denial of his rights as a non-'citizen'.2However, there is no sense of Albert Namatjira as a victim, for the values implied in a commemorative portrait presuppose a viewer who will contemplate the subject at a respectful distance. Within the conventions of European tonal portraiture, there is a subdued drama between the open-necked white shirt and the black skin it exposes, between the large, bulky torso and the long, fine-boned hands. Sir William Dargie was the favoured 'court' painter of the Robert Menzies era, his name synonymous with the portrayal of captains of industry, knights of the academy and society dames.3He was both a skilled adviser and confidant to government, serving for over twenty years on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, and a popularly acclaimed practitioner, eight times winner of the Archibald Prize. This portrait was his last Archibald win and was acquired the following year by the Queensland National Art Gallery, for 'the highest [price] ever paid by the gallery trustees for a painting' — a fact that drew national media attention to the artist: 'William Dargie, whose portrait painting earns him more than many top-level business men make and who looks more like a business man than an artist'.4 A portrait by Dargie, who was then at the pinnacle of his achievement having recently painted the Queen for the Commonwealth, represented the confirmation of great social value in 1950s Australia. Such portraiture seems now to occupy such a narrow place in our culture that one would imagine that his name could be left undisturbed on the walls of war memorials and boardrooms. Yet how do we reconcile the sense of a moribund practice when confronted by this singularly impressive portrait of Namatjira which challenged the attitudes of his contemporaries? In recent times Dargie's portrait of Namatjira has been retrieved and exhibited in several survey shows, most recently in '1956 — Melbourne, Modernity, and the XVI Olympiad' at the Museum of Modem Art at Heide, Melbourne, and in the 1984 exhibition 'Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting 1942-62: Dreams, Fears and Desires' at the S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney. In this recovery it has been observed that: 250 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965