Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

William Dargie Study for portrait of Namatjira 1956 Oil on canvas 41.4x34.5cm The Stuartholme-Behan Collection, The University of Queensland, Brisbane [amongst] a grouping of pictures ofAborigines as depicted by white artists, includingworks by Russell Drysdale, James Wigley, David Boyd, Ray Crooke, William Dargie, Noel Counihan and Sam Fullbrook... [the Dargie] produced in many ways the least racist image. While Dargie's portrait may tell us little about the conditions under which Aborigines lived at the time, it presents a strongly individualised image of Albert Namatjira, without the degree of racial stereotyping (or anonymity) which appears in the other pictures .5 Beside his modernist and social realist contemporaries who variously represented their Aboriginal subjects as victims or as generic native types, Dargie adopted a detached matter-of-factness that enabled him to see the particularity of his subject. Respect was the basis of the portrait. This ran counter to the desire for affinity, identification or mythic projection which has afflicted Modernism's pursuit of Indigenous encounters. Dargie had trained in Melbourne during the early 1930s with Archie Colquhoun, who taught a disciplined form of tonal impressionism associated with students of Max Meldrum. Dargie recalled that at the time, 'I was interested in epistemological matters — the theory of knowledge and what you could and couldn't know — and his [Colquhoun's] talk was about the analysis of visual sense data'.6When Dargie was studying in Melbourne, Percy Leason, one of the older generation of the Meldrum school, produced an extraordinary series, 'The last of the Victorian Aborigines', consisting of thirty life-size portraits, all painted in 1934, to mark the sesquicentenary of the white occupation of Victoria. While the social Darwinian belief that Aborigines were a vanishing race taints Leason's title, the paintings remain remarkably free of prevailing racial caricature. Each portrait, painted over two sittings, conveys a strong sense of individuality and left a profound impression on the young Dargie.7 It was the Meldrum school's emphasis on an analysis of visual perception detached from 'normal everyday associations' that made it possible to paint portraits that did not fit a racial stereotype. 'There is actually nothing else [except] tone, proportion 252 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-19655