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Aboriginal
painting auctioned for record K5.5 Million
By ED JOHNSON
Bloomberg: A painting by Australian indigenous artist
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri sold at auction for a record AK2.1
million (K5.5 million), Sotheby’s said.
“Warlugulong,” painted in 1977, is regarded as one of the most
important Australian paintings of the 20th Century, according to
the National Gallery of Australia, which bought it late yesterday
at the auction in Melbourne.
The sale, which broke the previous record of A$1.056 million for
an Aboriginal painting at auction, confirms the rising popularity
of indigenous art, said Tim Klingender of Sotheby’s.
“Aboriginal art has grown exponentially in popularity and in value
over the last decade or more,” Klingender said by telephone from
Melbourne today. “It is now very much in line with other major art
movements.”
The painting, standing 2 meters (6 feet) high and more than 3
meters wide, was first sold in 1977 for A$2,500.
It is one of Tjapaltjarri’s “seminal works” and “one of the first
large canvases produced by the Western Desert dot painters,” Ron
Radford, director of the National Gallery, said in a statement
today.
The artist was born in the 1930s in a creek bed about 200
kilometers northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory,
according to the Art Gallery of South Australia, which has
exhibited his works.
He received no formal education and worked as a stockman on a
ranch, during which time he learned to transfer ancient ceremonial
designs, traditionally drawn in the sand or in natural ochres on
the body, onto wooden boards and canvases in paint.
According to the Art Gallery of South Australia, Tjapaltjarri, who
died in 2002, was the first Australian Aboriginal artists to be
“feted in international art circles.”
“Warlugulong” is one of a series of five canvases, painted between
1976 and 1979, that map out his ancestral land. The vegetation,
geology and topography of the area are represented in dots of
paint.
The work will be exhibited at a new wing for Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander art at the gallery, located in the capital,
Canberra.
The previous record was set in May by Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s
“Earth’s Creation.”
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri was one of the truly visionary
Australian artists of the twentieth century.
Through the sheer power and beauty of his paintings, he introduced
his culture to the rest of Australia and then, to the world.
He was an expert wood-carver and took up painting long before the
emergence of the Papunya Tula School in the early 1970s.
When Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri joined this group of ‘dot and
circle’ painters early in 1972 he immediately distinguished
himself as one of its most talented members and went on to create
some of the largest and most complex paintings ever produced.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri led a groundbreaking career and was
amongst the vanguard of Indigenous Australian artists to be
recognised by the international art world.
Like Albert Namatjira before him, Clifford Possum blazed a trail
for future generations of Indigenous artists; bridging the gap
between Aboriginal art and contemporary Australian art.
Sadly, this great pioneering artist died on 21 June 2002 in Alice
Springs, the day he was to be presented with a medal awarding him
the Order of Australia for his services to art and to the
Indigenous community.
 
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