Old Masters bark paintings
Old Masters bark paintings: a provocative title for a beautiful show
National Museum of Australia relishes the chance to show off works by artists who are largely unknown 'national treasures'
The term old masters calls to mind a European ideal of classical portraiture and landscape; of artists we readily recall from the pages of our dog-eared high school textbooks. So it is with deliberate provocation that the National Museum of Australia has titled its forthcoming exhibition Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists.
Like the widely collected Western Desert canvases, Australian bark paintings now adorn the walls of major international art galleries and collections. But with a collection of more than 2000 barks, the museum in Canberra still has the largest collection in the world – including works by artists who, this exhibition argues, should be regarded the equals of those other old masters.
The people of Arnhem Land have been painting bark for thousands of years, with white Australians first beginning to collect them as pieces of art, rather than purely ethnographic artefacts, in the early 20th century. The 122 paintings in the Old Masters exhibition, however, span a period of just 40 years.
They start with works from 1948, the year of the joint American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, headed by the Australian anthropologist Charles Pearcy Mountford. It amassed an extraordinary collection of thousands of Aboriginal artefacts, artworks, anthropological and biological specimens.
Two of these barks are in the exhibition. Others come from the museum’s broader holdings that include original collections of pioneering Arnhem Land collectors including Karel Kupka, Helen Groger-Wurm, Jim Davidson and the leading anthropologist and bark art expert Howard Morphy.
Key to the show are the artists Yirawala and Narritjin Maymuru, of western and eastern Arnhem Land respectively. “Some of these artists are national treasures, but very few people know about them so it is a wonderful opportunity to introduce them,” says the exhibition curator, Wally Caruana.
“Most of the artists in the exhibition were born and brought up before white people turned up in Arnhem Land – that happened gradually, beginning in the west in the late 19th century.”
Others artists featured are Wally Mandarkk, David Malangi, andMawalan Marika and Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, who composed perhaps Australia’s most famous pieces of bark art – the Yirrkala bark petitions, delivered to federal parliament in 1963 by the Yolngu people in an unsuccessful early quest for land rights recognition.
“There were a number of artists like Mawalan Marika, Yirawala and others who recognised that if they didn’t show white people their culture they would lose it,” Caruana says. “And they figured that the most effective means of doing that was through art.
“When the first explorers came to Australia they thought of the Aboriginal people as being the most unfortunate in the world because they had no art – and that’s because they were looking for European-style paintings in frames and sculptures on pedestals.
“Of course the art was on peoples’ bodies, on the rock walls, on the ground and a lot of it was ephemeral, so they didn’t see that. But then by the beginning of the 20th century people started to appreciate bark painting as being a form of fine art. It is now, of course, acknowledged as one of the great painting traditions of the world.”
Bark pictures were traditionally painted for ceremonial and temporary decorative purposes – but with bindings of turtle egg, honey, natural resin and orchid juice, early works were not constructed for longevity.
“The bark tends to split and crack and warp,” says a conservator, Nicki Smith. “It’s why we store them flat and why we’ve got a humidifier running permanently – we really need to take great care with humidity and temperature. And the great challenge, especially with the older works, is to keep the paint on the surface.”
From the 1960s, artists have used PVC and other glues to bind colour to bark, lending more permanence to the work and its vibrant colours: red ochre, symbolising blood and earth; yellow, the liver, denoting health and happiness; charcoal, representing skin; and white clay, indicating bone and, in west Arnhem Land, the faeces of the rainbow serpent. Experts can uncover the provenance of the barks through regional variations in the colour of ochres.
The works can be appreciated for their clarity and beautiful figurative composition, while those with greater knowledge will discern ceremonial meaning. The barks also offer intriguing insight into pre-European continental history, including the influence of Macassan visitors – sailors who came from Sulawesi to harvest sea cucumber and pearl shell.
The Macassans introduced metal to the Arnhem Land peoples and many words including rupiah (money) that are still used today. Symbols of that contact – including the metal blade, the distinctive shape of the prow of the visitors’ boats (wind) and their sails disappearing beyond horizon (death) – still resonate through Arnhem Land traditional culture, not least visual art and song.
And they are captured vividly in the bark art of these Old Masters.
• Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists is at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, from 6 December 2013 to 20 July 2014
posted by Satish Sharma at
02:23
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