Emily Kame Kngwarreye

A place in the sun for a late bloomer
SOURCE: Sydney Morning Herald
October 10, 2007

An exhibition set for Japan is more than a first for indigenous art, writes Steve Meacham.



Striking figure ... Emily Kame Kngwarreye's work is considered on a par with that of renowned international abstract artists.

What is the most extraordinary thing about the first contemporary Australian artist to be granted a major retrospective exhibition overseas?

That she is a dead black female who didn't even start painting until she was in her late 70s? Or that the exhibition is being mounted not in London, Paris or New York, but in Japan - in two of the country's most prestigious venues, the National Museum of Art in Osaka and the new National Art Centre in Tokyo?

It is 11 years since Emily Kame Kngwarreye died, aged 86. Since then her works have reputedly sold for a larger combined monetary value than those of any other indigenous Australian artist.

In May her 1995 painting Earth's Creation sold for $1,056,000 at auction - setting a new record for just two months before it was surpassed by the $2.4 million the National Gallery of Australia paid for Warlugulong, by the late Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

Since 1998, when the Queensland Art Gallery mounted the first significant exhibition of Kngwarreye's work (it also toured to the Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery in Canberra), the artist's incredible life and work have been overshadowed, in the public imagination, at least, by men such as Clifford Possum and Rover Thomas.

So says Margo Neale, Kngwarreye's biographer and the curator of the 1998 retrospective.

Neale is the principal adviser on indigenous affairs at the National Museum of Canberra, and the Japanese turned to her when they decided on the Kngwarreye exhibition. The official announcement about the exhibition, which opens in February, will be made in Japan next Monday.

"Two freight planes of her work are going over," Neale says at her office in Canberra. "It's huge. There are over 120 paintings, and several of those consist of many panels."

To put it in context, Neale says, the futuristic National Art Centre in Tokyo "only deals in blockbusters. They've just had a million people in one month for their Monet exhibition." Yet Japan's arts establishment has decided Kngwarreye is a significant artist whose work deserves to be seen on the same stage as a Cezanne or a Modigliani.

"It really is extraordinary," Neale says. "The Japanese have never shown a serious interest in Australian contemporary art before. They've never done a big Australian show, and they have certainly never shown any interest in Aboriginal art, apart from small ethnographic exhibitions. Usually the Japanese only look to the French or the Americans."

Yet Asian and Aboriginal art are much closer than Asian and Western art, Neale says. The Japanese and indigenous Australian traditions, for example, both revere ancestors and reflect a spiritual affinity with nature and landscape. There are similarities, too, between the Asian love of calligraphy and the body markings of indigenous Australians.

Neale met the artist the year before her death "when she was being humbugged by everyone. Hawkers, painters, agents, everyone wanted a piece of Emily. She was thrilled that someone was going to give her a proper exhibition. She wanted her art to be seen by the world."

Her rise had been meteoric. She didn't start painting on canvas until 1989 - though, as Neale points out, as a senior Anmatyerre custodian, Kngwarreye had been involved in body marking all her life. She lived on the edge of the Simpson Desert, 250 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, rarely leaving the camps of Utopia. She had never been to art school. But in just eight years she created about 3000 canvases, roughly one a day, inspired by her traditional country of Alhalkere.

From her very first paintings, Kngwarreye was considered unique - with much more in common with American and European artists such as de Kooning, Kandinsky and Pollock than any of her indigenous peers. "She wasn't just another Aboriginal painter," Neale says. "Her work was received with great acclaim. It was compositionally sound. It had depth, colour, tone. All the things which make a good piece of contemporary art were there. Plus it was unusual because it used all these symbols and designs which came from breast painting and a woman's body."

The woman herself cut a striking figure, if only for the hole carved through her nose. Her name, Kame, means yam seed, and it is said she carried a seed with her in the piercing, which seemed to have been carved to resemble a particular holed rock in her traditional lands.

"I don't know when, where or why she had her nose pierced," Neale says. "But it is an embodiment of that place, her homage to that place."

The works in the retrospective have been drawn from 45 different public, private and corporate collections in Australia, the US, Britain and Singapore. Fifteen of the earliest paintings have been lent by Janet Holmes a Court. Yet, ironically, when the Japanese asked Neale to create the show, her own institution didn't own a single work by the artist ("We do now," she adds quickly).

Isn't it strange that the National Museum, rather than the National Gallery, is the body putting together such a ground-breaking exhibition?

No, says Craddock Morton, the museum's director. "In terms of Emily, we're not just expressing the aesthetic dimension. We're promoting the iconography of the work and explaining the relationship between the artist and the country, and between the artist and traditional beliefs."

However, Morton recognises the Japanese request has given the museum a chance to shine.

"This is a benchmark exhibition for us, and for Emily," he says. "It's the first major exhibition by an Australian artist to travel internationally. It's not an indigenous show. It's a show of a major Australian contemporary artist, with indigenous explanation provided."