AN Aboriginal artwork created during the formative years of the modern indigenous art movement has been discovered in a house in New York, where its significance was undiscovered for almost four decades.Experts believe the picture of three men bedecked for corroboree by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, a star of the Western Desert art movement, is one of the first paintings by the nation's most collected indigenous artist, who died in 2002.
The 51cm by 35cm board is on its way to Australia and due to arrive in Melbourne on Monday.
It is owned by an American woman who received it as a gift from an Australian family in 1975. The owner's daughter was unsure of the work's significance and asked Sotheby's Australia to tell her if it was Australian or African.
Sotheby's head of indigenous art, D'lan Davidson, said he was contacted last week as he was putting the final touches on the company's catalogue for its Important Aboriginal and Oceanic Art Auction in Sydney on October 18.
"They had no idea of its value at all," he said of the owners.
The work is thought to have been painted by Tjapaltjarri in 1972, not long after he joined what became the Papunya Tula Artists collective, which was formed in 1971 after schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon encouraged men at the central Australian community to paint.
Next week, the National Gallery of Victoria will launch an exhibition featuring 200 of the first paintings produced at Papunya in 1971 and 1972 by the founding artists of the Western Desert movement.
The works sparked the genesis of the movement, now internationally recognised as one of the most important developments in Australian art history.
The period from 1971 to 1972 marked a critical turning point when ancient visual Western Desert language was rendered permanent on sheets of composition board and thereby transformed into a new art form.
Tjapaltjarri began painting in 1972 and Mr Davidson said his paintings from that year were particularly valuable because in 1973 he adopted a style he thought was more commercial.
The picture will arrive too late for inclusion in the NGV show but Sotheby's has put it on the cover of its upcoming auction catalogue as Untitled (Emu Corroboree Man) with an asking price of $120,000-$180,000.
Emu Corroboree Man is the title of another Tjapaltjarri from 1972 which scholars claim was the artist's first work. It fetched $412,000 at Sotheby's in 2005, and will be exhibited at the NGV show.
"The two paintings are so similar you could almost say they've been painted back to back," Mr Davidson said.
There are only 13 known Tjapaltjarri paintings from 1972. Tjapaltjarri's vast 2m by 3.5m canvas, Warlugulong, 1977, fetched a record for an indigenous art work of $2.4 million at the top of the market in 2007.
Prices for indigenous art have since fallen considerably but the work found in New York is expected to attract interest from museums internationally.
Had it been discovered in Australia its significance would have attracted export controls preventing it leaving the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment