Ladies and Gentlemen,
When my wife and I saw paintings by Aborigines for the first time about ten years ago, we were both surprised and fascinated. That was in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The person who accompanied us at that time, Hank Ebes from Melbourne, who is also showing a part of his collection here, recently told me how stunned I was then, how I stood there with my hands alongside my face, full of admiration.
The fact that, even then, work by Aboriginal painters was exhibited in Canberra and in other state-owned galleries in the big cities of Australia was a clear indication that the question, "Are we dealing here with ethnographics or with art?", was no longer an issue for white Australians.
New York had already enthusiastically welcomed Aboriginal art in 1988, about seventeen years after its first appearance. But even in 1994 the art fair in Cologne refused to exhibit some works of contemporary art by Aborigines because they were considered to be mere folk art.
We are five years further down the track now, and in wide art circles the consensus leans toward art.
I mentioned the early start of Aboriginal art, and what I am referring to is the experiment by the Federal Government of Australia to see if the Aborigines would entrust their 'Dreamings' to canvas – dreamings which were sung, danced and drawn in the sand in the Central Desert. To that purpose they were supplied with hard board, paint and brushes.
And the result was so encouraging that they soon switched over to canvas.
The Aborigines, often in a family group, live in a widespread area in the vast Central Desert of Australia. Paint, brushes and various different sizes of canvas were delivered by car to these areas.
After about six weeks the trip, which could take a couple of days, would be repeated to see what had developed itself in the meantime.
Then the paintings were paid for and taken away and new art supplies were left behind.
That happened in Papunya Tula from 1971 onwards. And when Emily Kame Kngwarreye started painting in 1988/89, the art produced in the Papunya region had already found its place on the art map of Australia. The art dealers, some Australian and even some foreign collectors, were clearly interested.
Emily lived in a large area of about 2000 square kilometres in the Central Desert, otherwise known as Utopia, which is inhabited by about 900 Aborigines spread out over 16 camps – relatively small communities in family groups with around 50 members each.
Rodney Gooch, art advisor to the inhabitants of Utopia and manager of an Aboriginal art shop in Alice Springs, the town in the heart of the Central Desert, was the one who started a painting project. Everybody who was a member of the Batik Group could enlist for this. Also newcomers were welcome.
Emily by then had participated in the batik group for about ten years, together with many other women – a group set up as a part of a large project for the education of adult Aborigines.
Compared to the Papunya Tula works, where art started a lot earlier, the images on the silk batiks that came out of Utopia were less formal, freer, more varied and livelier. On top of that there was definitely an urge to experiment present.
Emily herself had grown into creating a batik style that was obviously different from what the other people produced and was actually perceived to be a bit over the top by her peers. The others snickered about Emily's art expressions.
When she and a friend, as young girls, were digging up yams, a wild vegetable that resembles sweet potato, she saw her first white person, probably a policeman, on horseback – an animal that she had never seen before either.
The girls got a terrible shock, thought they were dealing with some sort of devil who wanted to kill them, and fled as fast as their legs could carry them back to their camp in the hills.
When Rodney Gooch started the painting project, Emily was already in her seventies and white people didn't scare her anymore. Just like the other women she jumped at the opportunity to paint but the slow intensive way of making batiks was a process that didn't match her own natural speed.
She was quick in her movements, extroverted and uncomplicated – something that couldn't be said about the other participants, who were rather shy.
Emily, judging by her batik style, was also confident.
One by one the women had to drop off their first canvas with Rodney Gooch, and they all got the same price for their work. Rodney recognised the uniqueness of Emily's painting straight away.
The work, Emu Woman, was set up in a linear structure, loosely and naturally covered in dots.
After a short period of painting in this particular style, things changed. Emily covered her canvas now with closely packed dots – big paint dots in many colours with smaller ones on top of the big ones.
She worked fast and didn't clean the brush between changing colours, so that the paint strokes, often purposely, contained more than one colour.
She painted, like the others, with acrylic paints that come in almost any colour.
Her paintings in the dot technique, often in one or two main colours with an extensive colour spectrum, are a true colour feast for the eye.
And it's not restricted to the aforementioned two painting styles. The changes point to a pattern in Emily's work that she maintained throughout her painting career.
(She was born around 1910 and painted from about her 78th year until her death at 86 on 2 September 1996).
She worked in series, the numbers of which vary. And those who look closely at those series, of which there are seven, see how she developed a new style, how this particular style blossomed and evolved and faded because she found yet another way to express herself.
A larger brush than before allowed her to work faster. She clutched its handle close to the bristles and dipped it into new paint with other colours still on the brush and thrust the brush with some force onto the surface, hollowing out the centre and feathering the edges of a large dot.
Dubbed the dump-dump style, this technique was sometimes varied with a twirling of the brush before taking it off the linen. The result of this style is a painting of an impression of mainly flowers, not bound to any structure.
There seems to be some sort of order, though that might have had something to do with the size of the arc of her arm while painting and the distance of the reach of her body. Much more interesting are the colour schemes.
Sometimes the paintings are in just the one colour, and sometimes Emily used all possible colours – like the composition painting which consists of 50 canvases that is the focal point of the exhibition – a smashing colour feast that has no equal.
Emily painted, sitting in the sand, under a rusty corrugated steel cover that protected from the sun.
Sometimes the canvas was in front of her and if necessary she rotated it so she could reach all its corners with her brush.
With the large monumental canvases, of which there are many, she would sit in the middle of them and work from the inside out.
Her upper torso – she wasn't much taller than 120 cm – and the power in her arms was legendary, due to her earlier work. And she had strong but also large hands.
The brush became a natural extension of her arm, increasing the reach of her body.
Being also ambidextrous, she could paint with both hands, which to my knowledge is unique. Sometimes she would paint with the one hand and then change to the other if that suited her better, thus creating a larger reach from her sitting position.
In her later years, due to her physical condition – getting increasingly frail but not lacking in passion and energy – helpers often rotated the canvas for her.
She painted till the very end, without preparation or planning the work – not even in the case of the metres-tall paintings – and without correction afterwards.
She didn't feel the need to look at a painting halfway through or even when it was finished. Her dots and lines stop and start in the least likely places and appear to follow no rules.
She was not concerned about running out of paint halfway through a stroke or even continuing in the same place after reloading the brush.
When she painted in large brushstrokes she did not care about creating seamless lines nor was she worried about the brush picking up colours from neighbouring stripes on its rapid journey across the canvas.
She didn't care about precision, neatness and regularity.
It's taking it a bit far to say something about every one of Emily's seven different paint styles.
But I can't resist telling you a bit about her last style.
In August 1996, the month before she died, she once more showed the need to express herself.
She just loved painting. She would move her upper torso rhythmically, like the ceremonial dances, and she would sing while painting.
She had canvas and paint but no brushes. At a certain point in time she grabbed the eight-centimetre wide brush that was used to ground the canvases so the paint wouldn't be soaked up by the linen.
She was then 86 and in no time at all she created in wide strokes and lines 24 paintings in various colour combinations of which one is almost all white.
Twelve of those paintings are here at the exhibition – breathtaking in its luminosity and unheard of boldness.
Emily developed herself as a painter in a natural way – it sort of welled up in her. She had an almost unsurpassable control and power over her brush and she had the talent to create significant art.
Also unique is her total production, her output, produced in no more than eight years.
The estimate is that she painted over 3000 paintings – a lot more work than most European and American painters created in a whole lifetime – which is even more extraordinary if you remember that these paintings only came about at the end of her life.
Ladies and gentlemen, that leaves us to address maybe the most difficult aspect of Emily's art: what does she express?
She always answered this question in the same way: "my country, my country, my country".
Her whole essence of being was connected to her country and drenched with the traditions of her people: song, dance, ceremonies, body painting and the stories about the ancestors.
This is about the Dreamings. From within that connection, in a spiritual sense, she painted the land where she lived until the end of her days, sleeping in the open air.
But she didn't paint landscapes like the ones we know. She rather painted aspects of the fauna and flora, those that belong to her Dreamings – the Dreamings she inherited from her mother and others that she acquired later in life, based on the knowledge of the Aboriginal laws and insight into the community and wisdom.
Once Emily expressed herself more elaborately about her paintings, an often repeated passage that appears in almost every publication about her and her work and the one you will find printed on your invitation:
"…Whole lot, that's whole lot, Awelye (my dreaming), Arlatyeye (pencil yam), Ankerrrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (a Dreamtime pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (a favourite food of emus, a small plant), Atrwerle (green bean) and Kame (yam seed). That's what I paint: whole lot…".
Other than that, she didn't talk about her paintings and she certainly wasn't prepared to explain them. Outsiders are not supposed to know anything about that, according to the laws of her people of which she was a strong advocate.
Emily's work is – depending on her style phase – sometimes compared to that of Monet, Kandinsky or other famous modern masters. Those are purely visual comparisons.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye painted her interpretation of her land in a tens of thousands of years old Aboriginal tradition in which body painting, ceremonial dance and song were central.
Emily could sing her paintings and has done so in the presence of white people.
In the context of Aboriginal culture her art is – as a Frenchwoman said after her introduction to Emily’s work – revolutionary.
Speech By: Dr Simon Lavie (May 20, 1999)
Former Executive Director, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
