WEST MACDONNELL RANGES, 1938

Important Aboriginal Art
Melbourne
25 March 2009
25

ALBERT NAMATJIRA

(1902 - 1959)
WEST MACDONNELL RANGES, 1938

watercolour on paper

11.5 x 49.0 cm

signed lower right: ALBERT MAMATJIRA inscribed verso: ‘Purchased at the first exhibition of Albert Namatjira’s water colours held at the Fine Arts Society Galleries, Melbourne December 1938, J.W. Collings’.

Estimate: 
$12,000 - 15,000
Sold for $13,200 (inc. BP) in Auction 7 - 25 March 2009, Melbourne
Provenance

Fine Arts Society Galleries, Melbourne
Collection of Mr. J.W. Collings, Melbourne
Thence by descent

Catalogue text

Albert Namatjira's first solo exhibition was opened by Lady Huntingfield, wife of the Governor of Victoria on 5 December,1938. The exhibition comprised of 41 watercolours which were sold out in three days. This painting, purchased by the vendor's uncle, is a panoramic view of the Mereenie Bluff, in the West MacDonnell Ranges in central Australia.

‘Albert Namatjira's dramatic entry into the Australian art world was both inspired and inspiring. He inspired his own and subsequent generations of Aboriginal people and artists across Australia. In skillfully adopting the methods and materials of Western landscape painting he challenged the relegation of Aboriginal art to the realm of archeology and ethnography. Namatjira became the most prominent Aboriginal Australian of his era and, in 1957, was the first Aboriginal person to be granted full citizenship.’1

1 Watson, K., Poetic Justice: an overview of Indigenous Art, in Perkins, H., One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 20