Anatjari (Yanyatjarri) Tjakamarra circa 1938-1992

Painted in the Papunya region in mid 1972
Stuart Art Centre, Alice Springs
Private collection, France, acquired from the above in 1972

This painting is accompanied by a Stuart Art Centre field note, with a drawing describing the work and numbered 19408.

The painting is executed on a masonite board and is unframed. There are some areas of scuffing and scratching approximately 7cm above the central roundel which should be visible in the catalogue. There are some minor scuffs and rubbing around the edges of the perimeter and a few areas of minor surface scuffing. The pigments all appear stable and there have been no repairs or restorations.
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In 1971 Anatjari Tjakamarra was one of the original members of the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative that took Western Desert painting to the world despite the fact that his experience of sustained contact with Europeans had only commenced a few short years before. Tjakamarra belonged to the Pintupi language group and his traditional lands lay hundreds of miles to the south-west of Papunya, in the Gibson Desert. He was among the last of the Pintupi to abandon the semi-nomadic lifestyle and leave their homelands for the government settlement of Papunya in the late 1960s. Anatjari was a highly dedicated artist who was the first modern Aboriginal artist to have a painting – Tingari Cycle Dreaming – acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1988.

A highly regarded ceremonial man with a deep knowledge of ancestral law, Anatjari’s paintings mainly concerned the apical ancestors of the Western Desert peoples, the Tingari whose esoteric teachings are the basis for Pintupi initiation ceremonies. The Tingari are usually described as two main characters in a range of guises, both animal and in human form, who travel across the deserts creating sacred sites and giving people the civilising attributes of ceremony, law and language.

Untitled, Body Paint for Initiation, 1972, is one of a number of paintings created by Anatjari in the early years of the Papunya movement which focus on the designs painted onto men’s bodies in ceremony, in this case it reflects a pattern worn by an elder or ritual leader in an initiation ceremony. It consists of parallels of red ochre alternating with lines of white dots against a black ground. The dotting may relate to wamulu or pulped and coloured vegetable matter that is adhered to the skin of performers or that is used in ground paintings and applied to sacred objects. In the iconography of Western Desert painting, the central roundel in the painting may represent a ceremonial site and a ground painting. The non-figurative nature of this image hints at the deep, spiritual significance of its subject and reflects the personal totemic identity of the wearer.

In his studies of Tjakamara’s paintings, the anthropologist Fred Myers records several works from the early 1970s that are composed along a similar X-form structure, although most of these consist of an array of roundels.¹ Another similar composition featuring parallel lines of alternating colour and dots is Cave Story, 1972, in the collection of the Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide.²

^WC

^1. Myers, F.R., Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002, pp.88-93, 96.
^2. Ryan, J. and P. Batty, Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011, p.75.