Obituary by Susan McCulloch-Uehlin
(reproduced with permission); first published in the Australian 21 February
2001 (page 14).
Luritja elder John Warangkula Tjupurrula's painting
career is one of the most extraordinary of modem Aboriginal artists.
In 1997 the artist's painting Water
Dreaming at Kalipinypa set the world auction record for
an Aboriginal art-work when it sold at Sotheby's auction for $210
000. Three years later the same painting set another record in
its resale at Sotheby's for $486 500.
Like all artists whose works
sell on the secondary market, Warangkula received none of the proceeds
of this sale. But its effects on the then 72-year-old were twofold.
First, it brought attention to the state of abject poverty in which
Warangkula lived. Second, it sparked an interest in, and demand for,
any paintings this former great master of the early Papunya school may
wish to paint.
Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula
was born south of Lake McKay about 1925 and lived his early life In
traditional manner on the land, never attending European school. Vivien
Johnson describes in Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert: A
Biographical Dictionary that Warangkula recalled his first contact
with white people as one of fear, when he hid in a tree from a plane
which his people took for a mamu or devil.
In the early 1940s, Warangkula's
family moved to Hermannsburg mission, where the young man undertook
traditional manhood ceremonies.
In youth he worked as a road
and airstrip construction worker in a number of Central Desert communities
including Haasts Bluff (where he lived), Mt Liebig and Yuendumu. In
1960 he, along with most members of Haasts Bluff community, were moved
to the new settlement of Papunya, 40km south, when water at Haasts Bluff
became short of supply.
Papunya, where Warangkula became
a council member, was the last of the Central Desert Aboriginal communities
to be set up as part of the federal government's assimilation policy
for Aboriginal people. Most of Papunya's population of several hundred
were Pintupi but also comprised Amnatyerre, Arrernte, Luritja and Warlpiri
people.
After his arrival there in 1971,
teacher Geoffrey Bardon described Papuya as a "hidden city, unknown
on maps because of the shame felt by its Aboriginal Inhabitants" . "I
found a community of people in enormous distress," he wrote in Papunya
Tula, Art of the Western Desert, "oppressed by a sense of exile from
their homelands and committed to remain where they were by direction
of the commonwealth government. Papunya was ... a place of emotional
loss and waste with an air of casual cruelty."
Christianity, through the Lutheran
Church, was an aspect of community life, and Warangkula was a staunch
Christian and regular churchgoer.
In 1971, through Bardon's encouragement
and negotiation, tribal elders painted a mural on the school walls depicting
the honey ant dreaming story. Soon, painting on any surface - tin, cardboard
and plywood boards - was practised enthusiastically. Warangkula was
one of the 20 original "painting men".
Photographs of the time show
Warangkula, a big imposing man, sitting with a slight frown as he concentrates
on his painting. Bardon described him as a "happy, expressive man with
a slight stutter and tremor'. He was "modest but exquisitely confident",
and worked in his own style with intense concentration. "To overcome
his difficulty with brushes, he used extensive dotting and overdotting,
together with widely varied linear effects," says Bardon.
Aware of the popularity of his
art, his output, says Bardon, was prodigious and he would paint on any
surface, including matchboxes.
Warangkula's paintings from this
period are among the most striking and lyrical of modern Aboriginal
art, and rightly deserve the often misused nomenclature of masterpieces.
Although others exist, two in public collections stand out - the magical
Rain Dreaming in the collection of the Museum and Art Gallery
of the Northern Territory and A Bush Tucker Story in the collection-of
the National Gallery of Victoria.
Finely dotted in numerous overlays
and, In the case of the latter painted over a period of months, each
displays a, great freedom of individual expression. National Gallery
of Victoria curator Judith Ryan says the "rhapsodic layers" create "a
masterpiece of three-dimensional illusion".
A similar quality, although
in lesser detail and layering and of bolder design, is seen in the record
breaking Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa. Kalipinypa 400km west
of Alice Springs, was the main site over which Warangkula had authority
and is a storm centre or water dreaming site. Most of his paintings
are based on stories of this area.
Warangkula's paintings remained
popular and sold through the artists cooperative Papunya Tula (of which
he remained a member until death) until the mid 1980s. However, during
the mid to late 1980s health problems, which included a badly broken
arm and increasing blindness, caused a decline in quality of his work.
A further factor was that he spent more time in Alice Springs than on
his family's Papunya outstation of Kintore. For years he eked out a
living selling painted artefacts and some smaller paintings to the shops
at Alice Springs's Todd Mall.
With the landmark first sale
of Water Dreaming at Sotheby's in 1997, Warangkula was again encouraged
to paint. The art world didn't quite know ho these new works. Increasingly
large black-primed canvases with huge swirls of reds, yellows, oranges
and purples, they we alternately regarded as the reflowering of a former
genius or daubs created for a greedy market keen to buy anything by
a name artist.
If the art world remains undecided
on these, their creation at least helped restore this fine artist's
sense of self-worth.
Stories abounded about Warangkula's
exploitation - of him being locked in a hotel room until a certain number
of paintings were produced and paid a pittance for works selling for
many times more - but the man I met in Alice Springs at one of his dealer's
houses in 1999 arrived very much as the boss, demanding in no uncertain
terms that canvases be primed and that paints be at the ready.
Last year Warangkula's health
failed and he spent some months in a nursing home which, according to
Papunya Tula coordinator Daphne Williams, he disliked intensely. He
discharged himself to the care of his family at Kintore where he died
on 12 February 2001.
Warangkula is survived by his
wife, Gladys Napanangka who is also a painter; eight daughters (two
from his first marriage); and two sons, one of whom, Dennis, also paints.
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Obituary:
John Warangkula Tjupurrula 
