Indigenous art is riding a new wave of popularity. One Hollywood star is helping

This story is part of the Good Weekend October 14 edition.See all 15 stories.

When Andy Warhol said, “The best museum is Bloomingdale’s,” he was anticipating a day when art was seen as just another commodity, like a kettle or a toaster. In May, in the famous windows at Bloomingdale’s on 59th Street in Manhattan, kettles, toasters and espresso machines were covered in the distinctive patterns of Western Desert painting, part of a promotion by Australian company Breville called An Aboriginal Culinary Journey. The project, which required three years of research and development, featured a limited-edition set of appliances, with the profits from sales going to Aboriginal causes. The company believes it’s good business; at the very least it’s good karma.

Ten minutes’ drive away at Uovo, a dedicated storage facility on New York’s Long Island, an exhibition called 60 over 50 brought together two of America’s most important collections of Australian Indigenous art. The 60 paintings on display belonged to actor Steve Martin and his wife, Anne Stringfield, and to investor John Wilkerson and wife Barbara, the latter couple known as prolific buyers of American folk art.

It’s been a little over 50 years since the men of the Papunya Tula community in Australia’s Western Desert began to paint their traditional stories on boards. A selection of those early boards, created between 1971 and 1974 by well-known artists such as Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, are now part of the Wilkerson collection. The couple got hooked on Aboriginal art when they visited Australia in 1994 to see their son, who was studying at the University of Sydney. The immediate plan was to acquire examples of work by each member of the original “mob” that gathered in Papunya. The Wilkersons may not have got the full set, but they assembled a group of works that would be the envy of any Australian museum.

Steve Martin’s taste is more contemporary, although he jokes this is only because the Wilkersons got all the early stuff. His part of the display included major works by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Doreen Reid Nakamarra, Naata Nungurrayi and George Tjungurrayi, as well as paintings by legendary artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas and Paddy Bedford.

60 over 50 was a museum-quality exhibition held in a city long recognised as the centre of the global art market. It coincided with three art fairs, including Frieze New York, which listed as a satellite event a forum on Indigenous Australian art with Martin, the Wilkersons, Sydney collector Danny Goldberg and curator Bruce Johnson McLean from the National Gallery of Australia. On the day, it was standing room only.

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri’s Water Dreaming, 1972. Credit: Tony De Camillo. The estate of the artist, by permission of Papunya Tula Artists through the Aboriginal Artists Agency, collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson. Photographed for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

During Frieze week, an auction of Aboriginal art organised by the late Tim Klingender for Sotheby’s NYC produced new auction records for no fewer than 13 artists, including Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, whose Water and Bush Tucker Story (1972) sold for $US762,000 to a European collector.

From tiger-striped toasters in Bloomingdale’s to booming sales at Sotheby’s, Aboriginal art is riding a wave of popularity in the US that promises to change the way this work is bought and sold, both internationally and at home. The growing enthusiasm of overseas collectors provides an opportunity for Australia to remind the rest of the world that we’re making art that stands comparison with anything that might be seen in the US or Europe. At present, Aboriginal art is the only Australian work the rest of the planet wants to see, but it’s the spearhead that creates potential new openings for a broader range of art.

One of the unique aspects of Indigenous art, by definition, is that its power and authenticity are based on a deep connection between artists and the place where they live. Painters from the Western Desert or Arnhem Land are not about to move to Manhattan to capitalise on their newfound popularity; the basis of their work lies in an ongoing relationship with country. If private and public collectors want to see Aboriginal art at the source, they will have to travel to Australia – and that opens a path for a broader appreciation of local art. Or so one might hope.

Aside from the inevitable “tyranny of distance”, one of Australian art’s major barriers to global acceptance has been its relative cheapness. In world terms, our artists and dealers are paupers, our major artworks bargains. In the US, artists fresh from college regularly achieve much higher prices than Australian artists in their 70s and 80s. Guy Warren, now 102 years old, has never sold a picture for more than $35,000, for example.

There’s an ingrained belief, even among leading local collectors, that Australian art is, or should be, inexpensive. The well-heeled art buyer who travels to the Art Basel fairs in Basel, Miami Beach, Paris or Hong Kong and drops $1 million with an uber-dealer will return home and beat down the price of a $10,000 painting in Sydney or Melbourne.

The escalating global interest in Aboriginal art may spell the beginning of the end for these low provincial price points, dragging us into the international marketplace – if dealers and collectors allow it to happen. Many of Australia’s leading commercial galleries are perfectly happy to sell locally, however, avoiding the expense and bother of the art fair circuit. This is partly to do with the age of dealers who have no desire to take on the world when they’re doing nicely at home. But the art industry in general is like every other business in which comfortable stasis leads to gradual decay or, in this case, ever greater marginalisation.

A new generation, led by Australian commercial galleries such as Sullivan+Strumpf, Station, This is No Fantasy and Chalk Horse, are showing a little more adventure. Melbourne dealer D’Lan Davidson recently opened a discreet New York showroom where he’s selling quality Indigenous works on the secondary market to clients by appointment. Being the very opposite of a shopfront, this arrangement indicates the level of interest among those collectors looking for high-value items.

Davidson is also Steve Martin’s agent in Australia, a jealously guarded connection that’s provided a stepping-stone for Davidson into the New York market. Over the past five years, he’s helped his prestigious client, whose personal experience of Australia never reached beyond Sydney and Melbourne, to access Indigenous works of outstanding quality. A lifelong collector, Martin now has more than 100 Aboriginal paintings in his collection, to put alongside pictures by Georges Seurat, Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and other famous moderns.

---

The surge in interest by collectors such as Martin owes a debt to the way public museums have begun to focus on Indigenous culture in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Steve Martin (at left, with Danny Goldberg) at 60 over 50.Credit: Courtesy of Danny Goldberg

The recent spate of activity represents a second coming for Indigenous art in New York. The first time this work stepped out of the desert and into the metropolis was in 1988, when the exhibition Dreamings, curated by anthropologist Peter Sutton, was shown at the Asia Society Galleries and then in Chicago. Professor Fred Myers, arguably America’s leading expert on Aboriginal life, has identified this as the moment “when Aboriginal art emphatically became ‘fine art’.”

Following the Dreamings exhibition, the New York gallerist John Weber held a commercial show of paintings by Papunya Tula artists. For Weber, known as a dealer in abstract and minimalist work, the attraction of desert painting was aesthetic rather than anthropological. There was a brief flurry of excitement as it looked as if Aboriginal art had “cracked” the international market, but that opening soon closed. There was still too much ingrained resistance to the idea that paintings made by untrained artists in remote desert communities could be considered significant contemporary art.

The art world at that time was an elite club that protected its privileges. This became even more obvious in 1994, when a Melbourne Aboriginal art dealer, the late Gabrielle Pizzi, was rejected from the Cologne art fair (after participating in prior ones) because the selection committee said it was not its policy to show “folk art”. Today nobody – least of all the Germans – would question the contemporary art credentials of leading bark painters such as John Mawurndjul and James Iyuna. Thirty years on, the grass roots nature of this work that disqualified it in the eyes of the Cologne committee is now its major selling point.

If politics and social justice issues have exerted an influence on the broader acceptance of this work, so, too, has old-fashioned star power and, in this, Steve Martin has played a crucial role. We know him as a screen comedian, but he’s also a talented writer and musician, and a perfectionist who doesn’t do anything by half-measures.

The story of Martin’s discovery of Aboriginal art began in 2015, when he saw a picture reproduced in The New York Times by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri (one of the artists in the Breville project), which was showing at the commercial gallery, Salon 94, in the Bowery. Martin got on his bike and pedalled to the exhibition. He was dazzled by Warlimpirrnga’s painting and bought it, beginning a new art romance that would soon become compulsive.

“You have to understand, I didn’t even know it was Aboriginal,” he confesses when we meet in New York on a fine, sunny day. “I just saw the image in the paper, and because Warlimpirrnga’s standing right next to it, I know it’s from a foreign land. I really liked the Op Art part of it. I literally asked: ‘Are these for sale?’ and found they were nominal in contemporary art terms. Even today I’d bet our whole expenditure on this art is equivalent to one [by American artist] Mark Bradford.

Old Walter Tjampitjinpa’s Rainbow and Water Story, 1972. Credit: Tony De Camillo. The estate of the artist, by permission of Papunya Tula Artists through the Aboriginal Artists Agency, collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson. Photographed for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

“We lived with the work for about three weeks, without considering that it came from a particular culture. It was just a painting we liked. Then on Twitter, I began to look at the images of Aboriginal art that people were posting, and I thought, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this!’ Because a lot of these paintings were very inexpensive, I began buying online and making all the classic mistakes. Then I started reading up on them.”

As a collector, Martin is no mere trophy hunter. While many of the world’s biggest buyers of contemporary art allow curators and consultants to choose the works they acquire, Martin only buys what he personally loves. His growing fascination with Aboriginal art saw him invite artist Yukultji Napangati and her daughter to lunch at his apartment, where she could see her own work on the wall. Scrupulous about doing his homework, Martin has read widely, learning the how, why and where of this art, marvelling at the nature of a late-blooming movement whose roots lie in prehistory. Like a good philosopher, as his knowledge increased he increasingly realised he knew nothing at all. Could there be a greater lure for the true collector?

For every non-Aboriginal, the most fundamental concept behind the work is also the most difficult to grasp. There is no Western equivalent for the Tjukurpa – formerly known as the Dreaming – which defines an individual’s relation to the community and the cosmos. The Tjukurpa is both lore and religion, an eternal now, that recognises no distinction between past, present and future.

“When I first got in to it,” Martin recalls, “I bought every book I could find, and I studied them. I’m trying to get it, I’m trying to get it. Then, at a certain point you think, ‘Okay, I got this’. Two years later, you think, ‘I don’t have this at all – and I should quit thinking about it. It’s too vast.’ It’s like you or me trying to figure out how a hedge fund works! I realised I really should root my understanding in how this work fits into the larger world of art.”

‘I see these works as “abstract narrative pictures”.’

Actor Steve Martin

He began to seek familiar points of connection, learning to look at paintings as landscapes viewed from the air, with familiar signs denoting journeys, hills, waterholes and meeting places.

“I’ve simplified it for myself,” he says. “I see these works as ‘abstract narrative pictures’. For instance, if [Dutch-American artist Willem] De Kooning is not painting a woman he’s painting an abstraction, but these works have a subject and a story, they only look abstract.”

Having “lived his life in irony”, Martin says he loves the complete lack of irony in his Australian desert paintings. He also enjoys the idea that many of the best artists don’t get started until late in life. “In contemporary art, everyone has to be young,” he says, “but a young Aboriginal artist is 50.”

Through friends and contacts, Martin was eventually put in touch with D’Lan Davidson, who has been his guide through the maze of the Aboriginal art world, finding key works and helping him focus his purchases. The “Emily” room in 60 over 50 included 11 paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the majority of them from Martin’s collection.

Steve Martin (right) with John Wilkerson. The pictures in the 60 over 50 exhibition came from their collections.

Martin wonders why Kngwarreye “broke through” ahead of other artists as he believes her work is difficult. He knows that the roots of the yam or bush potato feature in most of her paintings, but also that they are often hidden behind huge bunches of dots. “Some are more obscure, some less,” he says. “The narrative is cloaked. There’s a degree of consistency, with all the roots and the yam lines, but it varies as to how much she reveals. For me, the quality of the picture is determined by that balance. There’s one painting here that’s completely grey!”

---

Before the show at Uovo, a selection from Martin’s collection had been shown at the National Arts Club in New York, in 2022. Then, following an approach from Carolyn Fletcher, partner of the then consul Nick Greiner, another group of works was hung at the Australian consul’s New York residence. Here, they were paired with the early Papunya boards from the Wilkerson collection, a combination that initially aroused Martin’s scepticism.

He felt more relaxed when he saw the hang and met the Wilkersons. “They had these early pictures, which were just explosive,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t get into that, because there was literally nothing left! When John and Barbara and I saw everything together on the walls at the residence, we thought, ‘This is fantastic! Where can we do this more publicly?’ ”

Breville’s “Piruwa” kettle, named for a native shrub whose flowers can be used to make tea.

Martin’s collection had already begun to attract attention. In May to July 2019, noted art dealer Larry Gagosian held an exhibition called Desert Painters of Australia at his Madison Avenue gallery. It was a non-selling show of Martin’s paintings along with works from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. Another version of the show, Desert Painters of Australia II, featured at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills outlet from July to September that year. By this stage, Gagosian was on a roll. There would be
another show in Hong Kong, Desert Painters of Australia: Two Generations in September to November 2020, followed by Emily: Desert Painter of Australia in his Paris gallery from January to March 2022. The two last shows were organised in association with D’Lan Davidson.

It may seem strange that a wheeler-dealer like Gagosian should host two non-commercial exhibitions of Martin’s collection, but Martin says there was no pressure to sell. He’s known Gagosian since the dealer was selling posters in Westwood, California, and has watched him evolve to the point where he now has 19 galleries spread across the US, Europe and Asia, and is generally considered the most powerful and successful art dealer in the world.

The way the contemporary art world is constituted means Gagosian is very powerful indeed. Long gone are the days in which critics, curators, museum
directors or collectors were considered especially influential. Today, the real power resides with the leading dealers, who sell works by big-name artists to billionaire clients and museums lining up to buy whatever is on offer. The dealers nurture rising stars, publish lavish catalogues, make generous donations to public galleries and largely determine which artists rise to the top in a highly competitive field. Galleries such as Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and White Cube have so many outlets around the world they resemble multinational corporations.

And so, when Larry Gagosian decides, magnanimously, to show the Aboriginal paintings collected by his old buddy Steve Martin, it’s more noteworthy than any museum exhibition. It’s him announcing that Aboriginal art may be the Next Big Thing.

“I had the feeling he just wanted to do it,” says Martin. “It may be some kind of long-term investment, but I don’t know. He told me it was the only show that got good reviews on both the East Coast and the West. Usually if it gets good reviews on the East Coast, they’ll give it a hiding out West.”

One may speculate about Gagosian’s motives, but it seems likely he saw the potential in a mature art movement that already has a history and a collector base but is wildly undervalued by international standards. It also fits neatly into the surge of interest in Indigenous art sweeping through leading museums. Finally, if Steve Martin ever did choose to sell any of his pictures, he would feel obliged to go with Gagosian. But Martin is only one collector; there are many others who might be attracted by Gagosian’s obvious interest in Aboriginal art and see him as the best option to sell major works internationally. It’s also a good deal for Davidson, who is now well-placed to be the middle man between Australian collectors and a leading international dealer.

---

If Aboriginal art “emphatically” became fine art in 1988 with the NYC Dreamings exhibition, it has taken overseas dealers and collectors a long time to accustom themselves to that idea. It was said, even in 1988, that this work had to lose a lot of the ethnographic “baggage” before it could be accepted as contemporary art. Nowadays, with institutions embracing non-Western art forms, the origins of the paintings pose less of a problem, but the presentation remains just as crucial.

Martin is excited by the changing priorities in international art, which have led to the rediscovery of many African-American and female artists. He cites the case of Norman Lewis (1909-79), an African-American painter associated with the abstract expressionists, whose work is suddenly turning up in all the museums. He was equally impressed with Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532-1625) after he stumbled upon a retrospective at the Prado in Madrid.

While recognising that Aboriginal art is set to benefit from this change of institutional focus, Martin believes that “little moments”, such as the Gagosian shows and the exhibition at Uovo, play a disproportionate role in the way potential collectors perceive this work. “I think it’s very important for America and Europe that these works are presented in a mainstream style,” he says. “They have to be recognised as contemporary paintings that stand up well against a lot of the other things we see. They need to be shown in whatever context we accept as ‘art’ without emphasising their foreignness. Aboriginal people may not see this as necessary, but it’s very important if these paintings are going to seep into the canon.”

That path to acceptance means that Aboriginal paintings are being seen in museums and in commercial galleries such as Gagosian and Studio 94; in
displays of private collections such as those of Martin and the Wilkersons; and on toasters and coffee machines at Bloomingdale’s. It’s a distinctly different moment from 1988, when Indigenous art struggled to shake off its tribal associations with dealers and collectors. At last, this work is finding its place within the ecology of international art.

The greater challenge will be to leverage the success of Aboriginal art into a more viable market for Australian art in general, a move that would change prices and perceptions at home. It would be another chapter in a familiar story, in which Australians only seem to value their own art and artists when the rest of the world starts buying.

John McDonald travelled to New York with assistance from the National Museum of Australia.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.