Lot 218: ANATJARI TJAKAMARRA , CIRCA 1930-1992 RAT KANGAROO DREAMING Synthetic polymer paint on composition board

Inscribed 'sold Fannin phot' and numbered in chalk '19332A' on the reverse Synthetic polymer paint on composition board

41 by 35.8 cm (irregular)

Painted at Papunya in late 1972
Private collection

Cf. For paintings featuring similar motifs see Rat Kangaroo Dreaming, c.1974, in the collection of the Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory; Rat Kangaroo Dreaming, 1972, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia; and Wangukaratjanya, 1974, in the collection of the National Museum of Australia, in Perkins, H, and Fink, H., Papunya Tula, Genesis and Genius, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, pp.21-23. See also Yiitjurunya, in Myers, F.R., Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002, p.90 and pl.3, painting 153, and in Morphy, H. and M. Smith Boles (eds.), Art from the Land: Dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe collection of Australian Aboriginal Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA, 1999, p.235, pl.8.19. Another related painting is Tingari Story, c.1973-4, in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery

The design featuring the concentric square motif related to the Tingari ceremonial cycle is a recurring feature in the paintings of Anatjari Tjakamarra of the early 1970s. Geoffrey Bardon illustrates a number of these paintings in Bardon and Bardon, 2004, p.450, paintings 421 and 422, the latter, 'Wati' (Man's) Ceremony in a Cave, 1972, in the collection of the National, Gallery of Australia; p.452, ptg.425; p.454,ptg.428, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia (and in Perkins and Fink 2000, p.22, above), and ptg.429; p.455, ptg.430; and p.456, ptg.431 and 432.

Bardon provides little in the way of interpretations of the imagery save that the designs refer to ceremonies, ceremonial places, men performing rituals and landscapes with caves. Bardon groups these works in a chapter about 'Mind-Maps of My Country (Homeland)' (ibid, pp.418-73), and states that the illustrated paintings were produced as "a statement by the Western Desert people of their immense distress at being apart from their ancestral lands ... where they had come from and where they wished to return forever ..." Bardon continues: "... the 'my country' [homeland] maps or spirit-directions being the vastest isomorphisms of the human spirit one could imagine." In particular, Bardon suggests the Pintupi artists' despair at being separated from their homelands was so acute they did not identify to him the sites or characters in their paintings (ibid, p.54) other than some related to the Rat Kangaroo ancestor.

Myers, on the other hand, recorded several paintings from 1973 to 1975 by Anatjari Tjakamarra bearing designs similar to that in the lot on offer, while conducting fieldwork at Yayayi, the camp established by the Pintupi some 40 kms west of Papunya. At the time Anatjari was painting frequently and Myers suggests this was, in part, the result of his involvement in Tingari initiations at Yayayi. Anatjari's paintings of the time increasingly featured 'rectilinear forms' which largely referred to places and features of the landscape such as freshwater rockholes, hills, claypans and rocks associated with the deeds of the Tingari and related ancestral beings such as the Native Cat. The design is also one painted onto the artist's torso in his initiation, and one that he painted onto the bodies of the young initiates at Yayayi (Myers 2002, pp.86-102)

Myers previously discussed these paintings in 'Aesthetic function and practice: A local art history of Pintupi painting' in Morphy and Boles 1999, pp. 219-45