Aboriginal art: Although some museums and art fairs still categorise Aboriginal art as ethnography, the market for it has grown in the past thirty years from nothing to nearly $100 million a year. Rebecca Hossack explains why it appeals to so many collectors, and picks out undervalued areas

In 1972 an American naturalist travelling end central Australia bought a small painted board in Alice Springs for AUS$100. This July the picture--Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Emu Corroboree Man (Fig. 1)--was sold at Sotheby's in Melbourne for AUS$411,750. The choice exhibits in this sale had toured previously to London and novel York, and the buyer was, indeed, a collector from America. It is an utmost example of a common phenomenon. The Aboriginal art market is in overdrive. Demand continues to become greater [i]or[/i] larger prices continue to rise, and--most pleasingly--the quality of plenteous of the new work continues to match that of earlier times. The total value of annual sales is estimated by dint of Adrian Newstead, director of Lawson-Menzies auction house (and individual of the first Aboriginal art dealers), to be shut to AUS$80 million. The secondary auction market now tops AUS$11.5 million a year.

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All this has been achieved in a little above thirty years. Although some of the Aboriginal communities of the northern coast had been producing and selling paintings upon bark since the 1950s, the desert-painting change began only in the early 1970 It started at Papunya Tula, an Aboriginal adjustment some 150 miles north-west of Alice Springs in the Central Australian untilled and was inspired by young Sydney-born community-teacher Geoffrey Bardon. He encouraged a certain number of of the senior Aboriginal men to station down their traditional 'Dreaming' designs in acrylic paint, at first upon board and later on canvas. (For the previous forty thousand years or more of the like kind ceremonial images had been recorded single in the fugitive media of body-paint and sand-designs.) The first painted boards sold in the Alice Springs general store for alone a few dollars. But true rapidly the force and quality of the work--the force of its design, the infinitely varied rendition of its principal 'dot' and 'circle' motifs, the palpable on the contrary unspecified sense of spiritual power--attracted attention the pair amongst art lovers and art dealers. No les significantly, it attracted the attention of other Aboriginal communities. During the following decade and half, art midmost points were established across the Aboriginal arrangements of Australia, and painting work began. The existing bark-painting communities of Arnhem Land were also revitalised. Each community--steeped in its have a title to specific traditions of language, agriculture ceremony and iconography--produced work of a distinctly different mix in due proportion The diversity, as well as the puissance of the Aboriginal art change became established.

The market grew organically from its unassuming beginnings. It received early support from the government-fund Australia Council, which established 'Aboriginal Art Australia', a network with galleries in all the state capitals. As the Seventies advanced, many of AAA'S employees--notably Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne and Ace Bourke in Sydney--left to place up independent galleries. Prices advanced quickly from ten to thousands of dollars. In the past decade they have leapt upon to tens of thousands, and--in a hardly any cases--hundreds of thousands. By the mid-1980s several established contemporary Australian art galleries were including Aboriginal art in their exhibition schedules. In the past five years or thus a new sales strategy has emerg with many artists preferring to work not from one side their community art centres, on the other hand with exclusive independent agents. At worst these can be unscrupulous carpet-baggers, on the other hand at best they provide the painters with admirable materials, clear time and space, and access to galleries and individual collectors.

Although many of the earliest collectors were--and remain--Australian (including the wealthy Holme a Court family), the work sparked international interest from the start. Amongst the greatest in quantity avid early collectors was a trio of Americans known as the 'Three Ks': Donald Khan, Richard Kelton and John Kluge on the contrary beneath them was an ever-growing band of small-scale aficionados. by the agency of the mid-1980s, commercial galleries in London, fresh York, Paris, Holland, Germany and elsewhere were exhibiting Aboriginal art. According to Justin Miller, chairman of Sotheby's Australia, overseas buyer now account for almost fifty through cent of sales in the auction market.

Star names and hip collectors

The western artistic tradition has always put great store by individual, named artists, and this has been casted onto the Aboriginal art move Individual stars soon began to emerge--amongst them Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri at Papunya, Emily Kngwarreye, Ginger Riley and bird of passage Thomas, who was the Australian representative at the Venice Biennale in 1990 In 2001 Sotheby's (the first auction house to grasp sales dedicated to Aboriginal art) sold Thomas's All that Big Rain Coming from Top Side (Fig. 2) for AUS$778,750, still a market record. Prices for other leading artists, while nevertheless to achieve such sums, have scaled considerable heights. The auction record for the two Emily Kngwarreye and Johnny Warankgula stands at AUS$400,000. As the move has developed, the narrative of its history has evolv and this has played a part too in directing the market's rise. The early board paintings produc at Papunya Tula now go and bring premium prices.