The story of Papunya (the art movement was labelled Papunya Tula, with Tula meaning the meeting place of siblings or cousins) seems on the surface a simple and heart-warming tale of success despite the odds. Having been released from the pressure of being powerful, having even been released from the pressure of being ochre, ochre paintings became a way for dispossessed people to operate in their new environment, as well as also being extraordinarily moving works of art in their own right. But Bardon’s story—partly told in his 1991 book Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert—has many layers too. And the ones below the sparkling surface are darker and more difficult.
At first it was exciting; he was selling the art in Alice, bringing back money—and later cars—for the painters. But within a few months, he said, things started turning bad, until they culminated in one terrible night that Bardon will never forget, and will still not talk about. The white administrators started to resent the fact that their “dispossessed” people began to have possessions. The paintings suddenly had a value, and as Bardon said: “Anything the Aboriginals had of value they had to be relieved of. It was that kind of place.” One constant threat was that Kaapa Tjampitjimpa, one of the star artists and a respected man in the community, would be deported from Papunya. “They had a game with me, I can’t be more emphatic than that.” But Bardon kept selling the paintings, and returning with increasingly large amounts of cash for the artists. He started giving driving lessons on the air strip—although, as he said, the police discouraged Aboriginal men from having licenses, and nobody was granted one while he was there.
And then there were more threats, with the superintendent telling Bardon that the paintings were by “government Aborigines” and were therefore “government paintings.” One day, while Bardon was away from the settlement, an administrator went to visit the painters—to tell them that, of a consignment of paintings worth $700 and left in Alice Springs, they were owed just $21, with the rest deducted as expenses. When he came back, oblivious of the lies that had been spread, Bardon felt shunned by both white and black communities: “I couldn’t have been more isolated than if I had gone to the South Pole on my own. There weren’t even penguins for company.”
The way he describes the end of his time in Papunya, it is like a bad dream—he fell sick, the Aboriginals began to distrust him and once even chanted the words “money, money, money” in their own languages outside the school in protest at what they felt was his perfidy. It seemed, he wrote later,22 as if he was becoming quite separate from the artists and, in a way, even from himself. “From my window I’d see strange and wistful caravans of black faces coming back and forth along the spinifex tracks. I’d see someone I thought was one of the painters, and then whoever it was would walk away.” It was finished, he knew, but it really ended late one night, when someone or several visitors knocked at his door and demanded to talk to him.
Whatever happened under the Southern Cross in the bush that night shocked him so much that he left Papunya in despair and in a hurry, and a few days later had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital. Thirty years later he has recovered from it, but the pain is still there. “There are certain things which can’t be said, so I can’t say them either,” Bardon said as we sat companionably on the verandah looking out at his garden. “I’ll stop now,” he said. And we stopped; it wasn’t right to look under the blanket of secrets anymore.
After you take off in a 747 from Sydney’s International Airport it takes nearly five hours to leave Australian airspace, and I spent most of that time just gazing out at the bush below. From above, the whole desert is a strangely mesmerizing shimmering orange. Whenever a friend was asked what his favorite color was, he would say it was just that: the red of the Australian center, when you flew over it in the morning. From this bird’s-eye perspective, the spinifex and other bushes made little dots on the landscape, just like so many of the Central Desert paintings I had seen. And from a plane the dried-up creeks and the curves of rocks turned into whorls and wiggles that no doubt had whole epic choral symphonies enclosed in them. But I had seen that before, and what I took back from this journey was something extra, something more complex.
It was a sense of ancientness, in a way—the ancientness that had so charmed me with that little yellow stone in Italy—but it was also a sense of the land as a conscious thing. And about how although on the top there is, along with all the beauty, a great deal of misery—alcoholism, racism, ill-treatment of women, and that terrible dull sense of boredom and pointlessness that I had seen in my travels—there was still a sense that below that ochre surface there is a different reality. It is a reality that the best red paint and perhaps the best art can give a glimpse of, but just a glimpse. Old Bill Neidje from Oenpelli had tried to explain its elusiveness. We don’t know what it is, he had said, in words that were recorded in his book Kakadu Man, “but something underneath, under the ground.” 23
Eight months after my journey to find ochre, Christie’s held an auction of Aboriginal artworks in Melbourne. “What a night,” art dealer Nina Bove wrote to me a few days later. “The atmosphere was electric.” There were a few big sales that night—of “Emilies” and “Clifford Possums” and “Ronnies”—but the biggest interest was when Rover Thomas’s 1991 ochre-and-gum painting of All That Big Rain Coming from Topside was brought onto the stage. It is an extraordinarily powerful depiction of something elemental: the white dots pouring down the ochre-brown canvas, seeming to settle for a moment in a ridge and then cascading to the bottom in floods. And that is a fair description of what happened in the auction room that night: a cautious start increasing in momentum until it reached an unprecedented high tide.
There were several big foreign buyers pushing up the price, but every time they did there was a phone bidder who matched them until it reached 786,625 Australian dollars and the hammer came down. As everyone was speculating on who the mystery buyer was, Wally Caruana of the National Gallery of Australia slipped back into the reserved seating section. He must have been shaken by his own actions, but from a telephone in the downstairs bar he had just paid more money than anybody had ever paid before for an Aboriginal artwork in order to keep the ochre painting (quickly dubbed by the local press All That Big Dough Coming from Topside) for Australia.
The modern art movement that had started in a place that wasn’t loved, pioneered by people who weren’t valued, had come a long way from the early days of Papunya. People who buy Aboriginal art are looking for many things: for movement and texture and tonal hue and stories. But they are also, I believe (in this coming together of paint, canvas and of the patterns made by people sitting under humpies in the desert and surrounded by dogs and four-wheel-drives but with glory in their minds) looking for something else. They are looking for country. They are looking for the crock of earth at the beginning of the Rainbow Serpent. And yet they don’t have to look so carefully anymore to see how it glitters.
2
Black and Brown
“As has been said, you begin with drawing.”
CENNINO CENNINI
“Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.”
JOHN RUSKIN
At first I found it odd to include black or brown in a book called Color. After all, one thing that had intrigued me originally was the brightness of my quest, and how our magpie needs for shiny colors had inspired incredible journeys. And anyway, I thought, there probably aren’t many interesting stories connected with people burning lumps of wood to make charcoal crayons, or collecting mud for dyeing. But I was wrong. As I read more, I began to hear intriguing stories about the “non-colors.” Of how black dye used to be sold by retired pirates in the Caribbean, how “pencil lead” was once so rare that armed security guards in northern England used to strip-search miners as they left after a long day in the heart of a hill, how white pai
nt was a poison (but tantalizingly sweet tasting), and how both brown and black paints were once said to be made from dead bodies.
So before I set out on my travels to see Afghan jewels on a Virgin’s scarf, to enjoy the richness of an iodine sunset or to discover the secrets of lost green vases, I went first to the land of shadows. Every part of life has them, and in art, perhaps more obviously than anywhere else, it’s the shadows and the shit which make the light bits believable. “Ashes and decomposition” was how I described the non-colors dismissively to a conservator friend, before my research had really started. “Exactly,” she said with satisfaction. “Sums up the painter’s art perfectly . . . Have you watched an artist start a painting?” Of course, I protested. “Then watch again.” So I did. In rural Shropshire I watched the icon painter Aidan Hart transfer his pencil sketch of the head of Christ to a gessoed panel— by tracing it onto the back of paper that had been rubbed with brown ochre; in Indonesia I watched artists sketch with charcoal before adding any paint to their Hindu story designs; in China I watched a calligrapher painstakingly grind his pine-soot ink onto his grandfather’s ink stone before even selecting the paper he was to write on; in the National Gallery in London I stood for a long time in the near-darkness before Leonardo da Vinci’s full-size cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, drawn in charcoal and black and white chalk—soft materials to smooth in the highlights of the Christ Child’s shoulder and the tenderness of a mother’s face.
And each time I marvelled at how so many paintings begin with a period of alert attention accompanied by the careful rubbing of dirt—earth or mud or dust or soot or rock—onto a piece of cloth or paper or wood or wall. The bright colors and the translucence come later, and when the highlights are added they always need the lowlights or shadows to make them seem real. Sometimes the drawings are even better than the paintings. Giorgio Vasari1 wrote vividly about how sketches, “born in a moment from the fire of art,” have a quality that finished works sometimes lack. Perhaps it is simply the spontaneity, but perhaps it is also the effect of black, gray and white which makes a sketch seem so complete. Just as white light contains all the colors, so—as I would discover in my travels through the inkwell—black paint can incorporate the spectrum too.
It was this theory—that “black” happens when an object is absorbing all the colored wavelengths—which led many of the Impressionist painters to stop using black pigments in favor of mixtures of red, yellow and blue. “There is no black in nature” was the popular refrain of this group of nineteenth-century artists, whose intention was to capture the fleeting effects of light in their paintings. In Claude Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, for example, the pitch-dark locomotives in his busy station are actually made up of extremely vivid colors—including bright vermilion red, French ultramarine blue, and emerald green. Conservators at the National Gallery of Art in London report that in this painting Monet used almost no black pigment at all.2
THE FIRST PAINTING
According to one Western classical legend, the first paint was black and the first artist female. When Pliny the Elder was writing his Natural History—a summary of everything available in the Roman marketplace and quite a few other things besides—he told a story of how the origin of art was found in epic love. After all, what better inspiration for art is there than passion? According to Pliny one of the first artists was a young woman in the town of Corinth in Greece who one evening was weepily saying good-bye to her lover before he set out on a long journey. Suddenly, between impassioned embraces, she noticed his shadow on the wall, cast by the light of a candle. So, spontaneously, she reached out for a piece of charcoal from the fire and filled in the pattern. I imagine her kissing the image and thinking that in this way something of his physical presence would be fixed close to her while his beloved body was far away in the distant Mediterranean.
As an origin theory it is a mythic image that has reappeared in paintings and drawings throughout the centuries since. It particularly appealed to the Georgians and Victorians, with their fashions both for cut-paper silhouettes and stories of desperate love.3 In 1775 the Scottish portrait artist David Allan painted The Origin of Painting, showing a very flirty lady sitting on her film-star boyfriend’s knee as she fills in his profile on the wall. Her flowing robes have slipped to reveal her right breast, the sight of which is evidently keeping the young man occupied while she gets on with the serious business of the first portrait. Quite apart from the toga effect, it is a deliciously challenging image—of using something that has already burned out to symbolize a love you want to last forever.
THE OTHER EARLIEST PAINTINGS
Pliny had no access to anything like our modern theories about the world’s earliest paintings, which suggest that the first human artists were inspired by things like winter boredom, techniques of hunting lore, sacred ritual practices or even just by the simple joys of illustrated storytelling. The proof was there if he or anyone else had wanted to find it—beneath the Niaux cave paintings in the French Pyrenees, for example, the imprint of a Roman centurion’s sandal testifies that the Neolithic paintings had been seen by at least one man in the classical world. But the scholarly world was not, apparently, ready for anything more than Pliny’s charming mixture of anecdote and mythology, and the first of Europe’s major prehistoric cave-painting galleries would not be discovered by the academic world for nearly two millennia.
However, if this opinionated Roman natural historian had been given the chance to move forward through time, and witness the discovery of the Altamira caves in northern Spain, for example, I think he would have felt a little smug. He was not necessarily accurate about the inspiration for early Spanish paintings. There is a lot more hunting than lovemaking in these caves, although interestingly some Swedish petroglyphs of a slightly later date contained so many pictures of men with impressively large erections that their documenter, Carl Georg Brunius, had to consult his colleagues about whether or not the mid-nineteenth century audience was ready to see these early examples of Swedish porn.4 The colleagues were divided on the matter. But Pliny was at least right about the painting materials. Ochre may have been undeniably the first colored paint, but even the earliest artists usually liked to draw their designs first with charcoal—sometimes just to make sure they got the shapes right before they committed to coloring them in, and sometimes to give their works powerful outlines. And if it was not necessarily a woman who had scribbled the early images with a lump of burned wood (and we do not know that it was not), it was at least a girl who discovered the extraordinary caves at Altamira.
In 1868 a hunter, stalking birds or deer one day in the area near Santander between the Atlantic Ocean and the mountains of northern Spain, stumbled across the entrance to a series of caves. After Modesto Peres told his landlord about it they led several amateur expeditions—lots of topcoats and tall candles—into a 20-meter-long cavern with a sloping roof and an uneven floor. There they found signs in the form of bear bones and fire ashes, intriguing trash from ancient human (and animal) habitation. But the real treasure of this long, rectangular gallery was only discovered eleven years later, in 1879: 1,800 years to the summer since Pliny suffocated under the most infamous flow of black gunge in history, in his hometown of Pompeii.
And if on that particular day Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola had been able to find a babysitter for his eight-year-old daughter Maria and had not taken her out of the afternoon sunshine and into a strange and rather dangerous playroom, no one might have found the treasure for several decades. Later, in his darker moments, he must have wished that it had not been noticed and that his daughter had remained silent.
De Sautuola was an aristocrat, a hunter and a landowner, but most of all he was a man who liked finding things. His eyes were always fixed on the ground, checking for things that did not fit, things that had been introduced by humans and not by nature, and which could explain the history of the world in new ways. He must have been thrilled when his ten
ant found the cave entrance. It would have seemed a God-given opportunity to test out some of the theories of evolution and human history that no doubt he, like the rest of European intellectual society, was debating with his friends and associates at every opportunity.
So he went looking for information. Just a few minutes before de Sautuola’s life changed, the forty-eight-year-old was sitting on the cave floor, busily looking for Paleolithic bear droppings, early meal middens or other signs of ancient habitation. His daughter—who, from a photograph of her held at the Altamira museum, seems to have been a pretty child with short dark hair, who might have looked boyish were it not for her long earrings—was running around the cavern, inventing her own games in the torchlight. Suddenly, according to the well-told legend of the discovery, she stopped, and squealed in surprise, “Mira, Papa, bueyes”—Look, Papa, oxen. De Sautuola stood up, and he must have exclaimed too—although probably with stronger language. Because there, above them both, the ceiling was covered with huge red-and-black bison thundering across a stone field.
The charcoal of Altamira was applied in wide, confident sweeps—simple bold lines that double up as shadow and outline— and then red and yellow ochre were painted on, either with a brush or perhaps with soft chamois leather pads. There were twelve complete bison, two headless ones (powerful nevertheless, looking more as if the heads had disappeared into another dimension than that the beasts had been decapitated), three boars, three red deer looking rather bedazzled and a wild horse. There is a sense of speed and energy about them that suggests they were created quickly and without hesitation. And the bison in particular— each two meters long or more—are bristling with muscle and power. Vasari would have approved of the energy of these sketches.