Once again the law prevented him, just because he was Aboriginal. It was a strange situation. Here was a man, heralded as a top artist, treated like a celebrity and yet not even allowed to own land. This meant they could vote, enter a hotel and build a house anywhere they chose.
It took ten years for the government to grant similar rights to the rest of the Aboriginal population. As a citizen Albert Namatjira could now also buy alcohol.
In , police charged Albert with supplying alcohol to Aboriginal people. After two months in prison, Albert emerged a free, but broken man. He had lost his will to paint, and to live. His second exhibition, however, was another sell-out, and this time the Adelaide Art Gallery bought one, making it the first state gallery to buy a watercolor by an Aboriginal artist. A great future was forecast for Namatjira.
Because of his World War I service and his long association with Hermannsburg, Rex Battarbee was appointed as its security officer. Namatjira's paintings were selling as quickly as he could produce them to Australian and American servicemen stationed in Central Australia.
Battarbee formed the Aranda Art Group to promote other Aranda artists, and he was chairman of an advisory group formed to help manage Namatjira's affairs. It was decided that in order to keep his standards and prices high, Namatjira should restrict his production to about 50 paintings a year.
His exposition of made Namatjira a national figure; he became the first Aboriginal person ever included in "Who's Who in Australia," and the first book about him appeared. The exhibition was his first in Sydney. It was rushed, and within minutes of the opening the entire collection was purchased.
Buyers included American servicemen and representatives from American, British, and New Zealand galleries. Reproductions of his work became popular and appeared on Christmas cards and calendars. He toured the capital cities; his portrait was hung in the Art Gallery of New South Wales; he met the Queen of England and other royalty—he was feted. In he was granted citizenship. Until then, like other Aboriginal people at that time, Namatjira had, in law, been a "ward of the state" denied the normal rights of a citizen.
The change in status gave him the legal right to drink alcohol but not to share it with other Aborigines. To an Aboriginal person this was unthinkable, as everything must be shared with kin. A Reset font size. A Increase font size. From the Arrernte people , Albert grew up at the Hermannsburg Mission — then the largest mission in Central Australia, some km west of Alice Springs.
He took a variety of jobs as a young man, including blacksmith, stockman, carpenter and cameleer. Inspired by the idea that he could earn a living from painting Albert joined Rex four years later, aged of 33, on a trip through the Northern Territory, where Rex taught him the art of watercolour and encouraged him to develop his, now, very recognisable style, a combination of European and Aboriginal influences.
Credit: AAP. Albert was prolific, painting more than pieces at least one-to-two a week for 25 odd years , determined to provide for his family in a way that few Aboriginal Australians at the time could dream of. However, life was not easy for the artist, who was caught between European and indigenous worlds for the latter half of his short life. International accolades also flowed: Queen Elizabeth II awarded him a coronation medal in He met the Queen a year later when she visited Canberra.
He and his wife, Rubina, were granted citizenship in , an entitlement not extended to all Aboriginal people until With Battarbee's assistance as teacher, dealer and mentor, a school of artists developed around Namatjira. Although Namatjira is best known for his water-colour landscapes of the Macdonnell Ranges and the nearby region, earlier in his career his imagery had included tjuringa designs, biblical themes and figurative subjects.
He also produced carved and painted artefacts, and briefly painted on bean-wood panels. Superficially, his paintings give the appearance of conventional European landscapes, but Namatjira painted with 'country in mind' and continually returned to sites imbued with ancestral associations.
The repetition, detailed patterning and high horizons—so characteristic of his work—blended Aboriginal and European modes of depiction. Namatjira's initiatives won national and international acclaim. As the first prominent Aboriginal artist to work in a modern idiom, he was widely regarded as a representative of assimilation.
In he was included in Who's Who in Australia. His quiet and dignified presence belied the underlying tensions in his life. With fame came controversy. Namatjira's brilliant career highlighted the gap between the rhetoric and reality of assimilation policies. He encountered an ambiguous response from the art world. Some criticized his water-colour landscapes as derivative and conventional, others viewed them as evidence of acculturation and a loss of tribal traditions.
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