Portrait Albert (Elea) Namatjira Albert Namatjira was born on 28 July 1902 at Hermannsburg (Njaria), Northern Territory. His parents Namatjira and Ljukuta called him Elea. He belonged to the western group of the Arrernte people. In 1905 the family was received into the Lutheran Church. Elea was baptised and given the name Albert, his father took the name Jonathan, his mother was blessed as Emilie. Albert attended the Hermannsburg mission school. After a western style upbringing, at the age of 13, he spent six months in the bush and was taught the traditional laws and customs of the Arrente community. He experienced an important Aboriginal ritual - initiation. When he was 18 he married Ilkalita, a Kukatja woman. Eight of their children were to survive infancy. In 1923 the family shifted to Hermannsburg and Ilkalita was christened Rubina. Albert’s wife was from the wrong ‘skin’ group and he violated the law of his people by marrying outside the classificatory kinship system. In the following years he worked as a camel driver and saw much of the country he would later paint, the dreamtime places of his Aranda / Arrernte people. Albert sketched the landscape and incidents around him and made artefacts such as boomerangs and woomeras. When, in 1934, two painters from Melbourne visited the mission to exhibit their paintings, Albert was inspired to paint seriously. One of the painters, Rex Battarbee, returned to the area in the winter of 1936 to paint the landscape and Albert acted as a guide to show him local scenic areas. In return Battarbee showed him how to paint with watercolours in the western tradition of painting, a skill that he quickly excelled at. Albert’s paintings were colourful and varied depictions of the Australian landscape. Rex Battarbee also helped Albert organise his first exhibition in Melbourne in 1936. This exhibition was a success. Subsequent exhibitions in Sydney and Adelaide also sold out. His western style landscapes made him famous and other exhibitions of his work followed, especially during the 1950s. He was awarded the Queen’s Coronation Medal in 1953 and was presented to the Queen in Canberra in 1954. Albert won many prizes and became a rich man. Albert 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. But his quiet presence belied the underlying tensions in his life. Some criticized his watercolour landscapes as conventional and derivative, others considered them as evidence of acculturation and loss of tribal traditions. Albert encountered an ambiguous response form the art world and also racial discrimination. [Namatjira’s mirrored the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of assimilation policies.] Artworks + examples: Superficially his paintings give the appearance of conventional Western landscapes, so different to traditional Aboriginal art -but Albert painted the sites imbued with ancestral associations. {Although he is best known for his water-colour landscapes of the Macdonnell Ranges with its rugged geological features of the land and the nearby region, he had ] He produced approximately two thousand paintings. He blended Aboriginal and European modes of depiction. His achievements were largely eclipsed by the dot painting style developed at Papunya in the 70s. A.N is hailed as one of the greatest Australian artists and a pioneer for Aboriginal rights. Due to his wealth Albert found himself the subject of a ritualised form of begging. The nomadic Arrernte culture expected him to share everything he owned. As his income grew, so did his extended family. So it happened that, over a period of time, he had to provide for over six hundred people. To ease the burden of his strained resources he tried to lease a cattle station, but the lease was rejected. All this resulted in the strange situation that, although he was held as one of Australia’s greatest artists and treated like a celebrity, he was living in poverty. He was not even allowed to own or build a house in Alice Springs. Public outrage at his predicament pushed the government to grant him and his wife full citizenship rights in 1957. Unlike many other Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory Albert and his wife were then entitled to vote, to live where they wished and were granted the same rights as the white population. This led to conflict because Albert and his wife were legally allowed to drink alcohol, his Aboriginal family and friends were not. In 1958 Albert was charged with supplying alcohol to the artist Henoch Raberaba. He denied the charge and his appeals were unsuccessful. As a result he was sentenced to three months in prison of which he finally served two months of ‘open’ detention at the Papunya settlement from March to May 1959. When he was released he was a broken man. He had lost his will to paint and to live. He died of heart failure in Alice Springs in August 1957 and was buried in the local cemetery. Copyright of The Aboriginal Art House 2012-2013