Western Desert Movement

b. 1971

Australian (Aboriginal) · Aboriginal Australian Art 40000 BCE–present

In 1971 a group of senior Aboriginal men at Papunya began painting ceremonial designs — until then made in sand, on bodies and on rock — onto board and canvas with acrylic. It is one of the few moments when the beginning of a major art movement can be dated to a specific year and place.

Western Desert Movement's color palette

The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each. Each swatch is an interpretation of the materials behind it, not a sample taken from a single work. How the palettes are made

Desert ochre red

Desert ochre yellow

Kaolin white

Charcoal black

Earth brown

Water blue

Pigments used: Cadmium red · Ochre · Sienna · Cadmium yellow · Umber · Titanium white · Cerulean blue

Formation

Papunya was a government settlement in the Northern Territory where people from several Western Desert language groups had been relocated, often forcibly, and where they were living far from their own country. A young teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged the men to paint a mural on the school wall, and the movement grew from there into the Papunya Tula artists' company, owned and directed by the artists themselves. Early works caused serious concern within the communities because some contained restricted ceremonial content, and the imagery was subsequently adjusted to remove what should not be publicly visible.

Technique

Acrylic on board and canvas, applied with brushes, sticks and skewers, and built from dots, lines, concentric circles and connecting paths — a visual language that is not decorative but cartographic and narrative. The designs record ancestral journeys across specific country: a circle is a site, a line between circles is a route, and the whole is simultaneously a map, a story and a title deed. Dotting was in part a deliberate device for obscuring restricted underlying designs, and it became the most recognisable feature of the style.

The palette

Initially the ochres of ceremonial practice — red and yellow earth, charcoal black, white pipeclay — the same materials used on bodies and in sand painting, which ties the acrylic work directly to a practice tens of thousands of years old. From the mid-1970s the palette widened enormously as commercial acrylics became available, and later Papunya Tula and Utopia painting uses a full spectrum. The change is a genuine expansion rather than a dilution: the underlying structure did not change.

Legacy

Western Desert painting is now internationally collected and is the most commercially significant Australian art movement, and it operates on a legal and cultural foundation quite unlike the Western canon — the designs are owned by particular people and groups with the right to paint them, which is not a metaphor but a system of law. The relationship between that system and the international art market remains genuinely complicated.

By Pigmentoria · Published · Palette: interpretive reconstruction

Working at the same time

Elsewhere in the atlas, in other movements and other media, these were the hands at work during the same years.

Jenny SavilleLate 20th Century & ContemporaryCecily BrownLate 20th Century & ContemporaryLynette Yiadom-BoakyeLate 20th Century & ContemporaryNjideka Akunyili CrosbyAfrican Contemporary ArtFujichrome Velvia 50Fujichrome VelviaKodak PortraKodak Portra