Bears Stuart Art Centre catalogue number 12032 on the reverse

Painted at Papunya, Northern Territory in 1972
Painting 32, consignment 12 to the Stuart Art Centre, Alice Springs
Private collection, Adelaide
Sotheby's, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 28 June 2000, lot 69
Private collection

Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, The Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 30 September 2011-12 February 2012; Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, 9 October 2012-27 January 2013

Bardon, G., and Bardon, J., Papunya: A Place Made After the Story - The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, The Miegenyah Press, Melbourne, 2004, painting 341, p. 387 (illus.)
Ryan, J. and Batty, P., Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2011, p. 139 (illus.)

Cf Medicine Story (version 3), 1971, in the collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson, illustrated in Bardon and Bardon, 2004, p.306, painting 248, and in Benjamin, R and A.C. Weislogel (eds), Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal
Paintings from Papunya, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York, 2009, p.88, catalogue number 8, for paintings by the artist that features a similar composition.

Uta Uta Tjangala was one of the first group of painters who translated ephemeral body and ground designs in permanent synthetic paints onto portable sheets timber at Papunya in the early 1970s. He belonged to the Pintupi group and was renowned for his steadfastly traditional outlook. At the time this work was painted, two old men who each had only one leg were living in the government settlement of Papunya, some 200 miles west of Alice Springs. They used crutches to support themselves. In his documentation of this painting, Geoffrey Bardon, the original manager of the Papunya artists cooperative, suggests that these two men were the subject of Uta Uta’s painting (Bardon and Bardon, 2004:387). The composition is divided into two sections. On the left is a planar map of country showing campfires as roundels, journey lines between them, and bush foods as a series of circles and scattered dotting. On the right lies a tripartite iconograph referring to the two one-legged men at their camp, where the section on the right contains the ceremony designs painted onto their bodies.

The story featuring the two old men is analogous to the principle ancestral beings of the Pintupi and related desert peoples, the Tingari, who are usually described as two old men, known generically as the Wati Kutjarra, who traveled across the desert giving people the attributes of culture, language and law. They continue to be the focus of initiation ceremonies today. Old Men stories relate to a number of places in Uta Uta’s traditional lands, particularly to Yumari, which he painted frequently, an important ancestral site in his mother’s country which is linked to Uta Uta’s conception place at Ngurrapalangu through Yina, the ancestral man (Myers, F.R., Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham and Lon�🐈�don, 2002, p.113).

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Stuart Art Centre.

WC