Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra Ngaliya/Warlpiri Language Groups, circa 1932-2020
Medicine Story, 1971
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
21 ⅞ x 17 ⅞ inches (55.56 x 45.4 cm)
Photo: Tony De Camillo for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
Provenance
The Artist, painted in December 1971
Stuart Art Center, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, consignment 4
Purchased Alice Springs, December 1971
Private Collection, Melbourne
Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 29 June, 1998, lot 244
Private Collection, Sydney
Sotheby’s, Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 9 July, 2001, lot 130
Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson, New York
Exhibitions
Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, The Herbert F Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 10 January - 5 April 2009; Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 3 May - 2 August, 2009; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, 1 September - 5 December, 2009
Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 30 September 2011- 12 February 2012; Musee du quai Branly, Paris, France, 9 October 2012- 20 January 2013
Abstraction & the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings from Australia’s Western Desert (1971 – Present), Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Utah, 11 September - 12 December 2015
Publications
Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 29 June, 1998, p. 122
Sotheby’s, Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 9 July, 2001, p. 112
Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, The Miegunyah Press: Melbourne, 2004, p. 293 (comparative images only)
Roger Benjamin, Fred Meyers, Vivien Johnson, et al., Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, The Herbert F Johnson Museum, Cornell University, 2009, p. 86-87 (illus.)
As the 2001 sale catalogue states: “This painting undoubtedly relates to the Old Man Dreaming often depicted by Uta Uta Tjangala and Charlie Tarawa.” The entry for Uta Uta Tjangala’s Medicine Story below gives details of the underlying story. Long Jack’s imagery is quite different, however, with a much more recognizable phallic form dominating the entire composition. Uta Uta uses red ochre color for his kuruwarri laid over a black ground, which gives a more funereal effect. Long Jack inverts this, with the phallus a threatening black form over a visually buoyant ground of rust red. The visual energy and agitation of the symbolic ejaculate, shown as wavy lines in red, yellow, and black, is highlighted further with white dotting all the way up to the ten roundels of the Old Man’s wayward testicles seen in different locations. (Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, p. 87)
