Aboriginal Bark Painting from Australia at New York’s Asia Society

The definitive exhibition and book, stimulated by a little-known American collection

F rom stories about Pompeii last week to a piece about Australia today. I did indeed spend a day in Pompeii but not in Yirrkala, a knob on the north coast of Australia where bark — the flattened bark of eucalyptus trees — is a painting canvas for Aboriginals who’ve lived there for thousands of years and for those who now keep the aesthetic tradition alive in Australia’s big cities. Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Paintings is the new exhibition at the Asia Society in Manhattan, on Park Avenue and 70th Street. It’s one of my favorite places, not only for good art new to me, an American art scholar, but for clear interpretation and lovely, human-size galleries.

I’d been looking forward to this exhibition and wasn’t disappointed, though the curators might say “for all the wrong reasons.” I went to the exhibition agnostic on the plight of Australian Aboriginals. I didn’t know much about the place, though I do follow Australian politics because it’s a close, indispensable American ally. I like Australians, who seem good-natured, but it’s never been a must-visit destination for me. No place could be further from Vermont, except the Moon, and Australia might be too much like California, where I can travel in a few hours.

Many Australians have caught the California psychosis. A few months ago, Australia’s government pushed a law giving Aboriginals a vague though definite veto power over national policies. Talk about a racket in the making. The law lost in a referendum. All my Australian friends voted for it. Alas, they’re affluent and, nice people that they are, have quack beliefs like surrendering their country to a fringe, and the Aboriginals in Australia are a fringe, nationally at least. In the Northern Territory, where bark painting is a core aesthetic, about a third of the population is Aboriginal.

Australia’s Covid lockdowns were among the world’s harshest. The government and elites in business, the newspapers, academia, and the nonprofit world were giddy in suppressing individual freedoms. My conception of Australia as a place with a rugged frontier spirit and a live-and-let-live philosophy might have been wrong, or at least outdated.

Not to beat a dead kangaroo, and I like kangaroos, but Australian art also tends to be derivative. Australia’s a big, rural place, so there’s lots of landscape art, which looks like Hudson River School art, or third-generation, tepid Constable. New Worlds from Old is the best exhibition and scholarly book on Australian art, but it’s from 1998 and, I think, covered the topic to the point that there’s no spawn. I saw the show and had a doppio espresso afterwards to revive me from catatonia. It was a good exhibition, well done by Yale’s British Art Center, but the art dulled the eyes and soul. It was boring.

Australia’s still a frontier place. It’s busy building itself. A Town Like Alice and The Fortunes of Richard Mahony are great Australian novels, but that’s the Irish in them. In painting, the place lags.

Except for Aboriginal bark painting. Madayin is a survey of art from the 1930s to today with a comprehensive, 300-page catalogue in English and Pama-Nyungan, one of many Aboriginal languages. In a hundred or so paintings on bark, most in a palette of rust, white, black, and brown, with abstract and figural passages, I saw both beauty and nuance. Madayin, I learned, is the sacred system of the Aboriginals in this part of Australia, embraced for years and undisturbed by Western systems like capitalism and a free market. Madayin is both a religion and a social system and, to an extent, a political and economic order as well.

Djambawa Marawili, the head of an Aboriginal art center in Australia, describes the paintings in the exhibition as views of ancient stories, as symbols of nature, and as legal documents. Aboriginal artists, starting in the 1930s, painted these pictures, mostly abstract, as maps indicating what land and waterways the Aboriginals own — the mining interests preferred a free-for-all. Who owns what land is a huge tussle.

It’s a thicket, but I labored through the catalogue, which has chapters on the Aboriginal clan system, the cosmologies, old stories, and songs.

The show starts with a darkened gallery displaying a video on three of four walls depicting crashing waves and suggesting an Aboriginal sense of unity between land and ocean, alongside a bark-scroll painting from 1935 in a case. It’s a dramatic space, with an Aboriginal man in the video on the beach dressed in animal skins or bark. It suggests an introduction to, for most visitors, a new culture and religion. “We can’t explain everything,” a label says.

The bark paintings are mostly big and depict riveting zigzag patterns and crosshatch patterns and other abstract motifs with, here and there, fish, a human figure, a mountain, and animals.

The bark makes for texture, which is visually handsome and conveys both mystery and an ancient people. In some of the works, the rippling bark suggests the waves of the sea. Compositions are unbalanced and rough, but that helps make them bewitching. Some look hewn. Not that these artists knew John Marin or Marsden Hartley, but they share their craggy look.

The abstract patterns resemble what I saw earlier this year when I reviewed an exhibition about Samoan tattoos at the University of Utah’s art museum near Salt Lake City. Another way of thinking about them is that they recall the geometric, abstract designs on totem poles. The artists are mostly unschooled, but they’re practicing art that’s been made for a long time.

A section on women painters had many good things but suffers from vagueness. I thought Marrnyula Munuŋgurr’s Djapu’ Clan Design, from 2019, was beautiful but the interpretation — “women have risen as painters because they have their own style” — isn’t developed by a “what, how, and why,” so I felt fed by clichés. “Women are strong knowledge holders passing down to the next generation,” I read, but what are they passing?

The exhibition is a joint project involving the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, and the Asia Society. The businessman John Kluge and the University of Kansas professor Edward Ruhe each assembled impressive collections of Aboriginal bark art. Kluge was attracted by its aesthetics while Ruhe had more of an anthropological interest. The two men didn’t know each other. Kluge bought Ruhe’s collection after his death. Living near Charlottesville, he started discussing a gift of his art with the university president in the late ’90s. The collection, the best in the world, opened to the public in 1999.

The collection is superb but not well known — it’s located on a university campus in an out-of-the-way place. One of the great pleasures of our decentralized, private museum system is you’ll never know what you’ll find and where.

Madayin was a massive undertaking given the complexity of the Aboriginal world and the book. There’s plenty of insider baseball. Still, the catalogue is gorgeous as a production and obviously authoritative. One of my few quibbles is that the art gets lost amid the intense scholarship, interviews, and anthropology. The exhibition’s too big as well. About 30 paintings were commissioned for the exhibition over the last few years. Most of them are smooth and refined. Flowers appear. One looks like a watered-down Basquiat. Many are pretty, not powerful. There’s a series of star paintings toward the end. Most are beautiful, but one or two look like white cotton candy. Yirrkala and bark painting are not unknown in Australia. The Aboriginals have been making them and marketing them all over the country for years. I fear that what once looked like a glimpse into the world of spirits now looks like it came from the Design Center in Manhattan.

Quibbles aside, I enjoyed and recommend Madayin. It’s very different and, to the Asia Society’s great credit, I’ve never gone there without learning a lot. And now that Lady DEI and Knucklehead have been dispatched by the voters, we don’t have to worry about eating bark, bugs, or cats.