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Clifford Possum, leading Aboriginal artist in Australia

OBITUARY

John Shaw

1 July 2002 - SYDNEY - Clifford Possum, who painted some of the masterpieces of Australian Aboriginal art, died June 21 in Alice Springs in the Australian desert, an ancient landscape he depicted in the mythical terms central to his heritage. He was about 70.

Possum, known among the Ammatyerre people as Kumuntjayi Tjapaltjarri, was the first Australian Aboriginal artist to gain international recognition.

He cleared the paths to artistic and economic success that many indigenous painters have followed since the 1970s by invoking sources and spiritual beliefs thought to be thousands of years old.

Since 1974, Possum's paintings, mixing symbolism and abstraction, have been shown in solo and group exhibitions and sold to major galleries and collections in Australia, the United States, Europe and Asia.

His work had its first public exhibition in the United States in 1980, in Los Angeles. In the United States, his work is in the collections of the Kelton Foundation in Santa Monica, California, the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami and the Pacific Asia Museum in Los Angeles.

Possum, who adopted that name for nontribal use after a stay in the 1940s at a Christian mission where he was nursed for malnutrition, began painting after 15 years of work on a cattle ranch.

At Papunya, a remote government settlement for the desert people, a teacher, Geoffrey Bordon, encouraged Aborigines to counter feelings of alienation by recording traditional images and themes in modern media, like acrylic paint on hardboard and later on canvas. This was the cradle of the Desert Painters movement in Aboriginal art.

The government awarded Possum the Order of Australia medal for his service to the art movement and to the indigenous people.

Source: The New York Times

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