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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Jul 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  44
• Lot Description:
  Alie Miller (Wurraputiwai Mungatopi)
  (circa 1897-1985)
  Untitled (1965)
  natural earth pigments on marine plywood
  122 x 59.5 cm
• Provenance:
  Sandra Le Brun Holmes, Northern Territory (1965); Private Collection, Victoria (1981)
• Notes:
  Alie Miller was one of five brothers who were leading artists and ceremonial performers; the brothers included ÔKing' Larry, Laurie One-Eye Nelson and Deaf Tommy Mungatopi. Alie was married to another prominent Tiwi artist of their generation, Polly Miller Poinomaju Mungatopi (c.1912-1989). Husband and wife were prolific artists and became close friends with Sandra Le Brun Holmes who collected much of their art. The relationship was so close that Sandra Holmes was permitted to record the pukumani ceremony held for Alie Miller in August 1968 at Milikapiti on Melville Island, which she published in Holmes, S. Le Brun, The Goddess and the Moon Man: The Sacred Art of the Tiwi Aborigines, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995, pp.91-99. Untitled, 1965, is a rare object in Tiwi art, having been painted on a sheet of plywood rather than bark. The image is typically abstracted Tiwi design, and although no description of it has been recorded, it bears similarities to the artist's bark painting Pukumani design for Yirrikipayi, 1965, collected by the anthropologist Helen Groger-Wurm and now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia. Pukumani design for Yirrikipayi is illustrated in Isaacs, J., Tiwi: Art, History, Culture, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2012, p.131. Groger-Wurm's record of Alie Miller's description of the imagery in the latter painting is that the diagonals indicate tutini, grave posts situated around a grave; triangular shapes represent tunga, bark baskets, that have been placed upside down on top of the tutini, and the horizontals are men's dancing belts (ibid. 131). See also an untitled painting of 1965 by Naunu, collected by Groger-Wurm and illustrated in her chapter ÔSchematisation in bark paintings' in Ucko, P.J. (ed.), Form in Indigenous art: Schematisation in the art of Aboriginal Australia and prehistoric Europe, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977, p.153, plate 10, for a design with a similar motif. Wally Caruana
• Estimate:
  A$40,000 - 60,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.