A vintage photograph of Komita, an Indigenous Australian man of the Musgrave and Mann Ranges, executing a drawing in sand
An extraordinary mammoth sepia-toned gelatin silver print (665 × 895 mm), recently archivally mounted, matted and framed; in fine condition, now superbly presented,
This truly stunning image appears in numerous publications, most (but not all) of them by Mountford. The best reproduction we have located is in Mountford's 'Australian Aboriginal Portraits' (1967, pages 60-61, 'The Artist'). The first paragraph of the descriptive text states that 'Komita was a skilled artist, not only in making sand drawings of the mythical stories, but in painting designs on cave walls or engraving them on sacred objects of wood or stone'. In Mountford's magnum opus, 'Nomads of the Australian Desert' (1976), in the lengthy chapter on the graphic arts recorded on his 1940 Central Australian expedition with Lauri Sheard (pages 57-116), only half a page of text and four illustrations - one of them this image - are devoted to sand drawings. 'But it is an entirely ephemeral art; the tribal elders erase their totemic drawings as soon as they are finished with them, while the secular drawings are destroyed by the sun within a few hours.... As the art of sand drawing was difficult to record, only four examples are illustrated' (plates 6-9). A footnote directs the reader to plate 81, 'Another example of this skill'; it may well depict Komita's finished artwork. Mountford did not have selling exhibitions of his works, and his extensive archive is in the State Library of South Australia. The Mountford material that we have handled or know about in private collections was given by him to the original recipients, and is often still in private hands. Accordingly, original Mountford photographs, especially vintage prints of this calibre, rarely appear on the open market. Provenance: Ainslie Roberts AM (1911-1993, surrealist painter, photographer, and book illustrator, who collaborated with Mountford on numerous books of Indigenous Australian myths and legends.
Item #144229
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