Johnny W. Tjupurrula; Popularized Aboriginal Art

Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, an influential artist whose work helped popularize aboriginal art and later sold for record prices at auction, has died.

Tjupurrula died Feb. 12 in poverty in a desert camp in central Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales reported Thursday. He was 75.

Tjupurrula was one of the most acclaimed of the Papunya Tula school of indigenous artists who pioneered the aboriginal technique of dot painting.

“It’s this vibrancy and vigor of line, dots and patterns that make his work rival the very best of contemporary Australian artists,” Geoffrey Bardon, an art teacher and mentor of Tjupurrula, told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

Last year, one of Tjupurrula’s paintings, “Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, 1972,” sold at auction for $263,145, a record for an aboriginal artwork. Tjupurrula, who had sold the piece to a dealer in the 1970s, got nothing from the sale.

His symbolic depictions of the Australian landscape interwoven with aboriginal myth was born out of despair after his forced removal by the government from his traditional land, scholars say.

In the 1960s, Tjupurrula and about 1,400 other aborigines were relocated from their remote desert homelands and housed in Papunya, 190 miles west of Alice Springs.

Bardon was an art teacher in Alice Springs who encouraged the aborigines to express their anguish through art.

By the mid-1980s, Tjupurrula’s work was selling for thousands of dollars around Australia, but the artist saw little of that money after selling his work to unscrupulous dealers.

Unable to work in his later years because of illness, Tjupurrula lived in a desert camp, nursed by his daughter, until his death.