MONTMARTRE SOUS LA PLUIE.

We were on a tight schedule after arriving in Paris, we had this particular day pencilled in for some time. It was to be a day of pilgrimage to Montmartre. I had been to the mount once previously, thirty years ago.

Since I was fifteen I have been fascinated by the French Impressionist artists, their works and their movement, intoxicated might be a better word. For such a group of artists to break with tradition – influencing each other in developing an original approach to painting so original that it outraged and inspired officiandos, patrons and lay art watchers alike, and still does 120 years later – it captured my imagination. They were Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Lautrec, Monet, Manet, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Pissaro, Seurat, Gaugin, Cassatt, Valadon et al.

I was in France to launch my second book in French. Travelling with my wife, we were housed at the Australian Embassy apartments and had Melbourne author Rosalie Ham as a roommate, arranged by our cultural attaché in Paris.

On Montmartre Day it rained heavily all morning but we were not deterred. The day previous it rained also, Rosalie joined my wife and I visiting the Musée d'Orsay, the converted railway station on the River Seine, on the opposite bank to the Louvre. The Musée d'Orsay houses the largest collection of French Impressionist in the world, transferred from the Musée du Jeu Paume in 1986 where they were when I last saw them. The three of us headed off, found the underground Metro at Bir-Hakeim near the Eiffel Tower and surfaced at the foot of Montmartre at the Abbesses station. It was still raining, but lightly.

Without a detailed map of Paris we set off up hill on foot. Of course we found the long way round and the rain became torrential. We had one umbrella and I chivalrously left it to the women … my clothes were soon soaked. Suddenly my heart quickened as I realised we had stumbled upon one of Maurice Utrillo’s immortalised streets near the summit. My wife took the following picture – see Utrillo’s painting below.

We eventually completed our pedestrian tour of the area seizing a moment of respite from the wet inside the Sacred Coeur. A young novice nun was singing en solo soprano. Her extreme timbre resonated throughout the building with an arresting sweetness that I can hear still.

Indigenous Art

Earth’s Creation
by Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Last Wednesday night an Australian Aboriginal female's painting fetched over $1,000,000 at auction for the first time. This enormous artwork by the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation, is a masterful work but the price tag again brings into question what can be done for present day artists living in poverty while their art is sold and resold for very high figures. All people involved in marketing Aboriginal art are making good profits from the selling and reselling of these works except for the original creator.

To remedy this I propose that Aboriginal art simply be sold strictly under license. If the work changes ownership by way of gift to a person or public museum, gallery or foundation the value of the work is to be estimated and a residual paid by the institution every year to the artist or the artist’s heirs.

Licensing royalties is not a new thing it has applied to many creative endeavours for over 100 years. Literature, music, film, television, inventions, computer software &etc, all have economic systems in place that return money to their original creators.

A Contemporary Starting Point.

From a certain date every sale and resale of an original Indigenous Australian artwork, and/or a reproduction of the work, is made on condition that 10% of the gross figure paid for the art, or reproduction, will go directly to the artist; if the artist is deceased, to the artist’s heirs for 75 years.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who didn’t take up painting seriously until she reached her eighties, lived in a community known as Utopia in central Australia. She fostered an art movement there and many artists, mostly women, are now making their own reputations internationally thanks to her. I visited Utopia when researching my latest book interestingly enough titled Utopia. I saw first hand the artists at work and heard stories of deals being done by unscrupulous ‘buyers’.




http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/regions/utopia-2.php