Prince Harry and the British Museum are at a crossroads exploring Aboriginal art

Out of Australia at the British Museum, an exhibition of graphic works from Down Under since the 1940s, is London’s first major show of Australian art in a decade. In the intervening years, our biggest brush with Aussie art may well have been Prince Harry’s controversial set of Aboriginal-style paintings in 2003.

Produced as part of his A-Level art course, the prince’s works - in the dot-painting style of the Central Desert and replete with totemic lizard motifs, derived from the 'Dreamtime' creation myths - saw him branded culturally insensitive by indigenous groups across Australia. 

The examiners may have awarded him a B grade, but Aborigines argued the prince would have been better off pastiching an artist from the Western canon, not heretically tackling a tradition of ancient religiosity. The paintings would barely have raised an eyebrow, of course, had they been by any other student in any other year. Indeed, we positively laud Picasso and Gauguin’s appropriations of other tribal traditions. But a prince from a Royal Family, in whose name myriad aborigines were culturally and socially dispossessed, perhaps ought to have chosen his influences more carefully.

Though latched onto by the UK media as another gaffe on the part of hapless Harry, the episode actually highlighted a far wider truth: the complicated status of Aboriginal art in the 21st century. For a long time, of course, the western world didn’t even consider it of artistic significance at all, but merely ethnographic. 

A key turning-point came in 1971, when the art teacher Geoffrey Bardon quit his Sydney school for the tiny indigenous community of Papunya, near Alice Springs, in his country’s core. He helped launch there an artists’ co-operative, teaching the locals how to adapt their work into durable media, such as prints, ceramics and acrylic-on-canvas – though from a tradition that’s millennia old, Aboriginal art had often been painted ephemerally on bodies, bark and sand.

The success of Papunya was followed by the launch of similar co-operatives and studios across Australia. By 1990, a pair of Aboriginal artists (Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls) were even representing Australia at the Venice Biennale. And in the two decades since then, Aboriginal art has rocketed in popularity all the world over - with total sales at auction reaching a peak, in 2007, of $24 million. 

But commercial success hasn’t come without its drawbacks. Dealers have been accused of flooding the market and, often too, of profiteering at the artists’ expense. Forgeries have been commonplace also - owing to Aboriginal art’s ostensibly copiable, abstract style and to the fact expertise in it is comparatively slight. One does wonder how true to its roots Aboriginal art can remain, in the wake of its Faustian embrace with the contemporary art market. 

By coincidence, the British Museum began its collection of Australian prints and drawings in 2003, the same year as the Prince Harry furore. (It now possesses some 900 works, 126 of which appear in Out of Australia). 

With a few exceptions, the exhibition provides pretty much a who’s who of Australian art since the 1940s, starting with Melbourne’s 'Angry Penguin' group - Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan et al - and progressing, via the likes of Fred Williams in the Sixties, to indigenous artists more recently. 

On the specifically Aboriginal front, it’s interesting to glimpse the diversity of styles from Australia’s different regions; and also to compare artists from remote areas (with stronger connection to their roots) to those now living in cities, whose experience of Aboriginal culture is inevitably somewhat mediated. 

I enjoyed comparing, too, the non-religious abstract work, by white artists such as Williams, with the highly religious abstract work by Aboriginal artists; and trying to piece together the symbiosis - or otherwise - of their rise. (One remembers the fabulous anecdote of Rover Thomas, proud son of the Kimberley cattle stations, visiting the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra for the first time, late in life, and exclaiming before Rothko’s 1957 #20 1957: 'Who’s this bugger who paints just like me?')

Thomas has one work in Out of Australia: the last etching he ever made, Crossroads from 1997. It derives from his famous abstract painting Roads Meeting, depicting an ancestral track being crossed by a modern bitumen road. It suggests the reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians at the close of the 20th century. 

Aboriginal art itself, indeed, seems to have reached a crossroads. One fears its uneasy, new relationship with the art market may lead to its dilution, under the influence of globalisation and shifting market demands. Yet, one hopes, in turn, that - emboldened by a belated sense of acceptance of their culture and the restitution to tribal groups of many traditional lands - Aboriginal art may yet flourish anew in the 21st century.

Alastair Smart is the Arts Editor for The Sunday Telegraph