As surely as night follows day the Archibald Prize has rolled around again, its purpose seemingly unchanged. That is to shock and bemuse we ignorant and ill-informed punters.
I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of the tokenism and political correctness that has usurped merit and excellence in our community today. Let me be clear, there is no doubt that art is a very subjective proposition. As Yotam Ottolenghi once said: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
However, I can’t help but wonder has the global phenomenon known as ‘revisionist cancel culture’ emboldened the galleries’ Trustees to such an extent that they are comfortable imposing their own arrogant views on what is and isn’t acceptable when determining the winners.
At the risk of upsetting today’s judges it might be prudent to revisit history and examine J.F.Archibald’s original bequest.
Background
The Archibald was the original major prize for portraiture in Australian art. It was first awarded in 1921 after the receipt of a bequest from J.F. Archibald (1856-1919), a journalist and founder of the Bulletin Magazine. He also served as a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW.
Yet Archibald had no desire to become famous and during his lifetime he shunned publicity and remained evasive and enigmatic.
When he died in 1919, Archibald bequeathed one tenth of his estate of £89,061 in trust for a non-acquisitive annual art prize to be awarded by the Trustees of the (then) National Art Gallery of New South Wales (now Art Gallery of New South Wales). In today’s money that equates to approximately $251,798.00.
According to the terms of the will, dated 15 March 1916, the bequest of the prize was to be awarded to: ‘the best portrait preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia during the 12 months preceding the date fixed by the Trustees for sending in the pictures. Additionally, ‘portraits should be as far as practicable painted from life and may be of any size. No direct copies from photographs will be considered eligible’. The primary aim was to ‘foster portraiture, as well as support artists and perpetuate the memory of great Australians’.
Historically the Archibald Prize has not been without controversy. In 1943 for example when William Dobell won the award for his entry of Joshua Smith two other entrants were so incensed, they took legal action in the supreme Court of NSW. Their challenge was based on the grounds that the painting was not a portrait as defined by the Archibald Bequest. The case was dismissed, and the court ordered the claimants to pay costs for Dobell and the Trustees.
In 1975 John Bloomfield’s portrait of Tim Burstall, painted from a blown-up photograph was disqualified on the grounds that the rules stated that the portrait had to be painted from life. The prize was rejudged and awarded to Kevin Connor.
In 1985 The Archibald found itself back in court. The Perpetual Trustee Company, which administered Archibald’s will, took the Australian Journalists Association Benevolent Fund to court. The AJA was named as first defendant in the case because it stood to inherit the money if the Archibald Prize failed to fulfil the criteria that the prize was still a ‘good charitable bequest’. The Court found that the Archibald Prize did fulfil this objective and directed that the Perpetual Trustees Company should transfer administration of the Trust to the Art Gallery of NSW.
Moving forward to today — the rules of the bequest allow that should none of the 1068 entries this year reach a quality nor fit with the terms of the grant, the Trustees do have within their discretion the ability to not award the Archibald prize to any of the entries.
This would not be without precedent as they did the very same thing in 1964 and again in 1980. The trustees decided not to award the prize on the grounds that the entries were not of a sufficient standard.
The extreme disparity between portraits selected for the Archibald Prize in recent years recalls the old saying about a camel being a horse designed by a committee – but it’s actually much worse than that.
If anything, it reminds me of the appalling tourists I saw in Cyprus a few years ago – bloated and sunburnt Putin loyalists – piling a whole breakfast smorgasbord on to a single plate, with chocolate cake balanced on fried eggs and bacon.
This distasteful mess is not dissimilar to recent Archibald awards and is entirely the fault of the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW, who select and judge the entries.
There were 816 portraits submitted for the Archibald this year. You could be forgiven for thinking that almost anyone with a modicum of talent could have culled the entries to create a decent exhibition.
We know this because so many good pictures, knocked back by the trustees, turned up in other shows such as the Salon des refuses and the Portia Geach, both held at the S.H. Ervin Gallery.
Instead, the trustees deliberately seek disparity and cacophony; they want the audience to be surprised, titillated, and even shocked. Hence the inclusion of everything from coloured-in printouts of photos to real or pastiche outsider art.
The gallery – like most institutions these days – is desperate to tick ideological boxes: gender, racial and other identity narcissists all need to be appeased.
And there are still a few colossal heads, like dinosaurs surviving from another age.
One of the mysteries of the Archibald, incidentally, is why people who should know better allow themselves to be painted by certain artists. Painters look for well-known figures to be sitters but allowing an artist to paint you is an implicit endorsement and thus reflects on your own judgment.
Among the few entries that can be taken seriously is Keith Burt’s painting of Bridie Gillman. It’s sensitive and interestingly composed, although some consider the palette a little bit cool and lifeless. It contrasts with Tsering Hannaford’s adjacent painting which is dominated by warmer colours.
Both are very talented painters but in one case the effect is a little bloodless, in the other rather suffocating. Just as the balance of tone – of lights and darks – gives vitality to a painting, so does the energetic interplay of warm and cool colours.
Ann Cape has a good portrait of her fellow painter Euan MacLeod which, unlike some other pictures, shows that she has spent time with her sitter and has come to know him.
Robert Malherbe’s portrait of Dana Rayson is intimate, inward and intense though at the same time distant and dreamy.
Lewis Miller’s Deborah Conway is striking and authentic although it could, in the end, have been more effective as head-and-shoulders rather than seated full-length with large areas left unpainted, reducing the face to a tiny area of the pictorial surface.
One of the best pictures in the show is a little self-portrait by Wendy Sharpe in a found antique frame. Sharpe has done a lot of work with found and antique frames recently and apart from the many interesting associations they bring with them, they also generally enforce a smaller scale than is usual in oversized commercial art today.
Sharpe is a talented artist and the painting benefits from the discipline of the small frame, creating a moving and intense image of herself emerging from the shadows with a dreamlike apparition over her shoulder.
A few other artists deserve a mention, including Paul Newton (he has painted actors Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness) and Jude Rae (inventor Saul Griffith).
And there are some others that have a certain eccentric or quirky charm, including Noel McKenna, even though he almost omits his subject’s face (art collector Patrick Corrigan), Vincent Namatjira for his self-portrait with a dingo, Katherine Hattam with Helen Garner, or Yoshio Honjo’s portrait of Yumi Stymes in imitation of ukiyoe woodblock prints.
If there is one painting that stands out, both for the quality of its painting and for its expressive presence, it is Robert Hannaford’s self-portrait. Hannaford is Australia’s most distinguished professional portrait painter and has been represented in the Archibald countless times.
If the prize were judged by portrait artists instead of by business people and socialites, he would have won it long ago.
This painting is a statement of his virtuosity but also his courage and persistence in the face of severe illness, has a conviction that no other picture in this exhibition achieves.
It shows up the paper-thin weakness of most of the other finalists. And it reminds us of the shameful injustice done to Hannaford in 2018 when his fine and moving self-portrait was overlooked in favour of what was, in my view, a work of obvious and embarrassing mediocrity.
