The Archibald Prize 2023 | The Saturday Paper

It’s a Sydney thing. It’s not only the oldest and most prestigious portrait competition in Australia but also the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s most popular exhibition. The media may call it “the paint race that stops the nation” but – unlike the rest of Australia – it’s Sydneysiders who are constantly saturated with publicity about it.

The Archibald Prize has a similar trajectory every year. It starts off with articles about the arrival of the portraits by hopeful artists to the gallery. Then there’s the obligatory story focused on the sitter and the artist. Recently there has been a sob story narrative – one this year was headlined “The portrait that will make you cry”. Next up is the Packing Room Prize, generally given to a hyperrealist portrait that verges on the kitsch. Following closely on the heels of this is the announcement of the finalists. Finally, the big night, when the winner is paraded before the media, sometimes accompanied by the dazed sitter. The next day, in this yearly ritual, reveals the published opinions of art critics who, with regular monotony, disparage the Archibald as a circus or joke.

Every year when I look at reproductions of the Archibald finalists the portraits appear so grotesque and so lacking in aesthetic quality that it seems less like an exhibition than the sideshow alley of Australian art. Before this year I had never actually visited it, even though I had been painted for the prize. The first time I was painted I looked like a homeless Elvis impersonator, dressed in rags with feet the size of skateboards. I was pleased I was unrecognisable, but the size of my feet still irritates me.

Another time my wife Mandy and I were painted but, when we saw the result, Mandy thought we looked like a gangster and his moll. We didn’t want it entered into the Archibald and the artist was upset when we refused to give him permission. He then got us to sign a petition protesting the demolition of an Art Deco building in Kings Cross. We should have been suspicious that we were the only two signatures on the petition. We later found out we were conned: our signatures were on the authorisation form agreeing to our portrait being entered into the competition.

Recently an artist painted me. It didn’t make the finalists but made it into the Salon des Refusés. He asked me to come and look at it. While we were appraising the image – me looking into the distance with my two chihuahuas at my feet – two middle-aged women paused in front of us, obviously not realising that I was the subject of the painting they were staring at. After pondering it for a time, one woman remarked to the other, “That Louis Nowra looks up himself, but his chihuahuas are cute.”

One can understand why some sitters are appalled by a finished portrait. Winston Churchill famously had his portrait by Graham Sutherland destroyed. Photographs reveal a bombastic and belligerent figure. It was obvious that the truth stung.

I visit the current exhibition on the morning of the opening day. The first thing that surprises me is the air of reverence. One critic has written that the judges deliberately choose some portraits that the “punters” will scoff at. I expected to hear laughter and caustic comments but there are only whispers as the huge crowd, with quiet excitement, slowly move from one painting to the next. The second surprise was that I expected the visitors to be primarily middle-aged but it is a mixture of the young and old.

It is a perfect warm Sydney day and everyone is dressed in what can only be described as Sydney casual, as if they are off to the beach. Yet I could be in a church. As I meander through the rooms, I am confronted by a huge close-up of a cartoon face with a gap tooth like a cave entrance. This is the artist Elizabeth Pulie, painted by Mitch Cairns, a former winner.

Next up, Anh Do’s close-up portrait of Archie Roach has a frightening vacuousness, as if the artist has compensated for his inability to grasp the character of the sitter and tried to overwhelm the viewer with its hugeness. The actor Claudia Karvan seems to be drowning in an iridescent green fog. There are others that are so badly painted their faces are unrecognisable. I know Drusilla Modjeska but for the life of me cannot recognise her.

This year’s winner is a portrait of Montaigne, Head in the sky, feet on the ground, by Julia Gutman. It shows the singer-songwriter with her head on her bended knee. The pose and face seem more that of a morose teenager than an adult. She has such a vague face that even her mother wouldn’t recognise her. Perhaps the judges saluted Gutman’s homage to Austrian artist Egon Schiele’s painting of his wife in the same pose. The body in Schiele’s portrait is limber and at ease, but Gutman’s Montaigne is awkward and stiff, as if the pose is causing her a backache. Perhaps the judges were influenced by an essay on the artist, which remarks that the textiles used in the painting are “a form to negotiate loaded precepts of femininity, tradition and expectation”. Whatever that means. 

Many of the label notes seem to resort to a special pleading or fall back on contemporary platitudes. So there are portraits that reference mental health issues, “paeans to the eternal feminine”, “a radical stance against patriarchal custom”, “disrupting the colonial space”, “the ongoing costs of colonialism” and “looking through the lens of otherness … in a world saturated by whiteness”, plus buzzwords such as “authenticity”, “illness”, “resilience” and “trauma”.

As I progress from portrait to portrait, I overhear the occasional comment of “That’s awful”, and one or two giggles. Looking at a picture of Noni Hazlehurst, one woman says to the other, “Oh, I loved her in that show. What was that show?” They couldn’t remember its name, but it was enough that they recognised her. And it slowly becomes obvious why the Archibald is so popular – it’s because the portraits are of famous or well-known people. The visitors spend most of their time viewing people such as Daniel Johns, Don Walker – “Oh,” says one, “I love Cold Chisel!” – or rugby league fullback Latrell Mitchell.

There’s a two-step process to the movement of the throng. First is a leaning forward to read the label notes, soaking up the information, and then a step back to see if the words correspond to the image. Yet it’s more than that. The visitors want the painters to reveal something hidden, some sort of secret about the celebrities and the famous faces. It’s almost a form of perving. The closer the face is to realism, the better. “It doesn’t look like her,” said a disappointed voice, summing up a constant lament.

I hear no mocking, no inhaling of shocked breath: only the hushed tones of people entranced by the portraits. This is their one day of the year at the gallery, an exhibition solely for them. To connoisseurs the paintings may seem silly, even rubbish, but that’s not the point. This is a special occasion for the public. Once the people leave the Archibald exhibition and head into the Wynne Prize rooms, it’s as if a spell has been broken. Voices are louder and there is laughter.

This is the public’s day, their yearly communion with art and the famous. It’s easy to be condescending to these visitors, and I suspect that the critics never see these works in the company of those they mock, but I found myself moved and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

The 2023 Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes are showing at AGNSW, Sydney, until September 3.

 

ARTS DIARY

FASHION Australian Fashion Week 2023

Carriageworks, Sydney, May 15-19

MULTIMEDIA Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, until June 18

FESTIVAL DreamBIG Children’s Festival

Adelaide Festival Centre, May 17-27

CULTURE Nimbin Aquarius50 Festival

Nimbin, NSW, until May 21

MUSICAL & Juliet

Regent Theatre, Melbourne, until June 4

LAST CHANCE

THEATRE Crimes of the Heart

Canberra Rep Theatre, until May 13