Archibald Prize: harsh criticism of winner reflects generational divide

It’s well known that both artist and subject can be significant factors in winning the Archibald Prize. So these two factors in combination led to a lot of talk focusing on Nicholas Harding’s portrait of John Olsen, Noel Thurgate’s Peter Powditch and Jun Chen’s Ray Hughes.

Each of these had strong sentimental factors on their side. There were also a couple of notable portraits by and of younger artists, in very different styles, including Andrew Bonneau’s Ayako Saito and Mitch Cairns’s Agatha Gothe-Snape.

In the end, the trustees narrowed their shortlist to two, and announced the second as highly commended. This runner-up, Chen’s portrait of Hughes, clearly had strong minority judges’ support.

The winner, of course, was Cairns’s portrait of his partner, striking as a composition in bright neo-Matissian colours and simplified shapes, but it is also a good, if stylised likeness of its subject. Beyond immediate formal qualities that attract the eye at a distance, Cairns’s picture is an affectionate evocation of a person and a relationship. As he has said, it was composed with love.

Whether it is the best picture out of the 43 finalists is another question. It is unfair of Olsen to declare it the worst picture to win the prize. As to his criticisms that it lacks structure and has a faux naivety, I don’t think the first is quite right, but the second point identifies a certain self-conscious designer quality in Cairns’s work that could easily become formulaic and impede his development as an artist.