Archibald Prize: the ones that got away

Winners of the Archibald Prize are not always the most interesting portraits — in fact sometimes they are dreadful.

Nicholas Harding’s Hugo Weaving was a 2011 entry, the year Ben Quilty won with his ‘dreadful’ picture of Margaret Olley.

In the course of the many Archibalds I have seen, the winner has sometimes been predictable, but seldom the best portrait in the show.

More often it is some magical alignment of the notoriety of artist and sitter — packaged in a facile, superficially striking style that will appeal to the punters — that seems to determine the choice of the trustees. They don’t usually select the worst picture because that often already has won the Packing Room Prize — with apologies to my esteemed colleague Bill Leak, who won it for a portrait of Barry Humphries in the character of Sir Les Patterson in 2000. But the trustees too often ignore the most interesting portraits because these are usually smaller, less showy and require a deeper engagement than is now expected of the exhibition’s audience.

My favourite Archibald story is from the days when the Megaportrait ruled the halls of the Art Gallery of NSW: in 1997, Lewis Miller entered a fine portrait of Allan Mitelman. It was hung as a finalist, but it was approximately life-sized, so no one paid any attention to it. The following year he entered a gigantic version of the same sitter and won. I don’t think the trustees realised what an own goal this represented.

Among the ones that got away — portraits that might have been more deserving of the prize than the eventual winner — I can think in recent years of Geoffrey Dyer’s David Walsh or Nicholas Harding’s Hugo Weavingin 2011, when the award went to Ben Quilty for a dreadful picture of Margaret Olley: this was a case study of a showy, pseudo-contemporary but ultimately photographic painting style matched with a sentimental favourite in the subject. The following year represented a low point in the general quality of the entries; it was won by Tim Storrier for an eccentric but memorable self-portrait based on Hieronymus Bosch. The other picture that equally deservedly might have won in 2012 was Garry Shead’s Martin Sharp, oversized but not colossal.

In 2013, the winner was Del Kathryn Barton (for the second time), but Imants Tiller’s self-portrait was the most interesting and suggestive. The contrast was still more striking last year, when there were many good portraits of normal size and actually painted from life by Jude Rae, Paul Miller, Troy Quinliven, Dapeng Liu and others, although in the end they were overshadowed by Wendy Sharpe’s flamboyant yet sensitive portrait of Ash Flanders performing in drag. Surprisingly, the winner was the insipidly photographic picture of Penelope Seidler by Fiona Lowry.