Review: NPG’s National Photographic Portrait Prize and Darling Portrait Prize
Painted portraits have a long history, which we can follow continuously since their reappearance in the Renaissance.
Painted portraits have a long history, which we can follow continuously for the past six centuries or so since their reappearance in the Renaissance. The ability to render a likeness seems to have been lost towards the end of the Roman Empire, as social decline and insecurity undermined the transmission of skills in the workshops of artists, and for a millennium or so virtually no one’s features were accurately recorded. The Renaissance discovered with a shock that they knew almost exactly what Julius Caesar or Trajan looked like — you might recognise them in the street from their busts and coins — but that they had no images of any of their own ancestors through the Christian centuries.
Naturally, they became fascinated with portraits, including self-portraits, which we have from the time of Masaccio, Ghiberti, Alberti and others. But portraiture was still in practice restricted to a fairly small proportion of society, for apart from artists and their friends and families, it was mostly the great and good (or bad) who could afford to commission formal portraits. That state of affairs lasted until the invention of photography, which soon made it possible for almost everyone to have a record of their features.
But the process, the aesthetic and thus the criteria for judgment are different in each case. The photographer has to record a single moment, and so much of the art is in being prepared to seize that moment when it happens, whether in a carefully set up studio environment or in a more casual setting.
Cartier-Bresson famously spoke of the decisive moment, but such a moment may come and go in the blink of an eye while a sitter is apparently motionless and posing. As Diderot wrote in a short essay on the experience of being a sitter, he could feel his own expression subtly changing with his thoughts even as he remained to all intents and purposes motionless.
A painted portrait is different because of the length of time the artist has with the sitter, either while actually painting or in the process of preliminary drawings and studies. One artist I know recently spent six or seven hours sketching his subject, followed by more than 30 hours for the painting itself. It is not always practical, however, for sitters to make themselves available for such a long time, and for that reason artists will understandably often rely on photographic images as a back-up. Artists have always availed themselves of whatever technology was available, so there is no point in being a purist about these things.
But the fact remains that time spent with the sitter, time spent either sketching or painting, is indispensable if one is to make a painting rather than a coloured-in photograph.
For the interest of a photograph is inseparable from its precise grasp of a moment, its punctual temporality, one might say. But the interest of a painting is something else, something trans-temporal. The painter doesn’t just copy the appearance of an instant, but tries to convey the layers of duration, the accretions of time that have built up the appearance we now see.
What happens in the course of hours of sittings is that the artist comes to understand the characteristic movements — angles of head, patterns of smiles and frowns — that have animated the face over the years and have ended up giving it a particular, distinctive form. The artist learns to know the sitter in intangible ways through conversation, but in very tangible ways too by observing the micro-actions and behaviours that express character and in turn shape the sitter’s features into a face that manifests that character.
The new Darling Portrait Prize could have aspired to being better than the Archibald and the Moran, especially as it is run by the National Portrait Gallery, which, as the national collection, is in a position to set standards beyond vulgar populism.
Sadly, it is just as bad, just as disoriented, because it is selected and judged by the same art apparatchiks who dominate our art scene.
In fact, as I was talking casually to a fellow visitor about the fatuity of one particularly egregious piece, I was approached by someone of this very kind.
“Oh, you must be one of those people who still think it matters whether you paint from life or from a photograph,” they said. After I introduced myself, they assured me that the judges had thoroughly discussed these issues: as usual. If people like curators, directors and heads of art schools agree, they must be right, mustn’t they?
On the very weekend I was writing this, we had two more illustrations of the dereliction of judgment in our art establishment. The Art Gallery of NSW announced that the relief over the entrance, meant to have been filled by a commission from Dora Ohlfsen a century ago, will now be awarded to a piece that has no discernible artistic merit and is in no sense a relief, but whose maker ticks about every conceivable box in the politically correct spreadsheet, as is shamelessly emphasised in the gallery’s press release — which adds insult to injury by announcing the decision as “redressing history”.
Meanwhile in Hobart, the Glover landscape prize has been awarded to a painting of a rib roast on a bed of mashed potatoes. What is really depressing about this is that it shows how art is treated as a circus in this country. The prize, according to its website, “celebrates the legacy of John Glover” and is meant to be for “the best contemporary landscape of Tasmania”. The painter of the picture says that he entered it “to try and disrupt a landscape prize”; the most eminent of the judges, Chris Saines, director of QAGOMA in Brisbane, falls for this because of course it must be edgy if it’s so obviously incongruous.
And then comes the predictable and tawdry phase of public controversy, with people getting cross on both sides, social media squabbles, and the art establishment defending its ludicrous decisions by complaining that anyone who doesn’t agree must be “conservative”. Andy Warhol’s ironic observation that art is whatever you can get away with has become the literal norm in a consumer environment in which the value of art is purely ludic and where, in consequence, non-value becomes a positive recommendation.
As for the unfortunate Darling prize, the two works highly commended by the judges are completely superficial: viewers can judge for themselves whether a vast picture of a woman’s wrinkled cheeks has added much to the data provided by its photographic source, and in the other case, a woman kneeling and holding her face in her hands — a self-portrait, so obviously only possible from a snap — has arms and legs grotesquely out of proportion based on the distortions of the camera’s point of view. The winning painting, meanwhile, plays a disingenuous game with us by copying a literal and yet conspicuously skewed likeness in the face, and then filling out the rest of the figure in loose sketching and decorator washes of pastel colour.
The more subtle problem with all these bad pictures, like those of Ita Buttrose and Brendan Nelson among others, is that the application of paint is so lifeless. Much of the beauty of the art of painting — whether in the work of old masters or modernists — lies in the micro-structure of the brush marks themselves, the evident thinking and feeling in the way the artist has negotiated forms, transitions and edges. In the coloured-in photo pictures, the application of paint is smooth and inert, like makeup, mixed without articulation and without structure.
One of the only paintings in this exhibition that really invites us to look more closely and to ponder its making is the little picture of Kimberley and Noam Chomsky — the cat, not the linguist — which the artist has based on a Holbein-like compositional template. The portrait is of his wife, whom he has painted before in other contexts, and is clearly informed by deep knowledge of the sitter. What is particularly attractive, and so remarkably rare in this exhibition, is that the surface is really alive, not with gratuitous and meaningless painterly activity, but with the visible signs of the painterly intelligence at work.
Other entries that have interest as paintings include Dagmar Cyrulla’s A New Beginning and Paul Newton’s Self-portrait: the fact that his right hand is less confidently and accurately painted than his left is an honourable fault, since it reminds us of one of the difficulties of painting oneself from life. Ben Bickley deserves credit, in his sensitive little portrait of Erica, for being clear about his process: “I had a short initial sitting with Erica, then used a photograph obtained during the session as a reference point.” There are so many ways to cheat today that all artists in portrait prizes should be required to explain how they have made their pictures.
As for the photographic portrait prize, there are quite a few presentable pictures, simply because there is much less confusion about what makes a good photograph. The main problem is that so many lean so heavily on sentimentality, or political and social appeal, or on currently fashionable topics such as gender ambiguity and intersexuality. A particularly striking image — as far as possible from any of these — is the clearly unstaged shot of Scott Morrison alone on the benches of the House of Representatives with his party standing behind.
Others include Life In Art, in which an eccentric but amiable art collector sits among his collections, and the portrait of the 96-year-old artist Marc Clark in his garden, in the shade, with one of his sculptures. Both of these pictures are well-composed, make intelligent use of their settings, and are touching without being overtly sentimental. The Mahi-mahi, in which a young fishmonger is seen with an enormous fish, is a strong composition, uniting the shape of the fish and the single action of the sitter.
There are a few other pictures that fit into this category, but many more that tip over into plangent sentimentality, sociopolitical tub-thumping and various forms of narcissistic identity posturing — or indeed into various combinations of these faults. The best photographs, and the best art in general, is self-contained, but winners of prizes tend to be rather more obvious in their appeal.
Online: View the finalists of The Darling Portrait Prize and National Photographic Portrait Prize at www.portrait.gov.au
National Photographic Portrait Prize and Darling Portrait Prize
National Portrait Gallery, until May 10
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