Why are the Archibald rejects so much better than winning duds?
The AGNSW Archibald hang insults our intelligence. The Salon Des Refuses show, on the othe hand, knows the value of art.
The original Salon des Refuses, as many people know, was held in 1863 at the order of Emperor Napoleon III after protests about the number of works excluded from the official annual exhibition in Paris, known as the Salon. The relevance of such an exhibition today, however, becomes clearer with a closer look at the history of the institutions involved.
The Paris Salon had its origins in the annual exhibitions of the old Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which was founded in 1648 as an association of artists who wanted to be free of the monopoly of the old guild of painters but evolved in subsequent decades into a teaching institution and eventually the template for all subsequent art schools.
At first the academy’s teaching was mainly confined to the evening drawing classes, supervised for a month at a time by the senior academicians, who would pose the model and correct the students’ drawings. This was supplemented by some classes in anatomy and perspective, and monthly lectures on art history and theory for which masterpieces from the royal collection would be brought to the lecture room to be explained by one of the senior artists and discussed by all present.
These discussions were meant to be minuted by the secretary and their conclusions, as the academy’s protector Jean-Baptiste Colbert suggested, were meant to form a corpus of rules and principles for making good art. In fact the debates that got going in earnest from 1667 led to the outbreak of a famous controversy over the primacy of line and colour in painting: as I mentioned months ago, the partisans on either side started with Raphael and Titian as their models, before updating them to the more contemporary examples of Poussin and Rubens.
The existence of this sometimes acrimonious Querelle, as it was known, reminds us that the academy was not an authoritarian institution with a single prescriptive view of the correct way to paint. Nor could it be, since most of an artist’s training remained outside the institution: young men would start as apprentices to a master, who would teach them drawing until they were able enough to be accepted into the academy’s classes, and then would continue to teach them painting, based on their own style and studio practice.
The academy was meant to ensure that certain core skills, particularly drawing, were taught to a high standard, but practical training in the specifics of painting and sculpture remained free and diverse until the radical reforms of late 1863 — the year of the Salon des Refuses — which brought studio training too into the academy and made the teaching of art into a regimented and state-governed process.
F
rom the beginning, excellence was judged by prizes and awards, the most important of which was the Prix de Rome, essentially a scholarship to undertake postgraduate study in Rome, under the aegis of a branch of the academy that was founded in Rome as early as 1665, and which since 1803 has occupied the magnificent Villa Medici at the top of the Spanish Steps. As other academies were set up all over Europe in imitation of the French one, they too opened branches in Rome, such as the British School at Rome, which is also open to Australian artists and archaeologists.
The exhibitions held by the academy were relatively modest at first but grew in the course of the 18th century to be extensive and important. The number of works that were hung, both by well-known artists and by newcomers, became so great that modern art reviewing arose to help visitors make sense of what they were seeing. The great precursor was Denis Diderot, but he wrote for an extremely private journal, La Correspondance litteraire, hand-copied for 15 or so princely subscribers — thus evading censorship — and his reviews (1759-81) were printed posthumously only from 1800 onwards.
By the early 19th century, with the explosion of modern newspapers and a decline in the sense of propriety that had once made critics abstain from the public expression of views about the work of living artists, critical writing — and much that could be called partisan rather than critical — proliferated.
Meanwhile the Salon exhibitions grew ever bigger and more crowded. Selection was by a jury whose task was in principle to select the best work and to encourage new talent, but that had come to be dominated in practice by a post-neoclassical style that combined a debased version of academic theory with a literal naturalism that was characteristic of the spirit of the century.
Such were the circumstances in which an increasingly rigid jury excluded many of the younger artists who were beginning to make their mark in Paris, and these excluded artists found themselves granted an exhibition of their own. The adoption of this model in the case of the Archibald is in one sense apt — since more than 1000 pictures were refused this year — but it also forces us to consider some important differences.
However unimaginative the Salon juries had become by the second half of the 19th century, they were still trying to maintain what they saw as the highest standards of art, and their inflexibility arose ultimately from taking art seriously.
The jury that selects the Archibald, that is the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW, is clearly doing something very different. The selection they make, year after year, reflects neither a commitment to high standards nor a high estimation of the importance of art.
The result is that many of those they reject are better artists and take the art of painting more seriously than those they select for hanging. In the culture of dereliction that the trustees represent — really just part of the mindless condition of the consumer world — any attempt to take painting seriously has become a countercultural act. All over the world, whether in schools such as Grand Central Atelier in New York or the Florence Academy, or in the books of Juliette Aristides and others, young artists are trying to learn to do what was once taught in the academies but is now all but impossible to learn in state-funded art schools.
So the artists whose work is hung at the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney are not refugees from a strict and prescriptive set of rules but from a clownish lack of values that deliberately embraces the ridiculous and is far more concerned to pretend to care about fashionable pseudo-political issues than with the standards of the art of painting. Not all the works here are outstanding by any means, but at least they have not been chosen for shock value; as one of the artists in this hanging said to me, the overall effect is rather mediocre, but at least it doesn’t insult our intelligence like the work at the AGNSW.
There are certainly many portraits here that could have replaced the countless duds in the Archibald. One is Euan Macleod’s vivid picture of Gordon Elliott, which captures something of the obsessive character of the collector. Another is the self-portrait of Alison Mackay, whose title alludes to the ordeal of a course of chemotherapy: the triple layer of flannel shirts she wears touchingly evokes the fragility of her body after what it has been through.
Another striking work is Evert Ploeg’s portrait of Angus Trumble, former director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra: the sitter is surrounded by details that evoke his character and is portrayed reading to us, although the open mouth — generally to be avoided in portraits — detracts from the impression of depth and inwardness.
The exhibition is intelligently hung, bringing together works of similar scale but above aesthetic character so that pictures enhance each other rather than detract from each other in a general cacophony. The best sequence of portraits is a set of three by Clare Thackway, Daniel Vukovljak and Samuel Massey. In the first of these Thackway closely inspects her own features at the age of 35, the classic midpoint of life, as cited in the first verse of Dante’s Inferno.
The second is a small but very intense self-portrait looking straight at the viewer — that is, at himself in the mirror — whereas Thackway has turned and tilted her head slightly in an attitude that also evokes self-scrutiny. The third in the row is an evocative portrait of Guy Maestri looking away to the right while his torso remains facing us, his hands holding what looks like a damaged marble or plaster head.
Among other portraits in the exhibition are Rodney Pople’s quirky self-portrait as a cockatoo’s shadow and Leslie Rice’s mysterious allegorical self-portrait in which he represents himself watering a small tree to which he is attached by a noose around his neck; the rather grim implication seems to be that he will be hanged from the tree once it is fully grown. There is a striking little portrait of Ross Fitzgerald, too, by Stephen Tiernan, a painter who is by day a police officer in Queensland; the style of the painting is not refined but it demonstrates a real apprehension of the character of the sitter.
The SH Ervin Gallery also takes in refugees from the sadly derelict Wynne Prize. It is good to see a picture by the extraordinary centenarian painter Guy Warren, who has been active as an artist since World War II.
Here too there is a particularly successful sequence of pictures, all of them small but far more intense and engaging than some of the bigger and more vacuous things hung elsewhere. The four artists in this row are Evan Salmon, Rachel Milne, Robert Malherbe and Tom Carment. Of these, Carment has, as always, an engaging intuition of the life of things, which a kind of selfless humility enables him to encounter with freshness and spontaneity.
Milne and Malherbe are less impersonal in their vision and more energetic and gestural in their handling of paint, but each of them conveys one of the most vital aspects of landscape painting, which is the sense of connection with and feeling for the life of nature: as with a portrait, the object is neither to copy superficial appearance, nor to produce a vague decorative effect, but to convey the presence of being as it is discovered in and through a particular site.
Salmon’s work, finally, is a reminder that composition is the basis of landscape painting, as meter is the basis of poetic language: where the horizon is placed, where the clump of trees is situated, the direction of the path, the open space on the left; all of these elements, although grounded in what the plein-air painter found before him, had to be adjusted to the abstract and invisible matrix of pictorial space to become a painting.