Archibald Prize: Mr Macron, this is why Robert Hannaford should win this time

How the Archibald hanging might be explained to a distinguished visitor from France.

Jonathan Dalton’s Abdul is an example of painters ‘essentially copying photographs’.

Realising that President Emmanuel Macron was visiting the Art Gallery of NSW at the very moment I was writing this preview of the Archibald finalists, I wondered if he would be taken through the show that I had seen earlier in the morning, and what he would make of Sydney’s greatest art circus. As it turned out, he walked past the show but didn’t see it, yet I couldn’t help imagining what it might be like to explain it to him, in terms rather different from the bland version he might get from the gallery’s management and trustees.

You see, Monsieur le President, although you may not suspect it from the quality of the work, this is Australia’s most celebrated — and notorious — art event. Every year it comes around, just like la grippe, and each time it’s the occasion for the same series of charades.

For months beforehand, artists have been working away at their prize pictures, hoping to hit on the right formula to ensure they are at least chosen as finalists. A lot is at stake because even to be hung is to gain recognition, and to win means instant if short-lived media celebrity, as well as a large cheque.

There were nearly 800 candidates this year, and these are duly paraded before the board of trustees, mostly businesspeople plus a couple of artists. Are they looking for the best paintings? Mais non! The most important consideration is to have the greatest possible mixture of styles, and that is why the quality is so wildly uneven.

And of course you have to have male and female artists and sitters, and also ethnic diversity, or else there will be a fuss on social media. Afterwards, it is the job of the curators to make some sense of all this, and to hang the selected pictures with some kind of coherence.

Once the pictures are hung, a first prize is awarded, but attention! — this is not the real prize; it is the Packing Room Prize, the choice of the packers, and traditionally the kiss of death for artistic credibility. The real prize, the one that brings money and fame, is announced next week by the trustees, and the media waits with bated breath, hoping for some whiff of scandal.

You see, Australia’s most famous aesthetic controversy, which culminated in a dramatic court case in 1944, arose from the claim that the 1943 Archibald winner was not really a portrait but a caricature. The second most famous controversy surrounding this prize was it was awarded in 1975 to a portrait that was subsequently disqualified on the grounds that it was painted from a photograph. This, as I’m sure you can see for yourself, is rather ironic when today so many of these pictures are slavishly copied from photographs.

You may have noticed that particularly enormous head of an actor, heart-wrenching in its literal banality — once, the Archibald was crowded with such monstrosities, but big heads are fortunately now all but extinct.

There are plenty of other painters who are essentially copying photographs, such as this one by Jonathan Dalton. Look at the edge where the shirt meets the sofa behind: the cut-out effect reproduces the monocular vision of the camera, not the binocular vision of human beings.

Or look at this portrait of Chief Justice Susan Kiefel sitting on an armchair that looks like something from a public service furniture catalogue: her poorly foreshortened left hand and the shapeless foot remind us that a photo simply doesn’t provide enough information about the shape of the body. Or again this portrait by Fiona McMonagle, which doesn’t look photographic at first sight but where the nostrils and lips could never have been so misshapen if painted from life. But there are of course better works, too. Perhaps the first that should be mentioned is this austere black-and-white self-portrait by Nicholas Harding.

He is a distinguished portrait painter and a past winner of the Archibald Prize, but recently he has been very ill. Here Harding has painted himself, with stoic courage, in the middle of a painful course of treatment.

And here, on the other hand, is an artist who has not been a finalist before but has produced an unusual and absorbing self-portrait: Stephanie Monteith, whose touchingly self-effacing profile is contrasted with the richly painted still-life motifs in a composition that recalls symbolist and post-impressionist painters of the late 19th century.

And here is a fine portrait of one veteran artist by another: Noel Thurgate combines a vivid likeness of Elisabeth Cummings with a low-relief assemblage of objects evoking her life in the studio and in the bush.

There are quite a few other portraits by artists such as Guy Maestri, India Mark, Tsering Hannaford, Alison Mackay, Natasha Walsh, Robert Malherbe, Marcus Wills, Euan Macleod, Graeme Drendel, Jordan Richardson, Matthew Lynn, Mirra Whale, Salvatore Zofrea and others, that deserve our attention, even if some are more successful than others.

But ultimately, this painting by Robert Hannaford stands out from the rest, and may even win this year, for Hannaford is probably Australia’s most senior and distinguished professional portrait painter — yet, despite having been a finalist in the Archibald more than 20 times, has never won the prize.

Sentimental considerations count for much in the Archibald Prize, Monsieur le President, as in film awards, but this is not why Hannaford should win this time.

Robert Hannaford, 'Robert Hannaford self-portrait'

The real reason is that this is one of the best of the many self-portraits the artist has painted through the years, from a formal point of view and as a likeness that embodies self-knowledge, the insight gained across a long career, and determination combined with poise and humility. Hannaford represents himself as he usually is, in bare feet, in his studio, where he repeatedly scurries up and down to compare the painting with the model — in this case a mirror — set beside the canvas.

2018 Archibald finalists

VIEW GALLERY

And here he stands leaning slightly to one side, intent on the picture we are looking at, capturing himself at the moment of deciding that the portrait is complete.

The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes will be announced on May 11.