Within minutes of the announcement, the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW got the headlines they must have anticipated — the first Indigenous winner of the Archibald Prize. And in case this sounds like a rather jaded observation, they had already announced an Aboriginal winner for the Wynne Prize. One could have been a coincidence, but choosing two looks like premeditation.
It is also worth pondering the numbers that were cited by the trust president, David Gonski. There were 1068 entries for the Archibald this year, of which 55 were hung; for the Wynne, there were 782 entries and 34 finalists; while for the Sulman (not selected or judged by the trustees) there were 715 entries and 18 finalists. As I have already observed,
we know that the hanging selection is not made on the basis of quality because we have other opportunities to see the ones that got away.
That said, having chosen a bad set of Archibald finalists, the trustees partially redeemed themselves by not giving a prize to the worst. They awarded a highly commended to Tsering Hannaford, whose self-portrait inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi I recommended in my preview of the hanging a week ago.
Shamefully, the trustees never gave the prize to her father Robert Hannaford, Australia’s leading portrait painter. They had a good opportunity with a strong self-portrait in 2018, but instead chose a grotesquely inferior work.
The winner of this year’s prize, Vincent Namatjira’s portrait of himself with Adam Goodes, Stand Strong for Who You Are, is an engagingly personal and heartfelt picture, even if rather naively ideological. And if it is not a masterpiece of painting, it is at any rate a real painting, unlike so many ersatz confections that surround it. There is a sense of character and inner life in the faces of both the sitters.
As for the Wynne, Lucy Culliton’s Gunningrah stands out for its authenticity in a weak and disoriented group of finalists, further confused by a large number of Aboriginal works that are not landscapes but something quite different.
And this makes it all the more interesting that the award went to the only Aboriginal artist who really is working within the genre of landscape.
Hubert Pareroultja’s sensitive view of Tjoritja
(West MacDonnell Ranges, NT) is painted in an idiom
that descends from Albert Namatjira, who is also — and this is a coincidence — the great-grandfather of Vincent Namatjira.
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