Small satisfaction amid media hype

THE Archibald Prize, whose sitters are so often celebrities, is a media phenomenon, an exhibition famous above all for being famous.

Why do so many cameras and breathless TV personalities crowd into one room at the Art Gallery of NSW?

It's less about the quality of the pictures on the wall than because everyone else will be there.

The prize announcement is a vulgar but entertaining affair, like an awards night in cinema or the media.

It's largely about suspense, and Steven Lowy, chairman of the AGNSW Trustees, did a good job of building anticipation, as he went through the Sulman and Wynne prizes, describing the judging process and explaining the shortlists the judges had come up with.

Arriving a little before all the cameras, though, I was able to anticipate the outcome of the judging for the Archibald.

I realised that a little picture had not been hanging there last week; two very big and ugly paintings had been moved apart to make way for a small but full-length portrait of a young man standing stiffly and looking at us slightly askance.

It was indeed this picture that won, Sam Leach's portrait of Tim Minchin, a comedian. Perhaps the horror of macrocephaly has finally sunk in with the trustees, for only one of their five shortlisted candidates was grossly oversized.

Leach's winning picture is extremely unusual in being so small, but it is far better to be smaller than larger.

The portrait is perceptive and sensitive to the character of its subject. It was apparently done from life, but the artist has internalised a kind of photographic literalism into his way of looking at the world, which gives the work an unappealing surface.

Leach also won the Wynne Prize with a small but dense imaginary landscape.

He is only the third painter to win both prizes in the same year - the first was William Dobell in 1948, while Brett Whiteley won all three major prizes in 1978.

Viola Dominello won the trustees' watercolour prize for a suite of studies of the Hawkesbury River, in NSW.

And Michael Lindeman won the Sulman for a work in which he reproduced several classified advertisements for cheap works of art - a cute idea, but not really painting, let alone subject painting.

Christopher Allen is the national art critic for The Weekend Australian