My name is Natalie Wilson and it is my great pleasure to be speaking to you from Gadigal and Bidjigal lands. I would like to acknowledge with respect the countries, the waterways, the skies and the spiritual systems of the First Nations peoples on whose lands I work and live. I do this in the spirit of reconciliation as we move to a place of justice and partnership and together walk gently on this land. For a hundred years, audiences have been flocking to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see the annual Archibald Prize, Australia's longest running and most celebrated portrait award. There have been many portrait prizes that have followed over the past century, but none have received the acclaim in public adoration like the Archies. Since the award was first established in 1921, visitors have experienced their brush with fame as they scrutinised the famous and infamous faces on the walls. The person behind the prize was the journalist and newspaper publisher, J.F. Archibald. Born John Feltham Archibald in Geelong, Victoria, he refashioned himself as Jules Francois with an imaginary French ancestry. As it happens, Archibald's younger half-brother Carl was himself an aspiring artist. A student at Melbourne's National Gallery School in the 1890s under the tutelage of the claimed Australian Impressionist painter Frederick McCubbin. And alongside Max Meldrum and Margaret Preston, who became celebrated artists, Carl Archibald died tragically on his return journey to Australia in 1915 after a decade studying in Europe. Perhaps Carl's untimely death, together with Archibald's abiding interest in portraiture, led him to endow an annual portrait competition to be judged by the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The terms of his bequest, which still apply, state the Art Award Prize be awarded to the best portrait, and I quote, "Preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist, resident in Australasia, during the twelve months preceding the date fixed by the trustees for sending in the pictures." These rules have been a source of contention and controversy over the years, which I'll return to later. The Gallery's Archibald 100 project began back in 2018, recognising that the centenary of the Art Award Prize in 2021 was just around the corner. Most people assume, understandably, that every work that has appeared in the Art Award Prize must have been documented and photographed, yet it is only relatively recently in a digital age that this has been possible. Not even a list of works survives for the inaugural 1921 Art Award Prize, and that first exhibition held in January 1922 garnered little interest in the press. We've been able to determine there were 41 works and identify many of them from scant records kept in the Art Gallery's archives and a few newspaper reviews. In the years that followed, the winning work was always reproduced in the press, but little else. While Gallery staff had been recording information about past Archibald portraits over the decades, it wasn't until 2018 that the Archibald 100 team began in earnest the gargantuan task of trying to track down all 6,000+ Art Award Prize works. We contacted institutions, both public and private, across Australia and further afield, to find out what portraits were held in collections. Art galleries, museums, libraries, schools, universities, churches, sporting organisations, town halls and the many agencies of government. Of course, there were also the artists and their families, as well as Archibald subjects and their families. All up, we've written and received well over 30,000 emails from our dedicated Archibald 100 email address. We also reached out to people across Australia through interviews on regional, state and national radio and on ABC TV's The Drum, as well as several articles published in newspapers, magazines and via postings on social media platforms. The word eventually got out about our search for lost Archibald portraits. You might wonder how it is possible that there are so many former Archibald portraits. While today it is only possible for artists to enter one work in the prize and the annual exhibition features approximately 50 of what today we call finalists, between 1921 and 1945 it was possible for artists to submit as many works as they wanted and every work entered was displayed. In the 1945 Archibald Prize exhibition held in January 1946, nearly 200 portraits lined the walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The trustees of the gallery decided something needed to be done and the rules were changed. The following year, artists were only permitted to submit two portraits, both of which could be selected, and the trustees would choose a group of works from the annual exhibition. The rule allowing just one portrait per artist changed as recently as 2003. After two years of tracking down most of Archibald portraits, in 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was beginning to shut down institutions across the country, I began to whittle down my shortlist and I started to establish some ground rules for the selection. Firstly, it was not going to be an exhibition just about the winners. That would mean roughly 90% of works would be by male artists only. It would also mean, at least until recent years, an almost total lack of cultural diversity in the artists and their subjects. To make the Archibald 100 selection inclusive and representative of the way portraiture has developed in Australia across the century, I decided to set myself some boundaries. I would aim for around 10 works per decade. I would get as close to gender parity as possible despite the difficulties, with many portraits by women artists still unaccounted for. I would try to ensure artists from every state and territory, as well as from Aotearoa/New Zealand, were represented. The diversity of artistic styles would embrace the gamut of art movements of the 20th century, including academic realism, cubism, expressionism, pop, photo realism and everything in between. And finally, each and every work would have a unique and compelling story to tell, either from the point of view of the artist or the sitter, preferably both, and of course would be a great painting. It soon became apparent that creating an exhibition that followed specific themes, rather than traversing a chronological path across 100 years, would present a more coherent history of the Archibald Prize. It's here we start our journey through Archibald 100. The exhibition begins with an introduction to JF Archibald, including this portrait by Tasmanian-born artist Florence Rodway. We also present the winning work from the 1921 Archibald Prize, which went to Melbourne artist William Beckwith McInnes, with his portrait of renowned Indigo-born architect Harold Desbrowe Annear, and which instigated a rivalry between Victorian and New South Wales artists that lasted for decades. The first theme of the exhibition is wielding the brush. By far the most common subjects in the Archibald Prize are the artists themselves. Of all the portraits shown in the Prize since 1921, well over 900 have been self-portraits. Merging the sitter and artist into one, the self-portrait asserts the painter's status as meriting the term "distinguished". In 1934, a then-unknown artist named Henry Hanke was the first to win the Archibald Prize with a self-portrait. Since then, 13 self-portraits have won the Prize. Self-portraits may also give us an insight into the artist's psychological state, offering a form of autobiographical insight while constructing a public persona. Intimate and introspective, rash and flamboyant, pukish and comical, the self-portrait also acts as an advertisement for technical prowess and self-promotion, a kind of calling card for future commissions. With the Archibald Prize, it's biggest catch. This portrait by George Lambert was painted when he was 47 years old and had just returned to Australia, having achieved significant recognition and success in Britain. It was his first Archibald portrait. Lambert had just moved to Sydney and was exhausted by a relentless workload of commissions, lecturing and social commitments. Controversially, both Lambert and John Longstaff removed their works within a fortnight of the opening of the 1922 exhibition. Both artists had been deemed ineligible for the award due to their residency status. Despite having lived in Australia for over a year, their London homes were still their primary residence. Within the Prize's history, there have been numerous controversies as well as inspiring stories that have captured the public's imagination. Henry Hanke's surprising win in 1934 was won. Hanke was just 33 years of age and the first Sydney-born winner. A little-known artist, he struggled to survive and support his family during the Great Depression, with his only source of income, a series of odd jobs and the Government Welfare Programme known as 'Sustenance Relief'. Hanke ground his own pigments, reused a donated frame and unable to afford a model looked in the mirror. The portrait took just eight hours to complete and eventually went on a celebratory national tour, with people flocking to locations around Australia to catch a glimpse of the work. In total, Henry Hanke had 66 portraits in the Archibald Prize between 1931 and 1972. I should mention that the record holder for the greatest number of works in the Archibald Prize is the Sydney artist Joseph Wolinski. Of his 107 portraits in the Archibald between 1921 and 1951, none took out the Prize. Wolinski is better known for the role he played in the 1943 scandal, which I'll return to later. Very few of his Archibald Prize works have ever been discovered. This striking work, our post to go for Archie 100, is by Tempe Manning. In a departure from her French academic training, she began experimenting with pointless colour theories and techniques, and the work she produced at this time added to the first vital stage of modernist culture in Australia, alongside well-known Sydney artist Grace Cossinngton Smith. Manning renders an assured elegance and confidence in her pose and bold gaze, alluding both to George Lambert's hand gestures and Henry Hanke's stance in his 1934 wedding portrait. And so we move on to the next thing, the intimacy of familiarity. After artists have turned the mirror on themselves, who better than their family when it comes to choosing an Archibald subject? Parents, siblings, partners, children, even in-laws, have all featured as Archibald sitters. Proximity and availability for sittings are two off-sighted reasons for painting those close to home. Marital rifts and strained emotions occasionally simmer just beneath the surface when those closest to the heart enter the realm of the artist's canvas. Nonetheless, familial ties are often painted with strong affection, revealing intimacy, tenderness and enduring ancestral connections. More recently, these portraits are celebrations of new dynamics that have arisen over the past century, with the expansion of the traditional family unit and act to define the artist's own sense of identity. This portrait by Western Arunta artist Vincent Namatjira depicts himself with his great-grandfather, the renowned Arunta artist Albert Namatjira, whose work he only became aware of after returning to his traditional lands at Hermannsburg. Vincent Namatjira had grown up in the foster system in Perth following the death of his mother and came to painting a little more than a decade ago. He recounts, "Painting is in my blood. It is part of our family. I'm finding my own way now with painting, and I want to keep fighting that battle in the studio every day." In 1973, Janet Dawson became the third woman to win the Artful Prize, with this portrait of her husband, the English-Australian actor and writer Michael Boddy. A ten-pound pom, Boddy emigrated to Australia in 1959. Throughout the 1960s, he appeared on stage and television and was part of the new wave of Australian theatre. Success came with the 1970 musical play The Legend of Kim O'Malley, written by Boddy and Bob Ellis, and directed by John Bell, with designs by Dawson and Sir Lloyd. Nicholas Harding's 2001 winning portrait of John Bell also appears in Archie 100, and the National Portrait Gallery holds David Naseby's portrait of Bob Ellis, which appeared in the 1999 Archibald. Described as gentle, erudite and private, Boddy later wrote books on food, home economics and sustainable living, following the couple's move to the NSW Southern Table Lands from Sydney. Here, the artist presents Boddy surrounded by gardening implements and sporting a straw hat. It is a tranquil and meditative image, imbued with a sensitivity, reflected in Dawson's choice of palette, with pale pink and shimmering creams reflecting and refracting the soft light entering through the shed door. One of the most ubiquitous of subjects in the Archibald Prize are portraits of other artists. In fact, 36 portraits of artists, including 13 self-portraits, have won the award since 1921. Throughout the century, these portrayals have signalled both collegiality and respect among Australian and New Zealand artists, occasionally marked and matched with spirited rivalry. Archibald painters are always on the lookout for their next subject, and who can relate better to the process of creating a portrait, the sitting, the sketches, the decisions about angle, light and setting than their fellow practitioners? This portrait by South Australian painter Robert Hannaford from the 1995 Archibald Prize features Wangkajunga, Walmajarri Painter, Printmaker and Preacher Jarinyanu David Downs. Painted shortly before his passing in April 1995, Hannaford captures the artist's frailty and strength in equal measure. His masterful rendering of the folds and crevices of his subjects' clothing and penetrating observation of his countenance confirms Hannaford as one of Australia's most revered portrait painters. Yet although he has had 27 portraits selected, the artist has never won the Archibald Prize. Ruminating on his inclusion in Archie 100, Hannaford said of his subject, "He was a very interesting man, and he was quiet, almost introverted. I'm very gratified that they chose this one out of all my entries." Group portraits of artists, although rare in the Archibald, often convey an air of creative vigor and synergy, affirming artistic friendship and camaraderie. They also provide an opportunity for the artist to experiment with the formal aspect of composition when dealing with multiple portraits within the one painting. There is the suggestion of interaction and collaboration between the sitters, such as this portrait by Sally Ross of LGBTQI creative collaborators Will Huxley and Garrett Huxley, who work across performance art, costume, moving and still imagery. When Nora Heysen became the first woman to win the Archibald Prize in 1938, she finally broke the canvas ceiling. Although the Archibald has been awarded to just 11 women in the past 100 years, female artists have figured prominently in the prize since 1921, representing one third of all Archibald artists. In the theme "Recasting the Gays," we focus on the significance of female artists in the Archibald Prize and celebrate the triumphs of contemporary female artists and the groundbreaking paths they continue to forge. This wonderful painting from 1941 by Violet McInnes, the wife of seven-time Archibald winner W.B. McInnes and whose career was greatly overshadowed by that of her husband, portrays her fellow artist, Sybil Craig. In the 1940s, Craig cemented her place in the city's modern art scene with her vivid, light-filled compositions. In 1945, she became the third woman appointed as an official war artist, painting women working in the Australian Munitions factories. McInnes' portrait reveals a chic, independent woman, a vibrant figure in Melbourne society. Wendy Sharp's 1996 winning self-portrait, the first ever by a female artist of a self-portrait, and the fifth time a woman took home the prize, humorously and brazenly portrays herself as the Roman goddess Diana, her hunting bow replaced by paintbrushes. It is one of five self-portraits by Sharp that the Gallery's trustees have selected for display between 1994 and 2022. Actors, comedians, luminaries of the stage and screen, the list goes on. Celebrity has always cast its spell on the Archibald Prize, with people jostling to see their favourite icons on the wall and experience a brush with fame. When the talkies first hit world cinemas in 1927, the Archies were still in their infancy. Nevertheless, theatre and movie stars often appeared in the prizes early years, and the cult of celebrity reveals some of these long-forgotten personalities. As a reputation of the Archibald swelled, the popularity of subjects slowly became a consideration for artists in their bid to secure the prize. Some personalities have appeared on numerous occasions, and of all the portraits awarded, the People's Choice and Packing Room Prizes celebrities dominate, proving their power to allure. John Brack's portrayal of comedian Barry Humphrey's most famous persona, in average, is painted in his distinctive deadpan manner and was the first of seven portraits of Humphrey's in all his guises seen in the Archibald. One of my greatest thrills, curating this show, was the moment when I got to speak to my teen idol, Molly Meldrum, as we were filming for the ABC series Finding the Archibald. When I finally saw the 1983 portrait of Molly by Victorian artist Wes Walters, as the work was being unpacked at the gallery, I was like a kid in a lolly shop. It certainly didn't disappoint. This Archibald went on a portrait by Paul Newton of comedians John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver, better known as Roy and HG, took out the 2001 People's Choice and Packing Room Prizes just a year after they shot to international fame in the ABC series The Dream, with their tongue-in-cheek commentary of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. For those who recall the series, Fatso the Wombat can be seen on Roy's white t-shirt. Of course, celebrity can be short-lived. Many household names have been forgotten over the course of 100 years. But, while fame is fleeting, a portrait endures. Over the past century, artists have sought out inspiring subjects for Archibald portraits. Some of these sitters were not widely known outside their communities until they featured in the exhibition, while others were already admired nationally and internationally. Often they were trailblazers in their chosen fields, whether in art, literature, law, filmmaking, sport or other endeavours. Sadly, many of these once-honoured individuals have now been largely forgotten. Lim Lee See, known as Granny Lum Loy, the matriarch of Darwin's Chinese community, was a pioneering market gardener. It is not known exactly when she was born, but at around the age of 10, she was brought to Darwin from Guangdong by the prominent merchant Feng Sui-Wing and his wife, Feng Yangxi, who owned stores across the Northern Territory. In this portrait by Victorian artist Geoff La Gerche, who was dubbed an eyeball realist for his super-scaled portraits, her weathered skin and her resting presence embody her abiding resilience. She survived two world wars, the deaths of her husband and only daughter, and the destruction of her precious gardens by Cyclone Tracy in 1974. In May 2023, her life was again celebrated by the Darwin community when the portrait was shown at the Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory in the Archie 100 display. Then there is this exceptional portrait of a Western-arondon artist Albert Namatjira by William Dargie, who had 36 portraits in the prize and was rewarded by Archibald judges eight times between 1941 and 1956. A record unmatched in the prize's history. This portrait of Namatjira is probably the most recognisable and universally respected of all Archibald winners. By the 1950s, reproductions of Namatjira's watercolours of his country adorned the walls of Australian middle-class homes. Despite his artistic success, however, the artist died broken spirited at just 57. His anguish, anguish and resilience perceptible in this portrait. The portraits presented here commemorate some of those who have united people through their ideals and deeds. As we look back, we once again celebrate the local heroes and national icons who have helped create the culturally diverse society we value today. The inaugural Archibald Prize was held just three years after the end of World War One. In its first decade, portraits of heroes of the Great War were lauded, many painted under the auspices of the Australian War Memorial's official war art scheme, initiated in 1917. Peace, however, was short-lived. In 1939, after England declared war on Germany, Australian and New Zealand servicemen and women went once more to the battlefields, as did artists. World War Two again saw commissioning schemes with women appointed as official war artists for the first time. Nora Heysen was the first woman awarded the Archibald Prize, winning in 1938 with her portrait of Michel-Elinke Schumann, the French wife of the Dutch Consul-General in Australia, which unfortunately couldn't be brought to Australia from its home in an overseas private collection. Heysen's success was overshadowed by the public focus on her being the daughter of celebrated South Australian artist Hans Heysen. It also drew the ire of the artist Max Meldrum, who at the time told a journalist that the life of an artist was, and I quote, "unnatural and impossible for a woman." In 1943, however, Heysen broke more ground when she became the first woman in Australia to be appointed an official war artist. Serving mostly in the territory of Papua, then under the authority of the Commonwealth of Australia, she produced a large body of work, with the Australian War Memorial acquiring 152 of these under the official war scheme. Heysen also met Dr Robert Black there, an eminent bacteriologist and professor of tropical medicine at the University of Sydney from 1963 to 1982, and the subject of this, her 1950 Archibald Prize work, now in the National Portrait Gallery's collection. As the war raged on, images related to the conflict appeared increasingly in the Archibald, not just portraits of Australians in various service roles, but also stories from the home front. Another one of my favourite Archie 100 discoveries is the portrait by the little known artist Alfreda Marcovitch, who was raised in Newcastle and travelled to Paris to study art in the 1920s. She married a prominent Yugoslav diplomat and journalist and lived in Yugoslavia for 20 years. Marcovitch escaped Europe with her two children just prior to the 1941 bombing of Belgrade by Nazi Germany. Her husband is presumed to have died during the Blitz. This portrait depicts Muriel Knox Doherty, who Marcovitch knew from her student days at Abbotsley Girls' School in Sydney, where Doherty was an untrained teacher. Doherty later joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration following the cessation of hostilities in 1945 when she was appointed matron to the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany. She was awarded the Royal Red Cross for exceptional services in military nursing and her harrowing experiences were later published in the book Letters from Belsen 1945. It's an extraordinary portrait, now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. The aftermath of the war saw emigre artists from across Europe come to these shores, bringing with them current ideas about portraiture, seen in this work by two-time Archibald winner Judy Cassab, a portrait of fellow emigre artist Stanislaus Rappatec. Cassab fled Nazi-occupied Austria and arrived in Australia in 1951. The works of artists like Cassab have become intrinsic to the chronicle of Australian art and the Archibald prize. In 1943, the Archibald itself briefly knocked the wall off newspaper front pages when William Dobell won with his portrait of fellow artist Joshua Smith. From the outset, controversy has quartered the Archibald Prize. Over the decades, works have been censured when the appropriateness of the sitter was questioned, such as this portrait by seven-time Archibald winner W.B. McInnes. Depicting Melbourne's socialite, Miss Neville Collins, Archibald commentators were in uplaw about whether the subject was indeed distinguished. In the 1930s and 40s, however, a different battle was played out on the walls of the Archibald. A cohort of artists supporting modern trends in art spared in the press with members of the newly established Australian Academy of Art, with its largely conservative outlook. This led to the biggest controversy in the history of the prize, in which two artists, Joseph Wolinski, who I mentioned before as the all-time record holder in the Archibald, and Mary Edwell-Burke, took the Gallery trustees to court after they awarded the 1943 Archibald Prize to Dobell for his portrait of Smith. While I do not include Dobell's winning work, which was all but destroyed in a file, the narrative of this most famous of Archibald controversies is played out through another of Dobell's 1943 Archibald portraits. His portrayal of the Glaswegian tea maker, Joe Westcott, known as the Billy Boy, and Joe Joshua Smith's portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore, which was the runner-up that year. Dobell and Smith's friendship was irrevocably damaged by the court case that followed the awarding of the 1943 portrait prize to Dobell. It challenged the painting's legitimacy as a portrait, as many felt it was closer to caricature. Art critics, gallery directors, artists, even medical experts, were called on for opinion, and Smith's appearance was put under intense and humiliating scrutiny. But how do we unlock the secrets of our psyche? As a society, the approach has shifted over the last hundred years. In the early 20th century, psychoanalysis was suggested as a way to deal with the subconscious, our oppressed desires, or conflicted feelings. The 1960s counterculture movement advocated psychotropic drugs as a means of exerting creating impulses, while today there is increased emphasis on identifying and supporting mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, and trauma. In this triple portrait by Dora Toovey, her subject, soprano Janet le Brun Brown, known on stage as Barbara Russell, mourns the loss of her recently deceased husband, composer Horace Keats, and their close friend, the poet Christopher Brennan, who had died over a decade earlier. Toovey's empathy is elucidated through her subject's melancholic visage and satinine backdrop. The heart and mind have long fascinated artists. In their lives and in their work, artists negotiate the myriad aspects of the human experience, the complexities of our personal relationships, and the sometimes veiled feelings, hope, doubt, despair, joy that accompany them. This portrait of an unnamed Australian serviceman by Ben Quilty, painted shortly after his tour of Afghanistan in 2011 as an official war artist, focuses squarely on the long-term physical and emotional consequences of his subject's experience. Through Quilty's potent rendering of flesh, bodies stripped of the protective shell of uniform and body armour, the artist reveals his sitter's inherent frailty. The potential of portraiture to illuminate the inner workings of their subjects and themselves has led artists to experiment with the limits of expression as they explore what lies beneath. One of my favourite sections of the exhibition is the theme titled 'In Polite Conversation'. Customary codes of behaviour have, in more genteel times, dictated that certain topics should never enter 'polite' conversation. With Archibald artists, however, nothing is off limits. Social taboos are tackled head-on without fear of censorship or reproach. Universal suffrage, the environment and the rights of First Nations people are just some of the issues that artists have broached in the past century. This beautifully painted portrait of leading feminist and social justice crusader, Jessie Street, is by Reginald Gerald Nathan, one of the prize's most prolific artists, who portrayed many of Australia's pioneering women. It is also from the National Portrait Gallery's collection. Politics and religion are two of the most influential factors on human existence and our future. Over the decades, Archibalded artists have cast their loyalties and sentiments on their canvases and seldom shy away from portraying those whose ideas may be polarising. Spiritual figures, politicians of all persuasions and those individuals whose beliefs and endeavours have impacted the way our society has grown and prospered. These are some of the Archibalded sitters who have led the debate into some of the greatest challenges of our time. Finally, the exhibition concludes with the art world. Art critics, gallerists, curators, museum directors, collectors and patrons have been frequent subjects of Archibald portraits since 1921. The movers and shakers of the art world have also played a seminal role in the success of the prize over the past hundred years. Their support of portraiture through the decades, when many questioned the relevancy of the genre, has been instrumental in its survival. The enduring friendships between Archibalded artists and those who support their creative endeavours are made tangible through many of these works. The Archibald's most prevalent subject, aside from self-portraits, is gallerist Ray Hughes, who appeared 14 times from 1974 until his death in 2017. Here we see the artist Ian Smith's 2003 Archibald portrait of Hughes in this quasi-Cubist portrayal of his larger-than-life subject, and acknowledging leading Parisian gallerist Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, early supporters of Cezanne, Picasso, and whom Hughes greatly admired. Smith said of his subject, whose portrayal by him was seen eight times in the Archibald prize between 1977 and 2003, "I think Ray, too, is always trying to change things, to reinvent himself and look for the new in art." Other portraits record these champions of art, who fostered and promoted the skills and talents of artists in both Australia and Ayrtair Royal New Zealand, while acknowledging the achievements of Australia's most famous and enduring portrait award as it celebrates its centenary.
