Controversy Over Aust. Art Prizes

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31585, 24 January 1968, Page 14

Controversy Over Aust. Art Prizes

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) SYDNEY, Jan. 23. The Sydney art world has been plunged into bitter controversy by the naming of this year’s winners of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes, Australia’s leading annual art awards. The winning paintings have been blasted by some critics who have questioned whether the prizes should continue in their existing form. After the prize-winning works and the works that they beat were displayed at the Art Gallery of New South "Zales this week, one critic called them “a travesty of contemporary art.” The critic, G. R. Lansell, wrote in the “Sunday Telegraph”: “It is a sad commentary on the state of Australian art and its public reception when the art event of the year is these moribund, grotesque exhibitions. “Why on earth do the trustees of the gallery persist with these meaningless charades? Are they living in the twentieth century? Do they know what contemporary art is all about? Or are they shirkers and benchwarmers, like most trustees?” Portrait Award A Sydney artist, Judy Cassab, who won the main award, the $l5OO Archibald Prize for portraiture, came off best in the critics’ lashing. Miss Cassab’s portrait of a fellow artist, Margo Lewers, was described as “tough and aggressive” and most critics agreed that it was the best of the 41 entries finally selected for hanging. Patrick McCaughey, art critic of the Melbourne “Age,” said many of the other exhibitors seemed “forced and unsure of themselves as portraists,” while

Lansell said the exhibition | went a long way towards I proving that portraiture was a dead art. “Clumsy Humour” The other winners did not escape so lightly, with Cec Burns, a 33-year-old bank security clerk and an “unknown” artist coming under heavy attack for his winning entry in the $5OO Sulman Prize for genre painting. Burns’s work, “Exercise in Variegation,” comprises three moulded cardboard cones, projecting from the canvas and painted in op-art whirls, stripes and checks. It is an “utterly clumsy and tedious attempt at visual humour,” according to McCaughey, while Lansell said it was “neither particularly well done nor particularly imaginative,” The $4OO Wynne Prize for an Australian landscape went for the fourth time to 69-year-old Salt Herman. His winning entry depicted a rusty, crumbling, corrugated iron shack at Ravenswood, a tiny north Queensland gold mining settlement. “Herman’s view of landscape is identical to a thousand week-end painters,” said McCaughey. “Prettify the subject at all costs.” He added: “If the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales continue to make such decisions and to choose light-weight charmers, the closely guarded secret that they are the worst people in the world to be judging an art prize might become a public fact.” Lansell ended his review of the “art event of the year”: “Don’t waste your time going to any of the exhibitions. They are, predictably, great disappointments. Stay at home and watch ‘Peyton Place.’ It will be a much more interesting and rewarding experience.”