Wayne Tunnicliffe, head of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW, has a sense of humour. The main entrance to this year’s Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prize exhibition features a giant black and white photograph of a student demonstration from 1953. At the time the gallery trustees, who are named in Archibald’s will as the judges of the prize, were actively hostile to any idea of modern art. Their taste was so predicable that the gallery’s director, Hal Missingham, would write the telegram congratulating the winner before the voting.
By the 1970s, when I was working at the gallery, trustees were less likely to vote for their mates. But there was a deep cultural disconnect between the aesthetic taste of the gallery’s professional curators, the arts community and the media, who lived in hope of a controversy such as the 1944 William Dobell court case.
