Behind Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize sits more than a century of data that paints a picture of its own. That is, of a changing nation.
The Archibald can also be called a social history prize, says historian Joanna Mendelssohn.
“What you’ve got every year is a snapshot of society, of what makes Australia interesting,” she says.
Mendelssohn is a historian working on the Australian Cultural Data Engine, which has a dataset of the more than 6,000 artworks hung in the prize’s history.
But today’s Archibald reflects a very different world than the one it was conceived in. Staid portraits of politicians and lawyers have become colourful renditions of cultural icons. Female subjects are no longer only wives or mothers of famous men. There are more female artists too, but men have still won a disproportionate number of times.
Here is what 6,000 paintings can tell us about how Australia – and the Archibald prize itself – have changed.
The biggest winners – and the artist who lost more than 100 times
In the beginning artists could submit an unlimited number of paintings every year: this meant artists like WB McInnes, who won the Archibald seven times, had 66 paintings hung over 17 years.
But the grand prize goes to Joseph Wolinski, who had more than 100 paintings entered and hung between 1921 and 1951. He never won.
With nine pieces, Vincent Sacco had the most artworks hung in one year. This was in 1945, the last year artists were able to enter so many works. He also never won.
“We haven’t been able to find many of Wolinksi’s works, so it is difficult to assess why they may not have won,” says Natalie Wilson, curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which hosts the prize each year, and curator of the Archie 100 exhibition.
Many pieces submitted to the Archibald have been lost to time. The gallery doesn’t buy or acquire Archibald artworks, and they only started photographing works 20 years ago.
There are no images at all for 4,000 works, and there are still some question marks hovering over the 2,000 remaining.
“There are some works we will just never know,” Wilson says. “Some works, we don’t even know what they look like. Lots of works are simply called portrait, and we don’t know who the portrait is of.”
Just over 60 people have won an Archibald prize.
Most multiple winners were active early on, before artists were limited to two entries a year. This includes William Dargie, who won a record eight Archibald prizes, and inaugural winner McInnes, who won seven times.
Judy Cassab and Del Kathryn Barton have also won two prizes each – the most by any woman.
The rules were changed again in the early 2000s to allow only one work a year.
McInnes won the Archibald prize the first year he entered, but some famous artists entered dozens of times before receiving that honour – if at all. For example, Dargie had nine portraits hung before winning the Archibald.
Three-time winner William Dobell’s 1943 portrait of fellow artist Joshua Smith was famously controversial: his win was challenged in court by a group of artists on the basis the work was a distorted caricature, not a portrait.
“The 1940s was a very conservative Australia,” Wilson says. “There was a battle in Australian art circles between more academic artists and the contemporary artists looking towards European surrealism, cubism, modernism.”
The court ruled in Dobell’s favour, and he got to keep his prize – but the painting seemed to be cursed with bad luck. Dobell suffered a breakdown, losing feeling in his left side from stress. The court process destroyed the artists’ friendship. And in 1958, the painting was destroyed in a fire.
How to win an Archibald – and how the paintings have changed
Earlier on, many of the winning portraits were of politicians and government officials. Mendelssohn says this is likely because most were officially commissioned and only later submitted to the competition.
But the most common subject of winning portraits are art world figures: other artists and art dealers, as well as self portraits.
Twenty-four winners have been portraits of other artists, while 13 were self portraits.
The first winning self portrait was by Henry Hanke in 1934. Unemployed, Hanke made his own oil paint, got a scrap of canvas, and painted himself because he couldn’t afford a model, ripped a frame off another work, and won.
“It was criticised at the time because he wasn’t a well-known painter,” Wilson says.
The colours used in Archibald portraits have changed significantly over time. Earlier portraits were dominated by blacks, browns and other dark values – up to 70% of the portrait surface in the first couple of decades.
This may be because, as Mendelssohn notes, many of the earlier portraits were painted in the style of 19th-century European art. “So a serious portrait had to have a brown background,” she says.
It wasn’t until 1966 that John Molvig’s portrait of fellow artist Charlie Blackman “suddenly introduced that pop of colour,” Wilson says. “Then we got a procession of works through the 1970s with very vivid colour that is non-naturalistic.”
Many recent paintings have continued this trend. When Cherry Hood won the 2002 prize with a watercolour painting of pianist Simon Tedeschi, it was almost entirely light skin tones over a white background.
The actual size of the works has also changed with time. In the first decade, miniatures – under 10cm – were the flavour of the day, Wilson says.
Portraits slowly increased in size until the 1970s, when American pop-art influenced many “big head” entrants and hyper-real portraits. The Archibald introduced a size limit rule in response. “We just couldn’t get them into the galleries,” Wilson says.
A poor picture of gender equality
The Archibald’s gender record is improving, but from a very poor start.
Roughly 70% of portraits hung in the Archibald have been submitted by male artists. In the last couple of decades, the proportion of female artists has been increasing. In 2021, the Archibald hit gender parity among finalists for the first time.
Given these numbers, men have also won a disproportionate number of times: 87 of the 99 Archibald prizes, 21 of the 31 packing room prizes and 26 of the 32 people’s choice awards.
It took until 1938 for Nora Heysen to become the first woman to win the prize. At 28 years old, she also became the youngest winner of the prize.
“There was bitterness coming from male artists like Max Meldrum, who wrote articles in the papers about her,” Wilson says. “He said it is not appropriate for women to be artists.”
You can see more Archibald data, and expert analysis, in the Australian Cultural Data Engine’s notebooks.
