The National Portrait Gallery is being urged to investigate a painting that was a finalist in the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize and won the Art Handlers' Award of that year because of its similarity to a work by the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The issue has been raised now because the painting under question is by a NSW artist, Jane Allan, who this week has been accused of winning a Queensland art award in 2025 with a "blatant copy" of another artist's work.
The ABC reported that it had only just come to light that Ms Allan won The Doyles Landscape Art Award last in 2025 with an imitation of a 2011 Nicholas Harding painting.
The Gold Coast-based art prize has acknowledged that Allan's winning work from last year was an "imitation" of Harding's painting while at least one art expert, according to the ABC, has described it as a "blatant copy".
Now, artists are calling for the National Portrait Gallery to investigate Allan's work Weight of the Minds Periapt 2021 which was a finalist in the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize and which won the Art Handlers' Award of that year.
An artist, who contacted The Canberra Times, said the work was "very much a copy" of Jean-Michel Basquiat's 1982 work Untitled (Two Heads on Gold), with the main figure from Allan's work almost identical to the figure at the right of the Basquiat work.
The Canberra Times reported in 2022 that Allan said her painting was a "portrait of her carer Warren".
In 2022, the Portrait Gallery announced on its Instagram page that Jane Allan's work had won the inaugural Art Handlers' Award.
On Tuesday night, another artist went back to that 2022 post and added the comment: "This needs to be reported also", saying she had sent a message to the gallery and "Hopefully they act on it".
Another person commented: "Did someone mention Basquiat?" and "That right hand side is totally lifted".
When the Art Handlers' Award was announced in 2022, the Portrait Gallery posted a video, in which its collection manager and collection administrator discussed why they had chosen Jane Allan's work as the winning piece. And they acknowledged the painting referred to other artists.
"You know, we both talked about the fact it kind of has elements of, like, the American artist Basquiat and also the Australian artist Imants Tillers, and that kind of semi-industrial kind of colour palette and tonality. And it was just something that, you know, really captured us," one of them said.
The gallery staff believed then they had made "absolutely the right decision", based firstly on the "aesthetics" of the painting and then by reading Allan's artist's statement in which she disclosed she had a spinal injury as the result of a truck accident and the painting was a tribute to her 75-year-old carer Warren.
But the painting has now angered some in the local artist community.
The artist who contacted The Canberra Times said copying another person's painting or any other work was "fraud".
"Where do artists draw the line between influence or copying?" she said.
"I think it's okay to copy when an artist is learning, but never to enter direct copies into competitions.
"I also don't think it's the competition or judges' fault. They can't keep track of all artworks produced in the last 20 to 100 years.
"But it's not good for the art world. It upsets me."
Allan received $2000 for her Art Handlers' Award. As far as the $20,000 she received for the Doyles art prize, the ABC reported that "Ms Allan and lawyers were discussing whether it was possible to recover the prize money".
A spokesperson for the gallery said: "The gallery will not be providing a comment on this".
