The painter William Dobell, a tall man with a pencil moustache, spent early 1943 painting his fellow artist Joshua Smith. He submitted the finished product to the Archibald Prize. Before starting, Dobell had warned Smith that “you may not like it” and that “an element of distortion makes the portrait more like the subject.” Dobell’s gave Smith a very pronounced neck, beady eyes and a gaunt, hunched-over appearance. Dr Vivian Benjafield would later declare on the stand that the image made Smith look like a corpse.
Mary Edwards and Joe Wolinski, themselves prolific artists, sued the Art Gallery of NSW’s trustees for awarding the Dobell portrait the Archibald prize. The Archibald must be awarded to the “best portrait.” As they maintained that Dobell’s painting was a caricature, and not art, they said it ought not have won as it was not a portrait.
James MacDonald, former gallery director, had written that it was “the epitome of ugliness, malformation and gruesome taste.” MacDonald said in court that Smith appeared as if he had been beaten “with a piece of lead pipe.” MacDonald declared that looking at the painting would make viewers “bound by duty to ring the ambulance.”
Various art critics and painters were called as witnesses, and, as barrister Garfield Barwick raised a patrician eyebrow on Edwards’ and Wolinski’s behalf, the case seemed to change profoundly from a simple equity matter to a more philosophical debate on the nature of art, and the role of society in deciding what is art. Since the terms of the prize demanded that submissions were ‘portraits,’ much of the legal arguments centred around the two competing definitions of portraiture. Those against Dobell argued that portraiture was bound by “limits of exaggeration” where a picture that was no longer a clear representation of the sitter would not be a portrait. To Barwick, Edwards and Wilenski Dobell’s painting could not be a portrait as it was not “objective.”
After more advocacy, the court ruled in Dobell’s favour, finding that “the picture in question is a portrait.” The fact that a matter of artistic debate reached a courtroom at all bordered on farce. If one says that art is a subjective question of taste, it follows that to have the Law make an objective ruling on such a subjective question seems to be at odds with the twin currents of interpretation and artistic intention that pulse through the creation and display of art.
The aftermath is the most profoundly sad part of the story. William Dobell, by this point having suffered a total nervous breakdown, left Sydney for the country. The names of Edwards and Wilenski would forever be associated with the case, and not with their artistic talents. Joshua Smith, the unfortunate catalyst for the debate, would say in 1995 that the affair was “a curse, a phantom that haunts me. It has torn at me every day of my life.”
Dobell would later recover, and win the Archibald outright. Despite this vindication, it remains that I can’t help but think of the painful irony of his career: that the work of an obviously talented and well-regarded painter was placed under the critical microscope that only a court can produce. In a way, the fact Dobell’s painting ever reached a courtroom offers an illustration of Australia’s relationship with art: art is not something to simply be enjoyed or discussed. Instead, it exists as a kind of public currency, for debate amongst the sober-suited bourgeois of Sydney to pick apart, in the hopes they can extricate some pithy moral didacticism from it.
In looking at Dobell’s case, one finds a prime example of one of Australian culture’s stranger streaks: a streak of conformity. In the insistence that Edwards and Wolinski placed on pulling apart Dobell’s otherwise unremarkable painting, we see a culture frantically insecure about itself, and needing to define itself within the rigid parameters of history and convention. Indeed, Dobell himself said under cross-examination that he painted in the “classic tradition,” and took pains to avoid aligning himself with modernism. In this irony, I think we strike really at the perverse heart of the matter: Dobell really managed to conform his originality, insofar as he had to defend himself against accusations of caricature.
As he said in court : “who’s to judge what’s art and what isn’t?”
