The Sydney Modern Project, a massive extension to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, opened in December 2022 at a cost of $344 million, with $244 million of this coming from the NSW government (i.e. NSW taxpayers).
Much of the remaining funding came from private entities, and if you scan the list of the major donors to the project, available on the gallery’s website, you will likely be unsurprised by the number with Jewish surnames. But while happy to take money from the Jewish community, it seems the gallery is disinclined to acknowledge, let alone celebrate, that community’s high achievers—no matter how brilliantly portrayed.
For more than a century, the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales have judged the Archibald Prize, a portraiture prize considered the most prestigious in Australia. It is certainly our most storied art prize, famous for controversies such as the debate in 1943 over whether William Dobell’s winning portrait of fellow artist Joshua Smith constituted art or merely caricature. More recently, the People’s Choice Award and the Packing Room Prize, awarded by the workers who hang the pictures, have added further interest to the judging process. It is also one of our richest art prizes, with the winner taking home $100,000.
But to be a part of all this excitement, portraits must first be accepted for consideration. The decision by the trustees to exclude Johannes Leak’s portrait of Alex Ryvchin from this year’s competition calls into serious question both the integrity and credibility of the prize.
Arguing that the portrait, if accepted by the trustees, would have taken its place among the 10 or so best pictures, art historian and critic Christopher Allen wrote in The Australian of 2 May: “…alas, Johannes Leak is not a favourite artist of the establishment, nor are his subjects acceptable to them.
A few years ago his portrait of Jacinta Price was rejected from the Archibald because, although Aboriginal and a woman, she was the wrong kind of Aboriginal woman …
There is little doubt that the portrait of Alex Ryvchin, a Jewish community leader, was similarly excluded either because of anti-Semitism or the fear of anti-Semitic reaction to the hanging of the picture.”
Given the gallery’s failure to justify its decision on artistic grounds, Allen is right to ask if this is racism or just good old-fashioned gutlessness.
Sadly, the artist and his subject never stood a chance. Johannes Leak is famously “incorrect” according to the cultural enforcers (witness his great friendship with the IPA) and—like his late, sainted dad Bill—unafraid to poke the woke.
And his subject? Alex Ryvchin fled anti-Semitic persecution in the Soviet Union, arriving with his family in Australia at the age of four. He gained entry to Sydney Boys’ High, a selective school which takes only the city’s brightest young men (incidentally, Johannes Leak also went there). Ryvchin would go on to become an author and respected community leader. But apparently, in the eyes of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he is beyond the Pale.
