The Prize by Kim Anderson
About the author
Kim E Anderson grew up in Sydney and has worked for a variety of book publishers and media organisations. She set up a new media division for HarperCollins in New York before returning to Australia where she joined PBL Online to set up Australia’s number one online portal ninemsn.com.au. She joined the Nine Television Network followed by Southern Star Entertainment. In 2009 she founded a social media site for readers based in New York. An avid reader, she now lives in Sydney and is also a non-executive director of a number of ASX listed companies and a director of the Sax Institute.
Review
Were artists Bill Dobell and Joshua Smith lovers? This novel says yes. Kerryn Goldsworthy, May 12, 2023. The Sydney Morning Herald
In 1943, the much-coveted Archibald Prize for portraiture was won by William Dobell for his portrait of his friend and fellow-painter Joshua Smith, whose own portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore was the runner-up that year. Such a competition and result might have put a little strain on any friendship all by itself, but the winner caused the same kind of reverberating ruckus in Australia’s art world as the Ern Malley hoax was to do in the literary world the following year.
Dobell’s portrait of Smith is a startling and dramatic sight. Smith was a slight, retiring, diffident figure with a core of stubbornness and an oddly asymmetrical face. Dobell’s portrait of him is as much about his subject’s character as it is about his appearance, and the result is the same sort of evocative exaggeration as the original Hablot Browne illustrations of Dickens’ novels. Two other disgruntled entrants took Dobell and the Art Gallery of NSW to court, arguing that the painting was not a portrait but a caricature.
Dobell and Smith were both gay and were close friends, and it has been speculated in recent years that they were lovers, which in 1943 would have been illegal and have carried a heavy burden of stigma and shame. But after the Archibald court case, the relationship, whatever it was, was over.
Smith had been humiliated in court by being made to stand next to the portrait and have his appearance discussed – in overwhelmingly negative terms – as part of the argument over what degree of realism constituted a portrait.
Dobell reacted so badly to the stress of the criticism and the court case that he was physically debilitated, had what’s generally described as a “nervous breakdown”, retreated to his little house in Wangi on Lake Macquarie, and didn’t paint again for several years. Both eventually recovered, but the relationship did not.
I am breaking the reviewer’s rule of not writing a plot summary of a novel because these are all things that really happened, and that fact goes straight to the question of what fiction is and is not.
The current fashion for writing novels “about” or “based on” real characters and events is widespread but no less fraught for that, with moral problems of accuracy and authenticity vying and sometimes clashing with technical problems of structure and characterisation, and in some cases with further problems of outright misrepresentation.
In this case, the idea of fictional invention about the private and indeed illegal sex lives of real people does not sit well. Having done it, however, Anderson treats it with a very contemporary kind of delicacy, in the sense that she presents it as a normal, everyday variation on the theme of love and barely dwells on it at all except for the occasional reference to the themes of rivalry and betrayal.
There are no actual sex scenes, awful or otherwise. And in this fictional version of the story, making such a relationship part of the plot adds another layer of emotional complexity and poignancy to the historical facts and events.
But in this curate’s-egg of a book there are other things that do not work at all. This is Anderson’s first novel and she makes a number of rookie mistakes, mostly with dialogue. All the characters talk exactly the same way as all the other characters; their conversation sounds wooden and unnatural, and often the things they say are at odds with what we are being asked to believe about their natures and their motivations.
Two of the female characters lean further towards caricature than Dobell’s painting ever did: Smith’s mother, Louisa, is presented as the petulant, passive-aggressive, smothering mother of a repressed gay son, while the painter Mary Edwards, one of the plaintiffs in the court case, is drawn as a preening and pretentious eater of sour grapes and a bad artist to boot.
In both cases, the character assessment may well be accurate, but in the fictional version they are given no excuses and no redeeming features, and that sits oddly with the emotionally complex and nuanced nature of the main story, as well as with the portrait of Dobell’s intelligent and sympathetic sister.
In spite of its drawbacks, this novel is an engaging read. The original story of the 1943 Archibald Prize is emotionally, intellectually and ideologically intriguing, and it is an important chapter in Australian cultural history.