Pick this year’s model and the Adam Pynacker 1660 version. One is an officially sanctioned Australian landscape.
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The sound of embarrassment and protesting too much
Do you know the sound of embarrassment? It’s the soundtrack to this year’s art controversy. It accompanies the current comedy of the Wynne prize, which is awarded annually for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists completed during the 12 months preceding the [closing] date …”
It sounds like this:
The AGNSW’s director, Edmund Capon: “When the picture came up … they [the judges] all thought: ‘What a wonderful painting – it looks like a late 17th-century Dutch landscape.’ And that was my first instinct. So what?”
And in the sound of the phrase “not sort of”, as in:
”There are some key differences there,” artist Sam Leach said. ”Quite clearly I’m quoting that original work … I’m not sort of ashamed or worried about it.”
It’s, er, hard to say … and hard to know:
Had the judges known how closely the painting reassembled Pynacker’s work – held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – would they have given Leach the prize?
”This is always hard to say,” she [artist and prize judge, Lindy Lee] said, adding that having so many judges made it hard to know.
Even not when it comes down to the final:
She went on: “‘We have to view 1800 paintings. We are not going to discuss the historical traditions and the lineage of each painting, and even not when it comes down to the final two or three.”
A very interesting question about originality and uniqueness … whatever:
The artist: “Anything you do in the Archibald and Wynne, somebody’s going to call it embarrassing for you. And so OK, fine, whatever. This is not embarrassing … I think it’s a very interesting question about originality and uniqueness and what makes something authentic.”
The myth, the wonder, the beauty:
Another judge, artist John Beard, defended Leach’s award with vigour, despite not sighting the original. “What matters is when I looked at it I felt the myth, the wonder, the beauty,” he said.
Oh, only a problem in an academic context (the P word, and more than a coincidence):
Art academics said if Leach submitted his work for academic assessment without attribution, he would be accused of plagiarism. Ted Snell, the chair of the visual arts board of the Australia Council and The Australian’s Perth visual arts critic, said the painting would have posed difficulties in an academic context.
“Well there is more than a coincidence here, and without the tell-tale Dutch boatmen and the suckling mother and a few bony cows, it would be hard to tell the works apart,” Professor Snell said. “In an academic environment, this form of citation would be acceptable if fully acknowledged, but without referencing the original, it runs very close to breaching ethical practice.”
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So next year it will be fine to enter these paintings. Go for it folks:
These are called “Mentone Holiday,” “Balcony 3″, “Fire’s Out” and “Post-Pioneer.” They “reference” other landscapes – Australian ones – with, oh, many detail differences not to mention scale etc etc. The originals being referenced are below.
Let’s keep in mind what gallery director Mr Capon said: ”It’s not a copy. There’s vast differences in detail, apart from the fact that the scale is somewhat different.”
And so, basically: As Sydney Morning Herald art critic, John McDonald – who said Leech’s* painting was “basically a copy” of Pynacker’s canvas with minor changes – pointed out: now, “anyone can enter something which can win which is basically a copy of another person’s painting, or indeed is not even an Australian subject.”
(*sic: Fairfax‘s hilarious Freudian spelling slip of Leach’s name.)
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MENTONE HOLIDAY
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BALCONY 3
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FIRE’S OUT
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POST-PIONEER
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Mere references:
Charles Conder’s A Holiday at Mentone; Brett Whileteley’s The Balcony 2; Arthur Streeton’s Fire’s On; Frederick McCubbin’s The Pioneers.
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My tuppence:
Let me say that I like Mr Leach’s Proposal for a Lansdscaped Cosmos quite a lot. His painting style – smooth, often photographically seamless – has a perfectionism that can be very appealing. I thought so when I first saw a reproduction of his Wynner online.
But in light of the Wynne requirements and seeing the Pynacker original, I think that the judges should receive a fail in art history, and a fail in retrospective judgement, and a fail in humility. I still like the painting, but clearly it shouldn’t retain the prize.
A great part of a painting’s work is in composition, conception, and yes, originality. There are some very fine copies of famous works by other famous artists, but they are for the sake of learning from a master, and do not pretend to be anything else. Many of the arguments above sound tinny to me – it sets off the old bullshit meter. The naked emperors are saving face.
There are dirty words no one can bear to bring up. As an architect friend of mine remarks, We say edit, we don’t say plagiarize.
So today, children, we say reference, we don’t say r*p-*ff.
Amusing side note:
In an AGNSW video interview between Sam Leach and Edmund Capon, Capon introduces the artist thus:
“Sam, you have well and truly inscribed yourself into the anals of Australian art history.” Indeed.
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UPDATE: 28 April 2010
In a board meeting the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW have decided that Sam Leach should keep his prize. Director Edmund Capon said, “‘It wasn’t taken lightly. I don’t think we have ever spent an hour at a board meeting discussing a topic in this way.”
In a written statement, the trustees defended their decision, saying that at the time of judging they noted that Leach’s painting had ”the light and air of a Dutch 17th-century painting”, but they also ”recognised and appreciated its quality and its mysterious implications of the natural world”.
The trustees concluded that ”what might constitute an Australian landscape was a matter of interpretation and had changed enormously since the Wynne Prize was first awarded in 1897.”
The artist said: ”I made this painting with total sincerity and a great deal of thought. I believed it makes an interesting contribution to the history and discourse of Australian landscape painting.”
17 Comments
Yeah, just like Olympic athletes found cheating after the event have to hand back their medals, I think Sam Leach should hand back his prize. It is clearly a poor imitation of an original despite detail changes – this is the sort of painting one would expect to commission in Asia from the many copyist workshops that create these sorts of fakes …
I can understand there being a frustration with the trustees and their choice of winners – sounds like the trustees aren’t terribly educated in art history – but I feel also that the artist is getting off way too lightly. According to John McDonald the artist isn’t necessarily to blame for such a faux pas but I beg to differ. How can a professional artist make such a mistake? It’s shocking and seriously bursts the bubble of Leach’s artistic depth and integrity.
I agree with the above sentiments that the prize should be withdrawn from that Leech. It simply doesn’t wash down with me this pathetic diatribe from the artist and judges who are defending the legitimacy of appropriation in art. You must, as Ted Snell mentions, ‘acknowledge the original’ which can make appropriation intelligent and historically informed!. The most embarrassing aspect of all this is that the judges cant even tell the difference between a Northern European and Australian Landscape! It seems that Leech and the Judges are clamoring to defend themselves having been caught off guard for their misinformed and laughable position. As for Leech we now know all his work is based on cropped examples of talented European artists work (Im surprised it took this long for people to notice!). The public it seems are not as stupid as the art establishment are as they seem to have their head up the ‘anals’ of Leech’s gimmickry, or is it the other way around? Perhaps Capon would like Leech to be firmly established in his own anal passage. As for the rest of us Australians we don’t want this Leech up our ‘anals’! God Forbid, it always seems that mediocrity reigns in the art world and popular culture. Hopefully this will expose Leech, who after all lets face it, is merely a graphic designer!
Yes, these painting look very similar. They are meant to, and that is the point.
But, by removing the historical pastoral references of the people, boat and animals and replacing them with grids of LED’s and stars, then dramatically reducing the scale and glossing it in epoxy resin Sam has taken the 17th painting, that is a Dutch painters ideal of an Italian (and mythical) landscape idealising the past and turned into a painting of a hyper real landscape looking into our technological future. He deliberately chose this painting to do this with. He has not just copied an old master and tried to palm it off as his own. With his exceptional talent and passion for this period of art history he has deliberately and painstakingly appropriated the older work to create a new work that no longer romanticises the past, but portrays, and allows, an optimistic ideal of natural beauty in the future. Artist have been doing this sort of stuff for centuries. It is a beautiful work worthy of the prize, and People need to get a grip, and stop letting the media dictate how they should look at this. Yes it is very similar but the differences are what it is about and why it is a new original work.
What a bunch of incompetent loons! Leach has copied and duped the so-called “judges”. What flagrant dishonor and shenanigans! The entry should be disqualified and the painter and judges should be roundly criticized for their obsequious and disgustingly disingenuous behavior. What do you take us for? Certainly not the idiots you’ve made yourselves out to be!
None of Shakespeare’s plots were original. Does that diminish the value of his art? Leach’s painting is an original and like all art hasn’t been produced in a vacuum.
That being said this kind of controversy is to the art world what poor referring is to sport; it stokes passion and anger and without it things would be much more boring and uninteresting.
All this hoo-ha about Leach’s painting is garbage. Anyone saying that he should hand back his prize has *no* understanding of art. The argument that it is not an Australian landscape is a moot point because there is no definite examples of flora in the artwork which are not found in Australia. Many newspapers are commenting that it is a Dutch landscape (not a landscape painting by a Dutch artist) – which merely illustraes their lack of art knowledge and fact-checking failure. The title of Pynacker’s painting is “Boatmen Moored on the Shore of an ITALIAN Lake”.
If the purpose was to pay homage to Pynacker’s work then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Now thousands of people know of his work where they would have otherwise never heard of him. Who am I to comment on this? Well, as a designer and Art University graduate, I am probably much more qualified to comment than many of the fools putting in their two cents on this issue.
I agree with Frieze.
Bit I also agree with Christopher Allen in The Australian, who suggested Leach should have added ‘after Pynacker’ to his title.
Then he could truly say he hasn’t “made any secret of where that painting came from”.
Frankly, any picture with the power to remove Edmond Capon from his comfy sinecure at the AGNSW, deserves to be placed in the National Gallery in Canberra and kept on permanent display.
Meanwhile….If someone can point me to where that landscape is in Oz.
I wouldn’t mind paying the place a visit and bunging a prawn on the barbie.
Proposal:
1. All the judges for this year’s Wynne should resign.
2. Leach should be disqualified for life to enter any national prizes in Australia if he refuses to hand back the money; perhaps he should go to Holland to win prizes.
3. No more bullshit.
Strongly agree with lao lao zi.
This is really a scandal in Australian art history….
Thank-you Paddy for writing such an intelligent but stinging comment.I thoroughly agree with you.
Indeed Capon has been in the job far too long.
The AGNSW reeks of a stale and fetid atmosphere and the selection of the current Wynne prizewinner is evidence of this toxic state.
A Detox of the AGNSW is needed.
Maybe we should demand of a landscape (as we do of a portrait in the Archibald) that there be proof that the subject has ‘sat’ for the painter.
Well, everyone has a view! Very good.
Ah, the foolish artist who would flout the rules to grasp the prize. The singular problem with Sam Leach’s winning entry is that he was making a picture about art, rather than a painting of a landscape – which, alas for Leach, is what the Wynne requires.
Perhaps it is more useful if we address the proposition of the landscape: what does a landscape painting do; what is it about? What does a painting of a landscape illuminate?
David Hockney would say that part of the work of a landscape painting is to place you, the viewer, in the picture: “The painting itself is addressing you … You can feel it. And that’s the point: out there in the world but here as well, space is a feeling.”
Implicit in those observations is that the artist has to have been in the landscape in order to transmit those feelings, to manifest the understanding in the marks that become the painting.
Or another way of putting it: unless you are painting from the landscape, then you cannot be painting a landscape.
To take off from I Britain’s remark above, if you are only painting from a photograph of a person, then you are not making a portrait of the person – you are making a copy of a photograph of the person. Which is why Warhol’s pictures were not portraits of the subjects – Jackie O, Mao, Elvis et al; there his one subject was Fame.
If you want to see the effect of such iteration, click here for Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, and several copies of that famous painting. To see the copies together is to recognise that they are not portraits of More, but only pictures of a picture of a man of power.
That explains is why we have not seen a portrait of Jesus – there has never been a picture we know to have been a direct experience of the man. Every picture we have of Jesus is a portrait of an idea: the artist’s, or the church’s idea of the son of God.
Seeing is believing. A picture is also an argument, a case, a persuasion. One needs original knowledge to make an original case. A copy provides only commentary.
PS: I’m not saying you can’t do a portrait from a photograph – but you do need some familiarity with your subject. If you make a picture with your only source, your only information, being another picture, then you have a problem.