Published: 3 June 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Portraits of Deborah Conway, John Safran and Ella Simons are among those selected for this year's Archibald Portrait Exhibition
Media attention at last month’s Archibald Prize announcement at the Art Gallery of NSW naturally focused on Blak Douglas and his portrait of fellow Indigenous artist Karla Dickens which won the $100,000 first prize.
Douglas became just the second Indigenous artist (after Vincent Namatjira in 2020) to be awarded Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize.
The Archibald, which is now more than a century old, was founded, ironically, by JF Archibald, the racist publisher of The Bulletin magazine which, after 130 years of publication, was closed down in 2008.
Nineteen other Indigenous artists submitted Archibald entries this year, while 27 painters of Indigenous heritage made the finals of the Archibald and its sister prizes: the Wynne (landscape) and the Sulman (genre).
Less noticed was the success of Jewish artists and/or subjects. Three of the people whose portraits hang in the 2022 Archibald exhibition are Jewish.
Singer-songwriter and former model Deborah Conway sat for hours on a milk crate for Lewis Miller (whose portrait of artist Allan Mitelman won the Archibald in 1998).
Filmmaker, author and satirist John Safran - a frequent Archibald subject - was depicted as both David and Goliath by Jewish newcomer to the competition, Avraham Vofsi.
Teenage climate activist Ella Simons, who has appeared at various global events alongside Greta Thunberg, posed for another Jewish artist, Yvette Coppersmith, a six-time finalist and winner of the Archibald in 2018 with a self-portrait.
“The surname on my birth certificate is spelt Koperszmidt,” she says, adding that she and Simons attended the same primary school in Melbourne, Sholem Aleichem College, “though several years apart!”
Of the three portraits, only Vofsi’s references Jewish culture. He asked Safran to be his subject because the filmmaker was one of the few obviously Jewish personalities on TV in Vofsi’s youth.
The unusual double portrait was a collaboration. After the artist insisted his painting must reference the Tanakh, the pair chose the story of David and Goliath with Safran suggesting he be portrayed as both victor and vanquished.
“When I head out on a book or doco adventure, I’m charged with taking down a giant - a cigarette company or a media mogul,” Safran says. “But I always end up the fool, just taking down myself. So why not have me gripping the beheaded head of me?”
Vofsi, unsurprisingly, took it more seriously: "Visualising John as (the future) King David as a real person, our actual ancestor… (was) a powerful experience for me as a Jewish person.”
Beforehand, artist and sitter discussed how previous examples of David holding the head of the slain giant – most famously by Caravaggio - rarely reference David’s Jewishness.
Taking inspiration from the 20th Century Zionist illustrator Arthur Szyk (a Polish-born Jew who fled his homeland in 1937 before becoming a US citizen), Vofsi’s version shows the young David wearing a sudra (headdress), with peyot (sidelocks) and tzitzit (ritual tassels) poking out from his tallit (prayer shawl).
Coppersmith's portrait of Ella, now 16 and still a schoolgirl, is without Jewish references.
However, the artist says, their shared Jewish culture, determination to reverse climate change and passion for female voices to be heard prominently on the global stage are at the painting’s core.
The two sittings included a visit to Ella’s bedroom to select props: most obviously the megaphone.
That was after the then 15-year-old returned from the 2021 Youth4Climate summit in Milan, where she was the youngest of 400 international delegates attempting to pressure world leaders into action at the subsequent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.
“We first met at a Zoom event and Ella’s vibrant energy impressed me right away,” Coppersmith recalls.
She says the teenager “represents a generation of Australians who aren’t old enough to vote but will inherit the mess we’ve made”.
As Jewish women, “social justice is in our DNA,” Coppersmith continues. “Jewish family life tends to involve conversations between grandparents and their grandchildren. That’s the first step in the battle against climate change - bringing older generations aboard. “Otherwise, we’re just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.”
The portrait is calm and conservative “to amplify the seriousness of Ella and her message. It is a form of protest … transmitting Ella’s presence and waking us up to this moment in human evolution and this window of opportunity.”
Unlike Conway and the other artists/subjects who made this small section of the exhibition, Lewis isn’t Jewish.
Yet many of the 18 portraits he’s had selected for the exhibition over the years (from the 31 he’s entered) have featured Jewish subjects.
“I only paint friends, and many of my friends are Jewish,” he says. ”I hate the idea of cold calling to ask someone to pose.”
Portraits of the past
So, is 2022 a record year for Jewish subjects in the Archibald? No, says Natalie Wilson, the AGNSW curator who researched and selected the works celebrated in last year’s travelling exhibition, Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize.
Entry forms for the Archibald have never asked painter nor subject to declare their religion so, Wilson’s research - conducted in two days for Plus 61J - wouldn’t meet strict academic criteria.
But she found there had been at least three previous occasions when three or more Jewish subjects were selected for the exhibition and the 1937 Archibald featured four: a portrait of her mother by Valerie Lazarus and three by the prolific Joseph Wolinski.
“He holds the record for Archibald entries,” Wilson says. “Between 1921 and 1951 he submitted 107 portraits. Of course, many of those came from Sydney’s Jewish community.”
In 1960, Judy Cassab became the first Jewish artist to win the Archibald for her portrait of fellow artist Stanislaus Rapotec (she won again in 1966). Vera Hrubska (Barry Stern), Sali Herman (Rabbi Israel Porush) and a self-portrait by Maximilian Feuerring also made the final cut in 1960. Joe Rose (Barry Stern)) and Feuerring (another self-portrait) featured in the 1963 exhibition, along with Kevin Connor’s depiction of Albert Foulkes.
In 1921, the Archibald’s inaugural year, Wolinski entered two portraits of Jewish identities: Rabbi Abraham Wolinksi, his father, and Rabbi Francis Cohen.
The first painting of a Jew to win the Archibald was John Longstaff’s portrait of Maurice Moscovitch in 1925. The Russian-born actor was known for his roles in New York’s Yiddish theatre and Broadway and later for his appearance in The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 anti-Nazi satire.
Winning artists who identified as Jewish include Coppersmith, Cassab, Feuerring, Lazarus, Rose, Sali Herman, Michael Kmit, Ruth Faerber, Louis Kahan and Jenny Sages.
“There are likely to be many others, “but prior to 1946 there is very little information on record on what would today be considered ‘amateur’ artists,” says Wilson
Photo: Detail of Ella Simmons, painted by Yvette Coppersmith (AGNSW)
