Artist William Dobell is widely remembered for the furore caused by his work in the Archibald Prize. In 1943, his winning portrait of fellow artist and friend Joshua Smith was challenged. Deemed a caricature by two entrants to the prize, a legal battle ensued to determine whether or not it was a valid entry.
Dobell was eventually vindicated but the saga had a lasting impact on him – and on Smith, causing them much grief. Interviewed in 1990, Smith spoke for the first time about the legacy of the work. He refers to the portrait and Dobell's subsequent comments about it as "a curse, a phantom that haunts me. It has torn at every day of my life."
Curator and art historian Dr Christopher Heathcote says this high-profile incident, which caused such an outcry, overshadowed Dobell's work.
"No one has really gone into what the work was like, what it was about, discovering Dobell – discovering the art rather than the man. Everything is focused on the great ruckus over the Archibald Prize."
Discovering Dobell, an exhibition at TarraWarra Museum of Art, aims to address that scenario.
"The real difficulty, I suppose, was thinking about how we're going to get these things fitted together and get them to make sense, because you want to show how an idea evolved and became a picture."
While researching the Newcastle-born artist, Heathcote visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales. What he found was staggering – masses and masses of drawings; Dobell had kept everything. Sorting through them, Heathcote realised he had struck gold; when he mentioned his find to gallery staff, they confirmed no one had been through the material since it was acquired in the 1970s.
"I found two pages covered with all these little drawings of kids playing on the street, probably in west London, then found they all turned into a work we'd already chosen for the show, Cockney Kid with Hoop. You can see how all these little sketches, where he's just looking at kids playing on the street, start to evolve and then become studies for major paintings."
Dobell went to London in 1929 courtesy of an artists' scholarship. He would spend a decade there and it was the most productive period of his life. According to Heathcote, the artist was young, enthusiastic and highly motivated to make the most of his time in the British capital. "He's there during the Depression and he sees some pretty interesting things ... [he knows] that history is taking place."
During those turbulent years, many artists documented life, particularly the experience of the poor and how they were suffering.
At the time, Dobell was working as a figurative artist, in a tradition popularised by Hogarth in the 1700s and some of the British artists he was working with in London. "It is anchored very much in realism and depicting people – it was argued later on that he was painting a caricature, which was preposterous because it had been argued hundreds of years before with Hogarth.
"Early on he's making these studies – they're not so much portraits but what you might call studies of social archetypes.
"He's really trying to fix on a certain type of person," says Heathcote. "These kinds of people had never appeared in high art before, had never been featured in paintings before. If they had they'd been treated as figures of fun and in cartoons."
On his return to Australia, even though people were shocked by the subject matter and the realism of his work, Dobell continued to paint people around him, Sydneysiders and in particular "common people like we'd never seen them before". The best-known example was The billy boy, who works with labourers, boiling the water to make tea for them.
"He has this enormous big belly, arms crossed and tattoos, a dirty, stinking T-shirt, [he's] smiling there, gap-toothed and everything else. This is something unique at that time – at that point, you hadn't had a figure like this [in art]."
"There was a big ruckus about it when it was shown in the Archibald Prize; people referred to it as 'the yob'."
That same year, there was an absolute outcry at each of the works he submitted for the Archibald, so much so that Heathcote says "people wanted to go out and lynch him ... The previous year he'd gone nowhere, this time he thought 'I'll go all out and show what I am really interested in'."
As well as The billy boy, there was a portrait of journalist and social commentator Brian Penton, who at the time was critical of both sides of politics.
Then there was the picture of Joshua Smith, which was meant to be a study of an artist. "Smith was treated as a figure of mockery ... Dobell was impressed with the way his mate would let the slings and arrows of life land on him and brush them off. He's painted in his Kings Cross studio with this black night outside, just getting on with it."
Witnesses at the Archibald inquiry said of the Smith portrait that it "was a picture of a corpse – the body of a man who had died in a peculiar position, remained like that for several months and dried up" and that "the picture was not a portrait at all, let alone a person, unless the person was a freak".
Even though Australia is traditionally conservative when it comes to art, Heathcote is convinced there would have been a similar ruckus had it occurred in Britain.
"It's like the trouble that happened to Bill Henson a couple of years ago. Every man and his dog, most of them hadn't seen the picture, or who Dobell had painted it of, they knew nothing about it. We're talking as well about everyone having an opinion on it but they knew nothing about art. Most people hadn't even visited a gallery."
Later, Dobell's portraiture featured people at work, while later still he became particularly fixated on portraits of strong women, including Helena Rubinstein, Margaret Olley and Dame Mary Gilmore.
"With Helena, he finishes up doing six portraits of her before he finds one he is happy with. She was a tiny woman, only five foot four, but when he found her she just exuded strength. She was also quite feminine in a way. It all comes into the face and the hands."
Heathcote says it was a similar scenario with Mary Gilmore. He met her at the end of her life; she had been a trailblazing feminist and political activist, a writer and a poet and he tries to reflect that spirit. That portrait features on the $10 note.
"When Gilmore saw the finished painting, she was stunned – what she couldn't get over was that the eyes reminded her of her father's gaze. 'This person who had never met me before and doesn't know my family, I look at it and it's my father's piercing eyes looking back at me.' And Dobell said, 'no, they are your piercing eyes'."
After the Archibald dramas, Dobell had a nervous breakdown and retreated to his sister's home in Wangi Wangi on Lake Macquarie. He spent several years there rebuilding his health; he also began to paint landscapes.
Two trips to New Guinea in 1949 and 1950 served as turning points in getting his life back on track. It was an ideal backdrop for the next step in the evolution of his art.
In some ways it took him back to his early days in London, with life drawing as his focus. "There was also the way that [the islanders] decorate themselves with body art, it really fired him up and inspired him. He watched a group of young men thatching a hut, and as they were working away, it reminds him of the nude figures interlocking along the top of the Parthenon.
"It also helps him make sense of the new sculptures by Henry Moore. This is where he does turn into a modern artist, he gets there by looking at primitive figures – as did Picasso and Gaugin."
Discovering Dobell is at the TarraWarra Museum of Art until August 13.
Also showing is Dobell's Circle. twma.com.au www.twma.com.au
Dr Christopher Heathcote will speak about the exhibition on Saturday July 22 from 2pm.