Proposal for a Landscaped Cosmos, by Sam Leach.
Australia is in the grip of another art scandal. This year’s Wynne prize of A$25,000 (£15,000) for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours” has been awarded to Proposal for a Landscaped Cosmos by Sam Leach. Leach has freely confessed that his painting is derived from Adam Pynacker’s Boatmen Moored on the Shore of a Lake, painted c1660, and now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Leach has never seen the original; he found the picture online. Shock and horror were freely expressed: the Australian public is loudly sceptical about what most people continue to call “modern art”, given to asserting that their three-year-old could do better, and that it’s all a con – much as you would expect to hear in Britain.
Leach won the prestigious Archibald prize this year as well, for a full-length likeness of comedian Tim Minchin. Minchin had wanted to be portrayed on a neon Perspex cross, but Leach objected that this was not his style, which turned out to be the dreariest kind of photorealism. There was no fuss about this unadventurous decision of the judges, who are the director and trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, plus a couple of painters, perhaps because all the other submissions for the portrait prize were dismal.
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