Portraits and Portrayals: Using Wealth and Power to Control What Art Historicises
- Bryleigh Pierce
- Nov 18, 2024
- 13 min read
Updated: Mar 20
Art is a powerful force. Whether you love it, hate it or are entirely indifferent, art is a reflection of who we are. Such a reflection can be inspirational calls to action, shocking reminders of times gone by, or, as Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has recently come to experience, a distressing depiction of reality and confirmation that art truly does historicise what it depicts. The actions Rinehart took in an attempt to refashion an exhibit at Australia’s National Gallery exemplify the continuation of the wealthy elite’s manipulation of their wealth to silence and erase unfavourable depictions or to falsify the historical narrative art writes. Rinehart is but one in an abundance of examples of using art to manipulate the perception of unsuspecting viewers who fall victim to the myths of neutrality promulgated by art galleries and museums alike.
False notions of neutrality have been perpetuated by institutions across the world since their inception as ‘cabinets of curiosities’, or ‘Wunderkammer’ as they were known when they first became popular in the West in sixteenth-century Germany. Collections of art and artefacts eventually outgrew small cabinets and were instead housed in specially designed rooms where more people could admire the owner’s sophistication and wealth as conveyed by the objects they collected throughout their travels or for intellectual pursuits.1 As these rooms became buildings and as visitors grew from friends and family to members of the general public, one thing remained the same – the objects were collected out of genuine interest in other cultures and histories, and they were displayed in order to provide an impartial education on those cultures and histories. No more, and no less. Yet, despite five-hundred years of claiming so, these spaces have never been neutral to wider social, political and cultural circumstances, in fact, it is quite the opposite: as empires grew and people were colonised, their tangible culture was pillaged by invading armies who donated or sold their loot to modern incarnations of ‘cabinets of curiosities’, who, in turn, displayed the objects not as tools of an impartial education, but as trophies of conquests. As empires reaped the benefits of subjugating their colonised ‘Other’, these trophies then served as a reminder of status above their Other, and as a threat to possible challengers that they have the power to strip an entire nation’s identity away from posterity.
Much like the myth of neutrality, institutions have justified their existence and importance by claiming responsibility for educating the public and housing the remnants of our global history. Although this, too, is a fictitious tale perpetuated with one specific goal to authorise who is able to learn what history – as Maurice Berger notes, “among the museum’s most important responsibilities is that of cultural gatekeeper”.2 By ensuring the colonised Other is unable to learn about their history through its tangible remnants, they are unable to connect their present to the past and are therefore unable to construct cultural and personal identities beyond that of their oppressor’s. Not only does the oppressor restrict their colonised Other from learning of their history, so do they exploit their ownership over the object to control the narrative being taught and, by ignoring or creating plausible doubt about certain ungainly aspects of an object’s history, the museum is able to erase the truth of its displacement. In the past, this has been done by institutions on behalf of monarchies in order to control the narrative of colonial expansion and perpetuate the imperial and aristocratic ideologies of the West having higher intelligence than their conquered and colonised Other, indicated by their appreciation of such objects as art and deeming it necessary that they are displayed instead of used.
This same paradigm can be seen outside the realm of empires and museums in the way wealthy patrons similarly use their wealth and status to ensure a flattering representation not just for the purpose of vanity or to hide their corruption, but also to dictate how they are viewed by posterity, as, in the words of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, art is “a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical”.3 Given that art is the origin of truth and the pen with which history is written, it stands to say that portraits, therefore, reveal a truth of character and write the history of its subject. Here, we see the power of art and the possibilities for its callous applications: if the subject of a portrait wields power over the artist or exhibiting institution, the truth it reveals and historicises can be favourably manipulated with ease.
While Marie Antoinette favoured Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun for her ability to blend pastels in such a way that made her appear more youthful and attractive, therefore making her more pleasant in the eyes of the viewer, she was also sure to be depicted wearing expensive fabrics, large feathers and jewels in order to assert her wealth. This is because the way in which a person, or people, are depicted in an artwork, dictates how the viewer perceives them and what they believe to be true of the subject: if the subject is surrounded by jewels and expensive fabrics, the viewer knows them to be wealthy and powerful, or, if the subject is youthful and holding a child, the viewer knows them to be beautiful and caring; much in the same way, if the subject is haggard and ugly the viewer knows them to be unpleasant and dishonourable. Truth is, therefore, not only historicised, but also formulated by art. The affluent few have always used art to project a specific image of themselves unto the world, whether that be by collecting displays of their intellectualism or by allowing their likeness to be depicted only by those under their control and in a manner of their approval. Artworks narrating a truth that cannot be manipulated or erased by the person it depicts, hold immense power and cause great offence to history’s perjurers – unable to dictate what truth the art reveals nor what it historicises, the subject’s animosity grows, becoming the epitome of malevolence and intolerance. Throughout the history of portraiture, this has not changed, and the anger felt by one such wealthy subject, resultant of not being able to control the truth art exposed of them, made Australian headlines recently both in and outside its art community.
Gina Rinehart, iron ore mining magnate, chairman of Hancock Prospecting and Australia’s richest person, is the incarnation of the malevolence and intolerance born out of losing control of how one is perceived, as she did when seeing her portrait painted by Indigenous Australian artist Vincent Namatjira, on display at the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) retrospective exhibition, Vincent Namatjira: Australia in Colour. Aiming to reveal “the power of his painting and the potency of his words”, Rinehart ensured the exhibition exceeded its goal by heavily pressuring NGA director Nick Mitzevich, to deinstall Namatjira’s portrait immediately after she saw it in March of this year, showing that his paintings do, indeed, have great power.4 When Mitzevich refused to remove the painting, she then turned her focus to NGA chair Ryan Stokes who, unfortunately for Rinehart, also refused to surrender and bend the exhibit to her will, with both Mitzevich and Stokes standing firm against the continuous pressure, choosing to handle the situation behind the Gallery’s closed doors. In the following month, however, news broke of Rinehart’s taking offence to the portrait and subsequent manipulation of her wealth and power in an attempt to control the narrative it writes, offering the public a glimpse behind the neutrality disguise so often asserted by institutions.5 While the NGA’s refusal to agree to Rinehart’s wishes is, indeed, admirable given her immense wealth and power, it is far too uncommon.
The effect of Rinehart’s pressure was twofold and only added to the unflattering portrayal: the first was that, after her exploitation attempt was revealed, the NGA received a 24 per cent surge in visitors, who flooded into the exhibition to see the artwork that was creating such anger.6 The second, was that news outlets across the country reprinted and uploaded Namatjira’s portrait in their reports of the story, in what can be assumed was an effort to offer the viewer context and an understanding of why she was offended by the image. Not only did this allow people across the world to see the portrait, and the truth of Rinehart it historicises, but it ensured this access in perpetuity. Following the media attention, she and her associates at Hancock Prospecting accused the Gallery of “doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party” insinuating that the exhibition was propaganda and intentionally designed to undermine her.7 At the time of Rinehart’s visit to the NGA, Namatjira’s retrospective exhibition was on tour from the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) where it had originated for their annual Tarnanthi Art Fair. Interestingly, a principal partner of the AGSA’s exhibition and the Art Fair was Broken Hill Proprietary, the world’s largest iron ore, copper and metallurgical coal mining company (by market capitalisation) and a direct competitor of Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting.8 Whether or not this is a mere coincidence can only be speculated, although, in linking the exhibition to the Chinese Communist Party, she also suggests that her competitors share the same link with the authoritarian state.
While Rinehart herself applied pressure to the NGA, so too did she weaponise her investments, and those who benefit from them, to besiege the Gallery. Quickly joining the campaign to have the portrait removed was Swimming Queensland and several members of Australia’s national swimming team, likely due to the $40 million Rinehart has given to the Australian swimming team and the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) since 2012, and the introduction of her Patron’s Medal Achievement Incentive Fund, which offers swimmers a medal incentive, paying $20,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver and $10,000 for bronze with an extra $30,000 for setting a new world record.9 Her sponsorships, funds and donations are, however, famously conditional, evinced by her suggestion that she will extend her partnership with the AOC, due to expire in 2026, to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics and to commit another $40 million to the Incentive Fund, but, in return the state government commits to building more marinas wherein she could dock her super yacht, because “super yachts need marinas too – sadly lacking for vessels over 50m”.10 Swimmers coming to her defence should not be mistaken as a simple return on her investment, but a reflection of her ever-present threat of pulling her funding from these organisations, which she made abundantly clear in 2022 when withdrawing $15 million in sponsorship support from Netball Australia, leaving them on the verge of collapse, after an Indigenous player, Donnell Wallam, asked for the Hancock Prospecting logo to be removed from her uniform on account of Rinehart’s undeniably racist beliefs and history of racist comments, and the land-rights violations her company routinely commits in their pursuit of iron ore.11
The portrait in question is one of twenty-one portraits that form Namatjira’s Australia in Colour (2021) artwork, which shares its name with the exhibition. Along with Rinehart, the artwork features portraits of Julia Guillard, Cathy Freeman, Adam Goods and Angus Young, as well as non-Australians who have had an impact on the nation’s history or culture, such as Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles, Captain Cook and Jimi Hendrix. Additionally, Namatjira has also included a portrait of his great-grandfather, watercolour artist Albert Namatjira, and a self-portrait. All twenty-one portraits are infused with Namatjira’s satirical expressions of the Australian identity. None of them are flattering portrayals of its subject. Not even his own. This suggests that, while Namatjira doesn’t believe his portraits reflect the character of its subject, Rinehart does. Therefore, she is not offended by the way in which Namatjira has depicted her, but by the character she knows such an unfriendly portrait portrays her to be, and, in attempting to weaponise her wealth and inhibit this portrayal, she is also showing us she fears history will perceive her in such a way.
It is important to also note that the elite haven’t limited their habitual manipulation of art to portraits and images that directly depict them. The same can be seen in the portraits and other artworks they commission, as is the case in J.M. Crossland’s portraits Nannultera, A Young Poonindie Cricketer and Samuel Kandwillan, A Catechist of the Natives’ Training Institution, Poonindie (both 1854). Commissioning the portraits in 1854, Archdeacon of Adelaide (later Bishop) Matthew Hale, hoped to evince his success in ‘civilising’ Australia’s Indigenous population through his establishment of the Aboriginal Mission Institution of Poonindie, where the subjects of both portraits and their families were forced to relocate by British colonisers. Painted less than three-quarters-of-a-century after the first fleet arrived in Botany Bay, and less than a century after Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, the portraits demonstrate just how quickly imperial expansionists and settlers dislocated Indigenous people and began their cultural genocide.
Unlike many other settlers, Hale wished to empower Indigenous people and encourage the assimilation into British culture by showing them the positives of Christianity and civilised society. After noticing that many students of the Adelaide Aboriginal School either returned to their communities as soon as possible or found employment temporarily before wandering aimlessly around Adelaide, Hale hypothesised that, if he were able to isolate them from “the influence of their own people and from the corrupting influence of many of the settlers in Adelaide”, he could continue their training in civilisation and Christian education, eventually enabling them to maintain themselves without the help of British settlers.12 Through establishing the Poonindie Mission in 1850, just fourteen years after the British began colonising the area, Hale hoped to conduct this “experiment” and prove that he was able to tame an “untutored and defenseless savage”.13 Specifically targeting students from the Adelaide Aboriginal School allowed Hale to begin immediately as the school had already put them “on the path to becoming Christians” by teaching them to read and write in English and familiarising them with British culture and tradition. Beginning by taking 110 Indigenous people, both men and women, into residence, Poonindie was similar to other Missions in its “emphasis on peasant labour and Christian instruction”, its “talk of penitence and saving of souls” and its routine baptism of all adults. While this made it successful in the eyes of Hale and other settlers with colonial intentions, in the eyes of those for whom the effort had been undertaken, the Mission had catastrophic effects beyond the loss of culture and identity: between 1850 and 1857, only three births were recorded, and, by 1861, fifty per cent of the 110 residents had died.14
Commissioned as evidence of Hale’s success, the two portraits can be read as a map of colonial integration that begins with mandating the use of coloniser’s clothing styles, teaching Indigenous people the coloniser’s language and educating them, with the coloniser’s educational methods, on the history and beliefs of civilisation.15 Kandwillan, who had been a pupil at the Adelaide Aboriginal School before its 1853 closure, is transformed him into an example of the limitations of re-education alone in colonisation: he is depicted wearing the costume of a well-educated, European, gentleman, and clutching the Christian Bible with both hands but his education alone does not enable him to fully participate in society beyond intellectual conversation. Nannultera, in turn, represents the solution to this limitation and the cultural assimilation Indigenous people were then subjected to after successfully learning the base of the coloniser’s culture. Holding a cricket bat with neatly combed hair, in a style not dissimilar to Hale’s, and wearing a vermillion red jumper and moleskin pants, Nannultera is depicted “as English as the game of cricket itself”.16 Having introduced cricket to the Poonindie Mission in order to further educate its inhabitants on English culture and the proper behaviour of a civilised, masculine man, Hale here indicates that this was a crucial element of his success. The focus on cricket and Christianity, the two pillars of English society, together with the subjects being set in a rural landscape instead of the surrounds of Crossland’s Adelaide studio, invokes the colonial narrative of Terra Nullius: what was once empty, barren land, is now full of life and civilisation.
Given that it was Hale, not the portraits subjects, who had control over the narrative told through the artworks, it is clear that he intended for these portraits to reflect a specific, flattering narrative about himself, his work and British colonisation, ensuring that he would maintain control over the narrative being written as truth and historicised. Furthermore, by taking the portraits back to England and displaying them to the public, he not only created vehicles for colonial propaganda and evidenced that Indigenous people could, indeed, be civilised, but declared that his teaching methods had enabled him, and him alone, to overcome the challenge of civilising the local population which had hitherto been believed to be “impossible”.17 It would, of course, have been easy for Hale to commission a portrait of himself, perhaps on the Mission land, perhaps with some of the Indigenous community around him or learning from him, although his decision to completely remove himself from the image is reflective of his ‘success’ story conveying that, while he is no longer there, his teachings have remained crucial to empowering Indigenous people to survive on their own.
Humanity’s ineffable ability to be offended by what is, essentially, the incarnation of an intangible essence, can be explained with an understanding that images create a region from which truth emerges. When an artwork divulges a truth contested by those whom it depicts, they run the risk of having that truth believed by posterity, and, while Rinehart attempted to use her wealth to erase the narrative she believed a portrait histoicised about her, Hale used his wealth to spotlight what he wanted to be historicised, connecting themselves, and Australia, to the established tradition of using art, and the institutions entrusted with caring for it, to manipulate the historical narrative.
1. Daniel H. Weiss, Why the Museum Matters (United States: Yale University Press, 2022).
2. Maurice Berger, ed., Museums of Tomorrow: A Virtual Discussion (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2004), 47-80, 136-155.
3. Barbara Bolt, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image, (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2004).
4. National Gallery of Australia, "Vincent Namatjira Australia in colour", NGA, 2024 (date of publication), https://nga.gov.au/exhibitions/vincent-namatjira-australia-in-colour/
5. Alex Greenberger, "Billionaire Calls for Removal of ‘Unflattering’ Portrait from National Gallery of Australia" ARTnews, 15 May, 2024.
6. Francesca Aton, "Following Calls to Remove ‘Unflattering’ Portrait from Australia’s National Portrait Gallery, Billionaire Gifted a Different Portrait of Herself", ARTnews, 31 May, 2024.
7. Greenberger, "Billionaire Calls for Removal of ‘Unflattering’ Portrait from National Gallery of Australia".
8. Art Gallery of South Australia, "Vincent Namatjira: Australia in colour", ASGA 2023 (date of publication), https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/vincent-namatjira-australia-in-colour/.
9. Australian Olympic Comittee, "Gina Rinehart's $3m Patron's medal achievement incentive fund", AOC, 2023 (year of publication), https://www.olympics.com.au/news/gina-rineharts-3m-patrons-medal-achievement-incentive-fund/
10. James Hall, "Gina Rinehart calls for more places to moor her yacht by Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games", Great Southern Herald.
11. ABC Sport, "Hancock Prospecting announces it is pulling funding from Netball Australia", ABC News, 22 October 2022 (date of publication), https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-22/hancock-prospecting-pulls-sponsorship-from-netball-australia/101565796
12. Peggy Brock, Writing Aboriginal Collective Biography - Poonindie, South Australia, 1850-1894, in Aboriginal History vol 11, no. 2 (1987): 116-128.
13. Brock, Writing Aboriginal Collective Biography.
14. ibid. p.120
15. Stephen Valambras Graham, "The catechist and the cricketer", National Portrait Gallery, 6 July, 2021 (date of publication), https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/65/the-catechist-and-the-cricketer
16. Pauline Green, Meredith McKendry, Justine Molony, Laura Murray Cree, eds., National Gallery of Australia: Collection Highlights, (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2014), 85.
17. Brock, Writing Aboriginal Collective Biography.
Images:
Figure 1: Vincent Namatjira, Australia in Colour (2021) (detail). Synthetic polymer paint on linen, dimensions unknown. National Gallery of Australia.
Figure 2: Vincent Namatjira, Australia in Colour (2021) (installation view at NGA). Synthetic polymer paint on linen, dimensions unknown. National Gallery of Australia.
Figure 3: Vincent Namatjira, Australia in Colour (2021) (installation view at AGSA). Synthetic polymer paint on linen, dimensions unknown. National Gallery of Australia.
Figure 4: Vincent Namatjira, Australia in Colour (2021). Synthetic polymer paint on linen, dimensions unknown. National Gallery of Australia.
Figure 5: John Michael Crossland, Portrait of Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer (1854). Oil on canvas, 99 x 78.8 cm. National Library of Australia, on permanent loan to the National Gallery of Australia.
Figure 6: John Michael Crossland, Samuel Kandwillan, A Catechist of the Natives' Training Institution, Poonindie (1854). Oil on canvas, 98.6 x 78.9 cm. National Library of Australia.
Figure 7: Artist unknown, Drawing of the Right Reverend Matthew Blagden Hale (1876). State Library of Queensland.
Kommentare