Portrait of Joshua Smith

In 1943 two portraits by William Dobell were selected for the Archibald Prize – one of a burly blue-collar worker titled The billy boy, and one of Dobell’s lanky and well-groomed artist friend called Joshua Smith. While The billy boy was acclaimed as an iconic image of the Australian worker, it was the portrait of Smith that won the Prize.
With his typically incendiary mix of pornographic imagery and art historical citation, Juan Davila weaves an absurd homosexual tale out of Dobell’s two very different subjects. Naked in bed together under the text ‘The Man of Your Dreams is Back’, Davila invokes the famous court case that followed Dobell’s win, when his portrait of Smith was accused of being an ineligible caricature, and defended as an example of modern art. The battle directed public attention to Smith’s unusual physical appearance, which was mocked in the media.
Davila calls this episode in Australian art ‘a little novella of love in modernity’. By recasting Smith and the billy boy in the scene of a sex act, he slyly points to the insinuated love affair between Dobell and Smith, which at the time fuelled people’s interest in the case. Dobell’s portrait of Smith, Davila explains, was possibly the first Archibald-winning work that ‘was produced by this loving gaze of one [male] painter to another’.
Although the personal consequences for Smith and Dobell were diabolical, the controversy ironically lifted both their profiles as artists. It also increased public attendance to the Archibald Prize. Always attuned to how images are interpreted, valued and manipulated for differing ends, Davila attempts to outdo Dobell with his pornographic revival of Joshua Smith, as if challenging the perceived provincial mores and shock economy of the Australian art world, and the public’s sometimes malicious appetite for scandal.