John Howard painting in Archie 100 exhibition needs a trigger warning

I have just had a similar experience (albeit more harrowing than Pete's and Dud's) of feeling followed around the National Portrait Gallery by the bare legs of former prime minister John "They threw their children overboard" Howard.

It is quite common now for great galleries to give content "trigger" warnings of exhibits that may disturb some visitors.

A recent Royal Academy in London exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon had signs at the entrance warning that "this exhibition contains adult content".

London's famed Tate Britain gallery makes a regular use of content warnings. Visitors to a recent William Blake exhibition there were warned "Please be aware that the art of William Blake contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of cruelty, suffering, sexual violence and the brutal treatment of enslaved people."

Signs at the Tate's Aubrey Beardsley exhibition warned gallery-goers that "Many of Aubrey Beardsley's works use deliberately provocative imagery, including nudity and sexually explicit content."

Meanwhile, though, the NPG gives no warnings that its new Archie 100 exhibition contains the potentially disturbing-for-some portrait, The Right Honourable John Howard MP.

Painted in 1979 by Josonia Palaitis and entered for the 1979 Archibald Prize, it captures the 40-year-old Howard sitting in a garden, framed by a strangely appropriate brick wall. He is wearing a gay Hawaiian shirt (its gaiety clashing with its wearer's grim, grey personality and presence) and sandals, and very short shorts.

As a painting (when one tries for the moment to forgive and forget its subject) the portrait is arrestingly brilliant. There is exquisite detail (each of Howard's nude knees is an individual in its own right) and the artist has Howard's face proclaiming "I am destined to lead this nation. Just you wait and see."

It is not so much the bare legs on their own that disturb and offend (although they are unhelpful and especially hard to forget) as that there is a portrait of Howard there at all.

Somehow one goes to art exhibitions to escape the John Howards of this Life, of this unhappy Australia. He has been much in the media lately, and was an influential gibberer on behalf of the referendum's shameful "no". To have him even present at Archie 100 is to feel stalked by him.

Will he even, one day soon, emerge from the trees during one of my long, lonely walks in the National Arboretum? Should I be braced for his appearance, his white legs resplendent in white tennis shorts, at my tennis club? Can this be paranoia? No.

At the exhibition one suddenly becomes aware of the painting (somehow calling attention to itself in an artistic phenomenon we might call the pete&dud phenomenon) while one is elsewhere in the space. The Howard portrait, led by its legs (they somehow seem to obscenely protrude from the painting as if they are coming looking for us) has an eerie "Look at me! Look at me!" quality.

My companion and I first saw and heard the portrait in the distance. We had been 20 metres away basking in the merry glow of Esther Paterson's 1938 portrait of her fashionably-dressed sister Betty cheerfully enjoying a glass of wine and a giant cigarette. Shuddering, we vowed not to go anywhere near the Howard painting, but I was unable to resist it and did eventually go up to it, drawn by the malignant magnetism of its subject.

I think the NPG, in not warning patrons of the portrait, may have underestimated what strong unpleasant feelings John Howard triggers in the bosoms of some of us. Perhaps we should be warned that he is there, just around the corner.

READ MORE IAN WARDEN

Perhaps it is that modern curators are so young that they were not with us in Howard's heyday (he was prime minister from 1996-2007) to be appalled and offended by him, especially by his artful political weaponising of the misery of asylum seekers. "They threw their children overboard," he lied, demonising asylum seekers as the inhuman demons his fatherly government would protect us from.

Then there was his toadying eagerness to suck up to then president George W. Bush by having Australia join in America's invasion of Iraq against the will, polls showed, of the Australian people.

Yes, as a connoisseur of art I know I should be able to make a cool, intellectual separation of who or what an artwork depicts and how fine it is as a work of art, but in this case I have struggled.

So has my companion of the day. After the exhibition, she sent me a witty poem that imagines how, after hours, the people in the Archie 100 paintings come out of their frames and mingle with one another. Except that, in her appropriate poem, no one wants to mingle with John Howard.

"I hope he doesn't come over," the decent and personable Betty Patterson shudders between sips of her wine and drags on her cigarette, wanting nothing to do with a right honourable John Howard she knows in her bones has nothing honourable about him.

Archie 100 - A Century Of The Archibald Prize continues at Canberra's National Portrait Gallery until January 28, 2024.

We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on The Canberra Times website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. See our moderation policy here.