Speaker 1: From The Australian. I'm Claire Harvey and this is the
Speaker 1: weekend edition of The Front. How does an artist capture
Speaker 1: a human face in oils on canvas to make it
Speaker 1: more than just a picture, to get right into the
Speaker 1: soul of a subject. Those are the questions we'll examine
Speaker 1: today in a special episode of The Front, featuring The
Speaker 1: Australian's editorial cartoonist Johannes Leek and Alex Rivchen, the writer
Speaker 1: and advocate. He's painted for one of the world's most
Speaker 1: prestigious art competitions, the one hundred thousand dollars Archibald Prize
Speaker 1: for Portraiture. This is a story I've written for today's
Speaker 1: review section in the Weekend Australian. We'll link to the
Speaker 1: digital version of the story in our show notes so
Speaker 1: you can see this beautiful work of art for yourself.
Speaker 1: There's a ray of light that drives Alex Rivchin bonkers
Speaker 1: in the mornings. It slants in through the high windows
Speaker 1: of his home study, making half the room convenience store
Speaker 1: blinding and casting the other half into gloom. When he
Speaker 1: has to do a video call or a live TV
Speaker 1: cross Riftin finds himself dragging furniture around to ensure he
Speaker 1: can be seen on screen. For artist Johannes League, that
Speaker 1: sunbeam is a gift shining in from above. It brings
Speaker 1: to mind a prison cell and the sense of confinement
Speaker 1: of pain he wants to bring to his portrait of
Speaker 1: Riftin For the Archibald Prize, the work must be a painting.
Speaker 1: Begin the rules of the Archibald, Australia's most coveted portraiture award,
Speaker 1: the work must be a portrait painted from life, with
Speaker 1: the subject known to the artist, aware of the artist's intention,
Speaker 1: and having at least one live sitting with the artist. Rifchin,
Speaker 1: a writer and advocate, qualifies for another Archibald clause that
Speaker 1: the subject be distinguished in art, letters, science or politics.
Speaker 1: Thanks to a breathtakingly erudite and street smart book on
Speaker 1: anti Semitism, The Seven Deadly Myths, among other works. He
Speaker 1: also happens to be handsome in a Ukrainian prince in
Speaker 1: exile sort of way, all sculptural nose and chiseled cheekbones
Speaker 1: a painter's dream. Born in Kiev, Rifchin arrived in Australia
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty eight as a four year old refugee
Speaker 1: from the brutal Soviet persecution of Jews, with his parents,
Speaker 1: both teachers, grandparents, and older brother Eugene. In Ukraine. The
Speaker 1: family had lived just a block from Babi Yah, the
Speaker 1: scene of one of the Nazi's worst atrocities, the September
Speaker 1: nineteen forty one massacre of more than thirty three thousand
Speaker 1: Jewish civilians, including old and babies, who were lined up
Speaker 1: naked on the edge of a ravine and machine gunned.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen eighties, Alex's parents, Tenure and Michael had
Speaker 1: been labeled refuse Nicks traitors for applying to leave the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, where Jews were relentlessly excluded and targeted. They
Speaker 1: spent months in Italy before gaining entry permits to Australia.
Speaker 1: In Sydney, there was no money, the kids spoke only Russian.
Speaker 1: Here's Alex Rifchin, now forty one.
Speaker 2: I remember within a month of arriving, I was put
Speaker 2: into school because my parents and grandparents got to work.
Speaker 2: So I went to Rose Bay School at age four
Speaker 2: and a half and I couldn't communicate with anyone. I
Speaker 2: was getting to fights every day because I thought I
Speaker 2: was being disrespected and ignored and misunderstandings were rampant, but
Speaker 2: this is what happens to migrants. And within a couple
Speaker 2: of months, you know, kids are incredibly adaptable and absorbed
Speaker 2: language very well, and things became a lot easier, but
Speaker 2: they were challenging at first.
Speaker 1: Mum, an English teacher, got a job in a pie shop, Dad,
Speaker 1: a physics and maths teacher, clean toilets and drove a taxi.
Speaker 1: Alex remembers huge kindness and generosity within the Soviet exile
Speaker 1: and Jewish communities and the broader Australia. For this penniless
Speaker 1: clan of Ukrainians, not everyone was kind. The young Alex's
Speaker 1: first personal experience of anti Semitism was the Austrian upstairs
Speaker 1: neighbor at a Randwick unit bloc who shouted death threats
Speaker 1: and Nazi slogans at the family every day. Why did
Speaker 1: he hate us so, Alex has written, He surely would
Speaker 1: have had no coherent answer, but he knew with perfect
Speaker 1: certainty that the Jew represented in that moment by my
Speaker 1: parents and their two boys was something so loathsome, so repugnant,
Speaker 1: so unhuman, that he was justified in threatening repeatedly to
Speaker 1: kill a young family later, both Alex and Eugene won
Speaker 1: entry to Sydney Boyce High, the selective public academy for
Speaker 1: brilliant young men, where one of the kids in Eugene's
Speaker 1: year was a young Johannes Leek. Leik and Alex didn't
Speaker 1: meet at school. With twelve hundred students, it's a big place.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until late twenty twenty four that Leak, now
Speaker 1: forty four, called Alex up for a coffee. By then,
Speaker 1: their link was gone. In twenty thirteen, Eugene, a thirty
Speaker 1: two year old, high flying chief financial officer, the rational one,
Speaker 1: the mathematician of the family, died of a brain tumor,
Speaker 1: leaving his adoring younger brother Alex, the emotional, creative one,
Speaker 1: shocked and grieving.
Speaker 2: He was my best friend. He was the most important
Speaker 2: person in my life, I would say the tame.
Speaker 1: In the twelve years since Alex's career as a lawyer
Speaker 1: brought him here, co Chief Executive of the Executive Council
Speaker 1: of Australian Jury and one of the most powerfully articulate
Speaker 1: of a new generation of Australian Jewish advocates, men and
Speaker 1: women who think about what they would have done at
Speaker 1: Babia or in the Warsaw Ghetto, and you hold the
Speaker 1: crinkly hands of the Holocaust survivors, and you know it's
Speaker 1: their turn to speak up. Alex Richin went back to
Speaker 1: Babiyar a few years ago and walked on the grass
Speaker 1: that covers the bodies of countless innocence. His own grandparents
Speaker 1: escaped the massacre only because the Soviet army in retreat
Speaker 1: had evacuated civilians shortly before Kiev fell to the Germans
Speaker 1: in September nineteen forty one.
Speaker 2: So the people that stayed behind were predominantly nursing mothers,
Speaker 2: the old and the sick, the frail. And when the
Speaker 2: Germans entered the city, they started plastering the city with
Speaker 2: notices calling on the city's Jews to assemble at the
Speaker 2: r for what they thought would be deportation, and then
Speaker 2: over two days, thirty three thousand Jews were massacred in
Speaker 2: that ravine.
Speaker 1: The Nazis got a feel for tipping bodies into Bubbya,
Speaker 1: and over the next two years it estimated another seventy
Speaker 1: thousand people, including psychiatric patients, roma people, and prisoners of war,
Speaker 1: were cast into the ravine. Like all of us Rifchin
Speaker 1: looks at the cataclysmic moments of history and wonders what
Speaker 1: would I have done if I'd been there.
Speaker 2: I think in my youth I probably harbored romantic views
Speaker 2: of being a liberator, being a leader of some sort,
Speaker 2: saving others, saving myself. But the more I've come to
Speaker 2: understand the nature of the killing process, the nature of Nazism,
Speaker 2: the extent of collaboration by the locals, and what actually happened,
Speaker 2: I'm convinced that I would have been slaughtered like the
Speaker 2: rest of them. I would have ended up in that ravine,
Speaker 2: like everybody else.
Speaker 1: All that is part of the swirl of emotion under
Speaker 1: the surface. In January twenty twenty five, when the men
Speaker 1: sit beneath the morning sun for their first live sitting
Speaker 1: in that home study, Leak sketching with a pencil and
Speaker 1: paper and taking photographs. So the plan go after and
Speaker 1: in March they meet again, just hours before Leek has
Speaker 1: to load the painting in a van and drive it
Speaker 1: to the Art Gallery of New South Wales loading dock
Speaker 1: for the big reveal.
Speaker 3: So we hear in the news Court building in Holt
Speaker 3: Street in Sydney, and I've had the painting delivered this
Speaker 3: morning in its frame, and it looks great. Alex will
Speaker 3: be seeing it for the first time. Any minute, did
Speaker 3: you cover it?
Speaker 1: After some nervous anticipation, Alex arrives, okay, I'm very excited.
Speaker 2: Thanks for coming down, pleasure.
Speaker 1: After some small talk, it's time to pull the cover
Speaker 1: off the painting.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, wow wow, it's amazing. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: I thank you. I think for the first time ten
Speaker 4: months without speech.
Speaker 1: Riftin is clearly moved by this depiction of himself, With
Speaker 1: that shaft of light drawing the viewer's gaze to his eyes,
Speaker 1: and the backdrop a deep green that started with the
Speaker 1: shade of the study cupboards and intensified Underleak's hand to
Speaker 1: take on an energy of its own. Riftin stares at
Speaker 1: the portrait, stepping close and backing away, grinning as he
Speaker 1: watches the face of his wife, Vicki, when she walks
Speaker 1: in a few minutes later to have a look. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, that's so amazing.
Speaker 2: That somber Wow.
Speaker 1: I sit down and have a chat with Alex and Johannas.
Speaker 2: I've experienced a lot in my life, in particular the
Speaker 2: last eighteen months, but this is something that I've never
Speaker 2: felt before. The only thing I can liken it too,
Speaker 2: I think, is my wedding day. I had the same
Speaker 2: kind of nervous anticipation on the way here, because in
Speaker 2: Jewish tradition, on the wedding day you see the bride
Speaker 2: before she walks down the aisle, you have to identify her.
Speaker 2: And when I saw my wife Vicki on that day,
Speaker 2: I just felt to pieces and it was a similar
Speaker 2: thing because in both case I've beheld great beauty. In
Speaker 2: this occasion it was me.
Speaker 1: There's self deprecation in that, just as in Leek's portrait
Speaker 1: there is caricature. Of course, there is Rifftin's jaw is
Speaker 1: a little stronger, his lips a little more prominent, his
Speaker 1: nose and eyes are photorealistic. But the cartoonists instinct for
Speaker 1: exaggeration cannot be suppressed. Here's Johanna's Leek.
Speaker 3: Well, I suppose I've become quite practiced at reading faces,
Speaker 3: taking features and interpreting them and then accentuating aspects. And
Speaker 3: it's just that in my cartooning work, I do it
Speaker 3: in a cruel sort of a way, and the object
Speaker 3: there is satire, and it's a disrespectful art form. This
Speaker 3: is my respectful art. I do feel this is what
Speaker 3: I wanted. This is the expression I wanted. It's that
Speaker 3: combination of defiance but also vulnerability and also pain and
Speaker 3: an awareness in those eyes of the gravity of this
Speaker 3: awful time we're living in Australia at the moment, the
Speaker 3: anti Semitism that we're seeing all over the world, and
Speaker 3: that's written on Alex's face. I noticed that before I
Speaker 3: ever met him, you know, I saw it on his
Speaker 3: TV appearances and I could hear it. It's something you
Speaker 3: pick up and that's really what I wanted to capture.
Speaker 1: Coming up the weight of history Alex Rifchin feels he
Speaker 1: must carry. There are parts of the portrait that Leek
Speaker 1: has left as bear canvas, on Rifchin's cuff and on
Speaker 1: his shirt where the bright blankness was perfect as it was,
Speaker 1: and as much of Alex Rifchin you can't see in
Speaker 1: this picture. The tiny star of David He's had tattooed
Speaker 1: inside his wrist, The fit young man who had Kanye
Speaker 1: West on his workout playlist before West started fanboying. Adolf Hitlock,
Speaker 1: the concerned dad of three whose daughter's daycare center was
Speaker 1: daubed with anti Semitic graffiti, whose former family home was
Speaker 1: set on fire and splashed with red paint in a
Speaker 1: string of racist attacks earlier this year. The painting came
Speaker 1: together quickly, partly because it just flowed, and partly of necessity,
Speaker 1: given Leek's commitments to this ravenous beast of a newspaper,
Speaker 1: the demands each day to be fed with mountains of
Speaker 1: words and pictures, videos and podcast episodes, ideas and emotions.
Speaker 1: Leak's dad, Bill, who preceded him as The Australian's cartoonist,
Speaker 1: was one of the Archibald's most popular portraitists and a
Speaker 1: regular finalist.
Speaker 5: But Bill's Australius rem Branch. He's our Warhol, our Jeff
Speaker 5: koons and I was absolutely gone cogsmack to hear we
Speaker 5: will say Drew Canton.
Speaker 1: That was Barry Humphrey's character Les Patterson, who Bill painted
Speaker 1: for The Archibald in two thousand. Bill's other entries, including
Speaker 1: depictions of Robert Hughes, GoF Whitlam, Donald Bradman, Tex Perkins
Speaker 1: and others, won Packing Room honors and People's Choice awards,
Speaker 1: but never the Big Prize. Johannas first entered the Archibald
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one with a depiction of conservative Aboriginal
Speaker 1: politician jacint A Numpihim for Price, which was not selected
Speaker 1: for the finalists exhibition, something that prompted outrage from some commentators.
Speaker 1: Neatly that was matched by outrage from others when the
Speaker 1: State Library of New South Wales subsequently bought Leek's portrait
Speaker 1: of Price for its own collection. Some library staff told
Speaker 1: The Guardian they didn't consider Price a significant New South
Speaker 1: Wales figure, just.
Speaker 3: Center in the language that we use these days, is
Speaker 3: considered to be a controversial figure, a polarizing figure, even
Speaker 3: though she's just a wonderful human being. But I'm sure
Speaker 3: that played a role. I mean that the Archiebald has
Speaker 3: been captured to some degree by progressive and I don't
Speaker 3: think I'm expressing anything that's entirely out of left field there.
Speaker 3: I think that's well and truly understood. But why try
Speaker 3: and go with the grain when you can draw attention
Speaker 3: to people who I think a lot of Australians do
Speaker 3: support and they understand people like just sent her And
Speaker 3: you know, we all saw that during the referendum she
Speaker 3: resonates with people and that was my way of bringing
Speaker 3: her to the fore and presenting her the way I
Speaker 3: see her. And I suppose there's a similar situation. Just
Speaker 3: because a particularly activist part of the arts community has
Speaker 3: aligned themselves with the pro Palestinian cause doesn't mean that
Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary Australians are
Speaker 3: not looking at Alex and seeing his appearances and thinking
Speaker 3: isn't he wonderful? Isn't he making sense? The archiboard should,
Speaker 3: I think, reflect a broader cross section of artists perhaps
Speaker 3: and the Australian experience in the Australian character, rather than
Speaker 3: a narrow progressive activist agenda. So that's why we enter
Speaker 3: and see how we go.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen months since the October seven massacre of
Speaker 1: Israelis by Hamas and the subsequent pounding of Gaza by Israel,
Speaker 1: it's been arts organizations in Australia where anti Israel sentiment
Speaker 1: has been the loudest. Kefis have been worn. Jewish artists
Speaker 1: have been uninvited, deplatformed, doxed.
Speaker 2: As someone who writes, I know what a piece of
Speaker 2: art if I can call my writing that in a
Speaker 2: lavish way, it's something that comes from deep within you,
Speaker 2: and you're revealing yourself. You want people to interact with it,
Speaker 2: to consume it, to debate it, and to be frozen
Speaker 2: out and shut out merely because some of those views
Speaker 2: or who you are perceived as a person doesn't align
Speaker 2: with a particular political agenda. I think it's a travesty,
Speaker 2: but it's also a tragedy that people have then frozen
Speaker 2: out of doing what they love and what they want
Speaker 2: to do, denied their livelihoods as well. But then when
Speaker 2: I think about it at a kind of macro national level,
Speaker 2: the Jewish people numerically a minuscule. There's little more than
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand Jews in this country of twenty five million,
Speaker 2: and we can't interact with ordinary Australians that much because
Speaker 2: there's not that many of us. And the way that
Speaker 2: we reveal who we are, the way that we put
Speaker 2: forth our ideas and show our humanity is through our art,
Speaker 2: through plays and literary works and paintings. And so when
Speaker 2: Jews get frozen out and subjected to boycotts and shadow bands,
Speaker 2: it's a way of expunging Jews from visibility and society.
Speaker 2: I mean, most people haven't met a Jew, but they
Speaker 2: may have seen a work of Eli Vizel or Isaac
Speaker 2: Bishev Singer or Steven Spielberg or Jerry Seinfeld, and so
Speaker 2: we need to keep fighting for this. I think it's
Speaker 2: fundamentally important and that's why my own through Johanna's fore
Speaker 2: end to this field. It's particularly meaningful.
Speaker 1: Even people who hadn't seen a piece of work by
Speaker 1: a Jewish artists would have seen one that had come
Speaker 1: into being thanks to Jewish philanthropy. Support for the arts
Speaker 1: has been a cornerstone of Australian Jewish society for many decades.
Speaker 1: Now there's an irony bear, isn't there that Jewish voices
Speaker 1: are being silenced.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, Jews have contributed to every aspect
Speaker 2: of life in this country, and not for any tactical
Speaker 2: or nefarious reason, as that detractors would have people believe.
Speaker 2: It's because we deeply love this country and we want
Speaker 2: to contribute to it. And you know, I speak to
Speaker 2: that generation that came here after the Holocaust with nothing,
Speaker 2: literally nothing, penniless and having lost their families in the
Speaker 2: camps or the killing fields, and they made something of
Speaker 2: themselves because of first of their own character, but also
Speaker 2: because of what this country allows people to do and
Speaker 2: to achieve, and they've always given back. They've always built
Speaker 2: up this country. They've always contributed to the arts and
Speaker 2: to medical research in all of these fields. And there
Speaker 2: is a terrible irony, as you say, to the fact
Speaker 2: that these people who've contributed so much out of a
Speaker 2: love for this country are now being rejected. And I
Speaker 2: think if that is allowed to happen, it'll be a
Speaker 2: tragedy for Australia. We will be worse off as a country.
Speaker 2: There's no question.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know if you'd be able to afford it, Alex,
Speaker 1: great would you like to hang that on your walk?
Speaker 1: Can you imagine it looking down at Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean I don't know what my wife would think
Speaker 2: about having two of me in the home, but I
Speaker 2: can gaze at that all day.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, Thank you so much, Thanks Claire.
Speaker 1: The finalists for the Archibald Prize were announced on Thursday,
Speaker 1: May one, after my chat with Johannas and Alex. Johannas's
Speaker 1: portrait didn't make the final cut. You can see Johannas
Speaker 1: Leek's portrait of Alex riftin right now at the Australian
Speaker 1: dot Com dot a U slash review. The Archibald is
Speaker 1: open at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from
Speaker 1: ten May to seventeen August, and you can read critique
Speaker 1: and analysis of the finalists and the winner anytime at
Speaker 1: the Australian dot com. Thanks for joining us on the
Speaker 1: front this week. Our team is Jasper Leak, who produced
Speaker 1: and edited this episode, Kristin Amiot, Lead Sammerglu, Stephanie Coombs,
Speaker 1: Tiffany Demack, Joshua Burton and me Claire Harvey.