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