The winner of this year's Moran prize, Melbourne artist Peter Wegner for a portrait of poet Graeme Doyle, was announced yesterday, 10 days ahead of the announcement of this year's Archibald winner.
The Archibald has always had the prestige, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize the money. Now, the latter has lots more money.
The Moran family yesterday announced the establishment of a $6 million arts foundation. Interest from the foundation will be used to make the $100,000 Moran prize an annual event - it has been biennial since its 1988 inception - and to set up an annual photographic prize that will also come with $100,000 in booty.
This puts it in more direct competition with the Art Gallery of NSW's annual Archibald Prize, which carries a $35,000 prize (provided by its sponsor, which this year is Myer) and its four-year-old companion, the Photographic Portrait Prize, which carries a $20,000 prize paid for by sponsor Citigroup.
Artists tend to enter both the Moran and the Archibald prizes. The Moran prize is traditionally more conservative than the (also fairly conservative) Archibald, but the presence of two portrait prizes within weeks of each other may change things. The winner of this year's Moran prize, Melbourne artist Peter Wegner for a portrait of poet Graeme Doyle, was announced yesterday, 10 days ahead of the announcement of this year's Archibald winner.
Moran prize co-ordinator Mark Moran insisted yesterday that taking on the Archibald was not part of the agenda. "It complements the Archibald. At some point it may take over, but at the moment the Archibald has the profile," he said.
The Moran Foundation, a prescribed private fund, is one of the largest to be set up with a focus on the arts. Designed to allow more tax-effective and strategic philanthropy, the funds were legislated as part of a 1999 package of tax reforms. The number of families setting them up has grown significantly in recent years and there are now 339 in Australia.
The other arts-oriented PPF of significant scale is the $10 million Mitchell Foundation, which advertiser Harold Mitchell set up five years ago with proceeds from the part-sale of his emitch online advertising business. With a growing corpus of $13 million, the Mitchell Foundation grants about $500,000 a year to projects in the arts and health sectors.
Mark Moran yesterday said the $6 million fund would return about $300,000 a year, and that over the medium to longer term, projects outside the portrait and photographic prizes would be considered.
The $186 million sale last December of a quarter of Moran Health Care allowed the nursing home operator to retire $100 million of debt, to look at other investments and to set up the foundation.