The trouble with the Blake Prize.

SIR: Two things might be added to Patricia Anderson's incisive article "The Struggle to Keep Faith in the Blake Prize" (March 2008).

The first is that the chief reason for the hallowed status of the Blake Prize on the national art scene before the mid-1960s was that its regular travelling exhibition of finalists was the only annual show of contemporary Australian art seen in many cities. Indeed, through the 1950s the Blake's organisers seem to have consciously selected the exhibits with a view to presenting a mini-survey of the leading painters. That is why the exhibition achieved instant acclaim in Melbourne and Adelaide, for instance, where it was staged in the respective National Galleries.

The second is that through the 1950s and 1960s the Blake's judges assumed that religious art was necessarily Christian art. This explains why very strong painters whose work was anchored in other faiths--Ian Fairweather and Godfrey Miller stand out here--never did win a Blake Prize. And if they did, as happened with Roger Kemp in 1970 (after numerous unsuccessful entries) with his untypical and clumsy abstraction The Cross, it was only because they devised pictures to meet the Blake's religious agenda. Kemp himself once told me that a biblical quote as title, or a cross within the composition, was mandatory.

The latter point might explain much about the Blake's troubles during the 1980s, a period when, as Patricia Anderson points out, the judges had to grapple with traditional Aboriginal art. Sadly they were not initially up to the task, tending to select only works that included Biblical references, not traditional indigenous Dreamings.

Christopher Heathcote, Taylors Lakes, Vic.