The Salon des Refusés was initiated by the S.H. Ervin Gallery in 1992 in the tradition of the renegade French Impressionists of the 1860s who held a breakaway exhibition from the reactionary French Academy. In 1863, the French Academy rejected a staggering 2800 canvases submitted for the annual Salon exhibition. Among those refused were Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Henri Fantin-Latour, James Whistler and Édouard Manet, who entered his now legendary painting, Le déjeuner sur l’Herbe. This particular work was regarded as a scandalous affront to taste.  The jury also argued these artists were “a clear danger to society and that the slightest encouragement would be risky.”

Since there were very few independent art exhibitions in imperial France, the taste of the buying public was dictated almost entirely by the Academy. Most members of the public invested only in artists sanctioned by the Salon. Rejection by the Academy therefore threatened many artists with professional extinction.

The protests that followed the Academy’s 1863 decision were so public and so pointed that eventually Napoleon III himself appeared at the Palais de l’Industrie and demanded to see the rejected works.  He then instructed the Academy to reconsider its selection and when it refused, the Emperor decreed that the rejected paintings go on display in a separate exhibition. And so the phrase Salon des Refusés entered into the world’s artistic lexicon. A hundred and twenty-nine years later, the S.H. Ervin Gallery revived the tradition and the name.

Each year our panel is invited to go behind the scenes of the judging process for the annual Archibald Prize for portraiture and Wynne Prize for landscape painting and figure sculpture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, to select an exhibition from the many works entered in both prizes not chosen for the official award exhibition. The criteria for works selected in the Salon are quality, diversity, humour and innovation.

The Salon des Refusés exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery has established an excellent reputation that rivals the selections of the ‘official’ prize exhibition and is often cited as a more lively and discerning selection.

The Holding Redlich People’s Choice Award winner in 2009 was Zhong Chen ‘Charles Blackman.’

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