The new exhibition ‘Arthur Boyd: agony and ecstasy’ at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra is a major showcase of Boyd’s art including more than 100 works across diverse media: paintings, prints, drawings, ceramic tiles and sculptures, and tapestries. The focus is on Boyd as an intense passionate visionary who was capable of plumbing the depths and vicissitudes of human emotions.
This show is a great opportunity to revisit the Boyd legacy and see first hand the contribution this lauded painter and printmaker made to the visual arts. Boyd lived both in Australia and for the later part of his life, in Britain. Amongst some of the works on show will be a range of prints from the collaborations he made with poet Peter Porter OAM who lived in the UK from 1951. He teamed up with Boyd a number of times, and together with Porter’s piercing literary evocations and the artist’s stinging visions the works that came out of the collaboration still remain intensely emotive and maintain a potent relevancy today.
It’s not hard to be transfixed by Porter’s amalgam of everyday syntax with a brutally honest juxtaposition and assessment of modern greed, envy and the social ills of the day. While the Australian landscape directly informs some works, the emphasis is on the way that Boyd engages with human experience – fear, love, sex and death became frequent subjects in Boyd’s imagery. These topics are what Boyd painted daily or was driven to paint throughout his career. These subjects are never easily palatable to audiences, but it was the willingness to explore these human foibles and our own aberrations that made these creators important. The biting allegoric component of Boyd/Porter collaborations arguably haven’t been seen since – during their height these two operated collectively as a long distance national conscience.
It’s safe to say that both creators benefited from working with each other and gained from the experience. Porter himself wrote: “Only when I first began to work with Arthur Boyd did I find that there is a fulfilling way of collaborating, and that it requires each artist to go his own way, the resultant works being counterpointed rather than harmonised… My experience with Boyd has been at the opposite end of patronage – I have been given the subject, but allowed to develop it as I saw fit, being simply plonked down on a wide-ranging theme and told to write poems to it. Arthur would then do the pictures in whatever form he fancied and the end-product would be the two sets of artworks issued together in a book. My description of this process, of course, begs many questions, including that of how much value the final book might have, but it underlines the autonomy of imagination which I believe to be essential to any worthwhile collaboration.”
The NGA has said that this show is not a retrospective but rather provides the opportunity to take a close look at a number of Arthur Boyd’s work that has never or rarely been previously exhibited. There are ten of these ‘collaborative’ works on show in the latest exhibition in Canberra. ‘Arthur Boyd: agony and ecstasy’ will showcase many works from Boyd’s great Gift to the National Gallery in 1975 among others, and will provide a rare opportunity to consider in depth works from a diverse series.
National Gallery of Australia
5 September to 9 November, 2014
Australian Capital Territory
Birth of Narcissus, 1976, oil on canvas, 152.5 x 122cm
The lady and the unicorn: Invocation, 1974, dyed wool on cotton high-warp tapestry, 363 x 254cm
Courtesy the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
