art history

BOYD'S WORLD

Janine Burke

Janet McKenzie
Arthur Boyd: Art and Life
Thames and Hudson, $80.00hb, 224pp
0 500 09296 6

ARTHUR BOYD MUST BE a writer's nightmare. Notoriously reserved about his art, Boyd allowed others to do the interpreting for him. He wrote few letters and his interviews were often painful affairs where Boyd gently changed the subject when questions about his paintings came up. Or, with a whimsical smile, simply agreed with the interviewer's interpretation.
      But shyness did not prevent Boyd from gaining local acclaim and international recognition. After Sidney Nolan, he is Australia's best known artist and certainly the most loved. The generous gift of his estate, 'Bundanon', to the Australian government was one factor in Boyd being named Australian of the Year in 1998. Rarely has this country so honoured an artist.
      Though Boyd chose not to push his own barrow, the vivid emotional originality of his paintings has meant that he has constantly inspired writers. Early 1940s paintings were the subject of favourable reviews by arts patron John Reed, social realist painter Vic O'Connor and critic Alan McCulloch. Everyone in the Melbourne art world wanted to claim his friendship and he was close to Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester.
      The Melbourne art world in the war years was intensely intellectual, vituperatively political and passionately critical. It was a dangerous place to be. Boyd had friendships with all the major players, yet managed to offend none. His closest friend, and his brother-in-law, was the brilliantly talented John Perceval who had an incendiary temper. At 'Open Country', the Boyd family home at Murrumbeena, Arthur lived in a kind of family commune. Artistic practice was considered the norm and the whole family engaged in painting, pottery and sculpture. Poor, gifted and idealistic, Boyd's family shaped his life and artistic conscience.
      Photographs taken by Albert Tucker pay homage to the great gang of Boyds with Merric and Doris, Arthur's parents, at its head. Merric was an innovative studio potter while Doris, the strength at the heart of the family, was a landscape painter and potter. Of their five children, Arthur, the second eldest, was the most talented.
      The war years provided a rich era in Melbourne art where shared attitudes engendered a new school of Australian painting, loosely described as the 'Angry Penguins' after the literary journal of the same name. Each of the main participants, however, had an utterly individual vision. McKenzie does not draw sufficient attention to the communality of ideas present in Melbourne at the time. Nor to the art. Aside from mentioning the Polish-Jewish painter Yosl Bergner whose dark, mournful paintings influenced the tenor of painting in those years, she offers no discussion of Boyd's fertile visual connections with other artists, particularly Perceval.
      Boyd may have appeared all sweetness and light but his army experiences released in his art something more profound and violent. Boyd abandoned his luminous Mornington Peninsula landscapes and entered the wartime dark.
      Butterfly Man sallies forth in South Melbourne's streets, a metamorphosising creature of crazy kinetic energy while in Crucifixion a mournful Christ-figure has become a mere plaything, a tortured toy for a hostile world. Boyd's lovers in The Beach and The Hammock rut frantically, merging with one another and the natural world, observed by evil angels who mock and frighten them. Redemption is suggested despite society's cruelty, its vigilant, negative potential. Within the lover's embrace, however desperate, there is the hope that love and solace can be gained.
      In those years, Boyd's and Perceval's paintings shared a sensibility with Tucker's. For all three, the city represents the heart of change, the site of transformation, for good or ill, of the modern personality, a place of innovation, vicissitude and rupture from the past. They saw the city with eyes dismayed by war's terror, violence and death. Melbourne, the safe place where they had grown up and attended art school, found friends and employment, lived and studied, seemed to have changed forever, fractured by fierce and unpredictable energies. They looked deeper and identified, as men, artists and radicals, with the powerless ones: children, cripples, tragic lovers, damaged women and men. Briefly, in 1943-44, their sources, and their methods of picturing their world, converged.
      All three had met and admired the same artists: Yosl Bergner and and the Russian painter Danila Vassilieff. Boyd visited Vassilieff at his Warrandyte home and he exhibited with Bergner and social realist painter Noel Counihan at Melbourne University's Rowden White Library in 1939. McKenzie does not mention this. 'In those days', Perceval told me, 'we worked on the fallacy that art could change the world'. Bergner and Vassilieff offered the same inspiration to Boyd and Perceval as they had to Tucker: a vision of the city's streets. They saw Melbourne's staid streets as they had never been seen before, as lusty, unpredictable and alluring. 'You had such a vision of the street/As the street hardly understands', T.S. Eliot wrote in Preludes.

Your comments are invited: email them in a letter toAustralian Book Review
Return to Australian Book Review /December 2000/January 2001