Arthur Boyd

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Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd (24 July 1920 – April 1999) was a well-known Australian painter of the late twentieth century.

Boyd's artwork ranges from impressionist renderings of Australian landscape to more elastic figuration, and several canvases feature both.

Several famous works, including The Expulsion (1947–48), now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, are among the Biblical stories set against the Australian landscape.

Boyd's work, as well as Clifton Pugh, David Boyd, John Brack, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval, and Charles Blackman, had a strong social conscience. The Boyd family's artistic dynasty includes painters, sculptors, architects, and other artists; beginning with Boyd's grandmother Emma Minnie Boyd, Boyd's father Merric Boyd, Boyd's mother Doris; "without her, the entire family would have fallen apart," says Boyd.

Mary Boyd, his sister, and a painter, married first John Perceval and then Sidney Nolan, both artists.

Yvonne Boyd (née Lennie), the boy's wife, is also a painter, as have their children Jamie, Polly, and Lucy. Arthur and Yvonne Boyd donated 1,100 hectares (2,700 acres) to Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River in 1993.

Boyd left further property, drawings, and the copyright to all of his creations that had been held in trust.

Early years and background

Boyd was born in Murrumbeena, Victoria, and the son of Doris Boyd and her husband Merric, who were both potters and painters. Boyd's sisters Lucy and Mary were both artists as well as both of Boyd's younger brothers; David was a painter and Guy a sculptor; and Guy was a sculptor. Boyd briefly attended night classes at Melbourne's National Gallery School, where Jewish immigrant artist Yosl Bergner introduced Boyd to writers such as Dostoyevsky and Kafka, which influenced his intellectual ethics and social conscience. Boyd spent time on the Mornington Peninsula at Rosebud with his grandfather, Arthur Merric Boyd, a primary guide to the creation of his talent. Portraits and of seascapes of Port Phillip were created while he was an adolescent, living in Melbourne's suburbs. He migrated to the inner city, where he had been inspired by his encounter with European refugees. His art evolved into a distinct period of representations of fanciful characters in urban settings, reflecting this change in the late 1930s.

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Career

When conscripted to serve in the army from 12 May 1941 to March 1944, Boyd (Service Number V101720) was 20. Boyd started with the 2nd Cavalry Division, later called the 2nd Armoured Division (Australia), and then the Army Headquarters Cartography Company. Boyd spent mainly as a Cartographer in Bendigo. Boyd's expressionistic wartime paintings, which included photographs of cripples and those who were deemed unfit for war service, were considered traumatic portraits of the homeless and the outcast, based on his own lived experience.

Boyd, along with John Perceval, established a Murrumbeena workshop and turned his attention to what he had been occupied with since childhood, pottery. Ceramic painting and sculpture followed ceramic painting and sculpture later in life. Despite the fact that Boyd was the closest of acquaintances with Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, and John and Sunday Reed, the contemporary Heide Circle and its hierarchical system did not beckon him overtly, as his place in the Boyd family gave him the fullest identity.

Boyd traveled to Wimmera country and Central Australia in the late 1950s and early 1950s, including Alice Springs, where his interest shifted to landscape paintings. Perhaps his best-known work during this period is his Love, Marriage, and Death series, which also known as The Bride, depicts an Aboriginal person of mixed descent as a forgotten stranger. The exhibition, which premiered in Melbourne in April 1958, received a mixed response as it did in Adelaide and Sydney later this year. The gallery's director Brian Kennedy expressed surprise in 2002 after the National Gallery of Australia's acquisition of Reflected Bride 1.

Boyd's ceramic sculpture 'Olympic Pylon' was installed in the Melbourne Olympic Swimming Pool's forecourt in 1956.

At the Venice Biennale in 1958, Boyd appeared with Arthur Streeton, where his Bride series was well received.

He was affiliated with the Antipodeans, a group of painters formed in 1959 and backed by Australian art historian Bernard Smith, who attempted to promote figurative art in the era of abstract painting and sculpture. The group was on display at the Whitechapel gallery in London. Boyd and his family immigrated to London in 1959, where he remained until 1971. He began receiving commissions for ballet and opera set designs in London, and, after returning to ceramic painting in 1966 as a sign of the human condition, he began the Nebuchadnezzar series. Boyd was in London for another time during his career, with his works centered around the idea of metamorphosis.

He created a number of works, including a series of fifteen biblical paintings based on his mother's teachings, Doris. The Wimmera series, a tempera collection containing large areas of sky and land, was released later.

In 1971, Boyd and his family returned to Australia as one of Australia's most well-known artists, recipient of a Creative Arts Fellowship from the Australian National University. Boyd donated several thousand works to the National Gallery of Australia in 1975, including pastels, sculptures, ceramics, etchings, tapestries, paintings, and drawings.

Arthur and Yvonne Boyd bought houses and settled permanently at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River in 1978. A Man of Two Worlds, based on Boyd's life and work, was produced by ABC TV and BBC TV in the following year. Boyd's landscape works were based on the Shoalhaven River in the latter part of his painting career. Boyd was a little overwhelmed to paint the area at first glance; he discovered the scenery was rugged and wild, much different from the landscapes he had imagined. However, he befriended the rugged landscape over the years, painting scenes of the Shoalhaven River and the immediate bushland. The resultant paintings on sale are not simply landscapes, but rather a blending of Boyd's European and Australian roots.

"In the lead up to the First Fleet's arrival in 1988, his Australian scapegoat paintings of the 1980s investigated Australian identity." They use violent imagery and blaming to portray war's futility. Boyd also worked in ceramics, designed sets for the theatre, and illustrated Australian poet Peter Porter's poems.

In 1982, Boyd gifted a villa in Tuscany to the Australia Council for an artist-in-residence program. He was commissioned to produce a tapestry based on the painting Untitled (Shoalhaven Landscape) for the Great Hall in Canberra's new Parliament House in 1984. The work is one of the world's largest tapestries. But Boyd could not find the courage to fight for the protection of the lower rectangle based on the building consultants' recommendations. This tapestry was created in Melbourne's Victorian Tapestry Workshop. In the same year, he made sixteen canvasses for the Victorian Arts Centre's foyer.

Boyd represented Australia with eight major works at the 1988 Venice Biennale and the 2000 Venice Biennale. Boyd was hired to paint Earth and Fire for the front page of Time magazine special issue on environmental conservation in Australia on November 28, 1988.

In 1993, Boyd's work was on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, as part of a major retrospective exhibition.

Boyd performed together with the six members of his artistic dynasty under one roof in 1997; with brothers David and Guy, son Jamie, and nieces Lenore and Tessa Perceval, the Perceval was the first time. The Best of Boyd exhibit included 80 paintings and 40 bronze sculptures. The exhibition was held in Galeria Aniela Fine Art Gallery and Sculpture Park, NSW, Galeria. On the ABC television Australian National News, 18 May 1997, and the ABC TV Afternoon, June 1997, documentary reports were shown.

Boyd died in 1999 at the age of 78. He was saved by his wife Yvonne, their son Jamie, and their daughters Polly and Lucy.

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