Word: boyds
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...likely that many Americans will see the retrospective of the work of the Australian artist Arthur Boyd, which opened March 20 at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne after an earlier run in Sydney. More's the pity: Boyd is 73 now, the evidence on his life's work is in, and his show suggests -- no, insists -- that he deserves to be seen as one of the West's major living painters. And yet, outside Australia (and London, to some degree) his work remains persistently unknown. The bibliography at the end of the catalog tells its own story...
...case of Boyd is doubly peculiar if you consider the kind of art that was in vogue right through the 1980s: Neoexpressionism. Boyd's trouble was premature Neoexpressionism. His early paintings are fiercer and more abandoned in their imagery than almost anything produced in Germany, and anything at all from America, during the '80s -- the cries of a visionary that didn't have the faintest hope of being heard outside his antipodean isolation, but that mattered a great deal to a tiny coterie of like-minded artists in Melbourne...
This commitment to extreme emotion -- combined with a lyrical sense of Australian landscape, whose appearance in art Boyd played a large role in re- creating, and an enthusiasm for allegory and biblical narrative resembling Samuel Palmer's -- suffused his work for the next 30 years. Naturally, this made Boyd seem provincial, against the dominant currents of international abstract art. Then came the '80s, and with them a figurative revival -- conducted, for the most part, by shallow rhetorical artists, media- hypnotized Americans and hot-'n'-heavy Germans. But Boyd, unlike Georg Baselitz and other cultural sausagemakers, didn't have ministries...
...much the worse for the menu. It's hard to see this show without reflecting that Boyd may turn out to have been the major artist that, with the single exception of Anselm Kiefer, '80s Neoexpressionism never had. Is everything of his on the same level? By no means: curator Barry Pearce has edited Boyd's long and effusive output sharply, and even so there are some real clinkers among the more recent work. Yet one remains convinced of a deep, solid achievement, not only in painting but also in sculpture -- for some of Boyd's ceramic work is truly...
Nobody could call it avant-gardist; but so what? What counts is its integrity and depth of feeling. It is, to use a more-or-less obsolete word, extremely earnest, not least in its relation to tradition. Boyd seems never to have felt the Oedipal hostility to the past that garbled the rhetoric of Modernism. He didn't think of art as a weapon against paternal authority, ^ because he grew up in an extremely nurturing family, a sort of artists' guild presided over by his grandfather, a painter, and his father, the potter Merric Boyd. (The only way to rebel...