Art
Arthur Boyd
By HUGH GRAHAM OF the eighty or so current ex- hibitions in London, it goes without saying that the most interesting, if not the best, is at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. There are a dozen good ex- hibitions in the West End, and a brilliant Calder retrospective at the Tate. But none of these springs any par- ticularly startling surprise, even if Calder turns out to be a far more serious entertainer than the odd mobile seen in a museum might suggest. But the Whitechapel Exhibition confronts us with an artist who is not famous nor even familiar to the average gallery-goer but is immensely gifted, immensely original and possessed of a visual imagination owing little or nothing to the accepted modern idioms of Europe and the United States.
It is true that Arthur Boyd belongs to a strain in Australian painting which has plenty of admirers over here. The Whitechapel Art Gallery two years ago demonstrated that Sydney Nolan is not unique among his countrymen in his capacity for creating momentous symbolic images. Boyd himself was represented in that ex- hibition, but among so much that demanded attention his pictures made less than their right- ful impact. Besides, they gave no idea of his range and versatility. At the same time the Zwemmer Gallery gave him a one-man show, but perhaps because its rooms are rather too small to show big pictures to advantage, its success was limited. Or it may be that Boyd is one of the few artists whose strength becomes more and not less evi- dent from a large one-man show.
How to describe him? In spirit he reminds me of the young Chagall, interpreting regional myths and legends with a lyrical intensity which lifts them far outside the provincial. In form he is too much himself to suggest any pre- cise European counterpart, but although he in- vokes a surprisingly numerous and heterogeneous ancestry (among them Brueghel, William Blake, Rouault) his most personal work owes much to the German Expressionists, and above all Nolde. That is to say his colour is rich, dramatic, emotional, his touch spontaneous, his drawing free but basically naturalistic. And, like Nolde, he can be delicate and barbaric at the same time. Boyd's major weakness is that his themes regional, biblical, erotic—mean so much to him that occasionally he forgets his duties as a painter and becomes raw or slapdash. This is per- haps the price we must pay for such intensity of feeling: many painters are frequently uneven in quality. But in the best of his mythological pieces —for instance Nude with Beast V—he succeeds in animating a large picture-surface with a sus- tained seriousness of pigment (in this case oil and tempera) which raises them well out of the limbo of illustration. That he can, when he chooses, draw with cool precision is evident from a num- ber of crystalline tempera landscapes.
These last will strike many as the most attrac- tive things in the exhibition. Boyd has great gifts as a landscape painter—and in the Australian landscape, with its contrast of sun-baked desert with steamy jungle, he has marvellously exotic material. But unquestionably his most original work is figurative. One recurring theme, the aboriginal mourning his half-caste bride, he treats with such a tender blend of pathos and sen- suality that I am reminded of Piero di Cosimo's painting of Cephalus and Procris in the National Gallery.
Other exhibitions to visit are : at Marlborough Fine Art, flower-pieces by Fantin-Latour and a nice group of pictures by the usual French names; the Fantins are a quite exceptional gathering of his truthful, appealing but slightly prosaic bouquets. At Crane Kalman, in the Brompton Road, a most intelligent anthology of marine paintings, including a splendid Courbet, Mer Ourageuse, and fine things by Monet and de Stael; the catalogue marries each picture to a counterpart in verse or prose. Arty, but well done.
At Colnaghi's, Old Bond Street, an imposing array of Old Master drawings dominated by a great newly-found Rembrandt of Saskia stand- ing. At the Piccadilly Gallery, Cork Street, paint- ings by the Belgian expressionist Permeke. Sombre but rarely gloomy, his great potato-eat- ing peasants and stubborn earthy landscapes are sustaining and reassuring, and absurdly neglected.
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