Seeking The Wild Little known outside of Australia, Arthur Boyd is a world-class painter

By ROBERT HUGHES

It's not 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: no American or European critic seems to have written on Boyd; no museum outside Australia has ever shown his work in depth -- and even in Australia this is his first retrospective in three decades.

The 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 and art magazines pushing his work while a worldwide dealer and museum network pulled it. He never got on the Postmodernist menu.

So 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 remarkable -- and printmaking.

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 against such a clan would have been to join a law firm.)

Boyd's sense of art as a kind of tribal wisdom, an inheritance ceaselessly modified, extended into his dealings with the larger tradition that geography prevented him from joining. He knew the Old Masters only at second hand: reproductions of Bruegel and Bosch, Rembrandt and Tintoretto in the Melbourne Public Library, and in the National Gallery of Victoria some of William Blake's original watercolor illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. All this predisposed him to narrative. Sometimes the stories in his paintings are explicit -- illustrations of the Bible, for instance, into which Boyd (like Blake) injected his own obsessions.

The vision of love as vulnerable, menaced by authority, entered his work early -- and was fixed there, apparently, by an alarming moment when the Australian military police burst in on him and his future wife Yvonne after he went AWOL from army camp. It finds its most complete form in Boyd's painting of Adam and Eve, 1947-48, their bodies like a pair of white tubers, embracing in an Eden that is also the Australian bush, while a huge patriarchal angel glares inquisitively at them from behind a tree and a curly horned ram -- the libido in Boyd's iconography -- stares back.

It's difficult for a contemporary American to imagine the lack of information about art that was the common lot of any artist who wanted to be "modern" in Australia a half-century ago. German Expressionism was known only through a pitiful smattering of black-and-white reproductions, messages in a bottle from a Europe that seemed almost inconceivably distant -- 14,000 miles away and shrouded in another kind of cultural space. But when the sources of advanced style are meager, as they were in Australia in the '40s, beautiful deformities can arise -- if there's enough naked psychic pressure behind them to compensate, at least in part, for a thin diet of other art.

Almost from the start, once he had got past his adolescent prewar exercises in Impressionist landscape, Boyd let his fear and yearning run with startling freedom. "Seek those images/ That constitute the Wild": Blake's exhortation was seldom better fulfilled by a young artist than it was by Boyd. In paintings like The Gargoyles, 1944, the Melbourne beach suburb of St. Kilda, where he lived, became a theater of freaks and demonic hybrids, as real in its way as Mikhail Bulgakov's fantastic Moscow, because grounded in memory. Thus the blond cripple in The Gargoyles is a fellow artist who had polio; and one of Boyd's recurrent images, a person walking (or copulating) with an animal like a wheelbarrow, was based on the sight of a woman walking her ancient dog along St. Kilda beach, holding up its paralyzed hind legs. One felt he believed in his images (or at least entertained their possibility) as wholeheartedly as medieval artists believed in imps and sirens.

Boyd would tend, in later life, to work in narrative series. In his homeland, probably the best known of them is a set of paintings mostly from 1957-58, done after visiting the squalid aboriginal encampments in central Australia made for people exiled within their own country and between two cultures. Known as the Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste series, these Chagall-like images may be flawed by sentimentality but they achieve at times a tragic gravity, and are virtually the first effort by a white Australian artist to express the guilt of racism.

Boyd's narrative cycles more often come out of the Old Testament. Outstanding among them, in the '60s, was a series about Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king whose pride set him up against God and who was punished by seven years' expulsion to the wilderness. The paintings radiate a sort of excruciating rage, as the King mutates into a toadlike beast, is threatened by lions or -- in the most striking image of all -- flies wrapped in flame over the charred tree trunks of a recognizably Australian forest. Boyd was living in London when he painted them, and Nebuchadnezzar on fire is clearly related to the acts of self-immolation by protesters against the Vietnam War.

The narratives change in Boyd's work, but the landscape endures, whether broadly generalized or seen and set down with minute care, tree by tree. Since the 19th century, primal landscape has been as important to the history of Australian art as to American, and Boyd is one of its main exponents, moving between its two main stereotypes: as hostile wilderness, seen as desert or dark wood, and as lyrical Eden. His '80s paintings of Pulpit Rock on a river south of Sydney are of the second kind. This hill with its fallen slabs of gray rock, a low tusk of the earth changing in the light and doubled in the water, has become the Mont Sainte-Victoire of Boyd's old age, and paintings % like Mid-Day, Pulpit Rock, 1983, are a fitting capstone to one of the most fecund careers in modern landscape painting.