Biography
Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd is one of Australia's most prominent artists. His work is respected and traded in major international art venues and held in public galleries throughout Australia and overseas. He has represented Australia twice at the Venice Biennale, has been awarded the H G Richards Memorial Prize, 1963, honoured with the Order of Australia for services to the arts and the Companion to the Order of Australia. Boyd is also an accomplished sculptor and ceramist and was responsible for the design of the tapestry in the reception hall at Parliament House, Canberra.
Arthur Boyd was born into a family of artistic renown. His grandfather, Arthur Merric Boyd was a New Zealand landscape artist who settled in Australia in 1886,while his grandmother Emma Minnie, a member of the A’Beckett family, was an accomplished painter. Both paternal grandparents exhibited at the Royal Academy, London and Arthur Merric taught his grandson the skill of landscape painting in the Heidelberg tradition. Boyd learnt ceramic art from his father, Merric Boyd while family life revolved around art and religion.
At the age of 17 he held his first exhibited at the Seddon Gallery in Melbourne. He was soon to move away from the light-toned, blue and gold palette style of the Heidelberg School to a darker palette using freer more expressive brush strokes. In the early forties Boyd came under the influence of social realist, Yosl Bergner, and took painting lessons from Danila Vassilieff, an expressionist artist. He was an active member of the Angry Penguins and shared a studio with John Perceval. The paintings of this time already exhibited a Boyd characteristic: tension experienced on margins, such as the boundary of sex/love, love/loathing.
In 1945 Boyd studied the European Masters especially Brueghel and Bosch and later Rembrandt. Religious themes became prominent in the work although he gave them contemporary pertinence and universal significance and they were often sited in local landscape. In 1948 he commenced a magnificent series of landscapes based around the Wimmera which won him the respect of the Australian cultural establishment.
In the early fifties, Boyd turned much attention to ceramics and produced some of his finest sculpture. In 1956-57 Boyd painted the much acclaimed Bride Series which bought him international attention and arguably, is his best work. These important Chagall-like allegorical paintings also known as "Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste", were made from observations during a trip from Alice Springs to Arltunga in 1951 and are concerned with the problems facing half-cast Aborigines and poverty. Boyd was one of the seven artists who contributed to the controversial Antipodeans exhibition, 1959 which defended form and figuration and questioned the all encompassing conversion to abstract expressionism. In 1960, Boyd moved to London and from 1970 divided his time between Britain, Tuscany and the Shoalhaven River, NSW. His work continued to include landscape and mythology - religious and allegorical. He has designed and painted sets for major London productions.
Selected Exhibitions
SOLO
1993
Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (touring)
1991
The Magic Flute Series and Other Paintings, Pyramid Art Gallery, New York
1990
Symbols of Transformation 1940-1960, BMG Fine Art, Adelaide
1989
Paintings 1973-1988, shown in XLIII Biennale of Venice 1988, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Myths and Legends, Mornington Peninsula Arts Centre, Victoria; Bendigo Art Gallery; Ararat Art Gallery; Mildura Arts Centre; Benalla Art Gallery
1988
Paintings 1973-1988, XLIII Biennale of Venice, Australian Pavilion
1987
The Shoalhaven River, The Australian Consulate General, Los Angeles
1986
The Bundanon Paintings, Von Bertouch Galleries, Newcastle The Bride, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Bulleen
1985
Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, touring
1984
Drawings, Paintings, Prints and Ceramics (1940-1970) from the Collection, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
1979
Tapestries, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The Lady and the Unicorn, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1977
Drawings, Mornington Peninsula Art Centre, Victoria
1974
Drawings and Prints from the Permanent Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1970
Arthur Boyd’s Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1969
Retrospective, The Richard Demacro Gallery, Edinburgh
1964
Retrospective, Art Gallery of South Australia
Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia, Melbourne
Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge
1962
Retrospective, Whitechapel Gallery, London
1958
Exhibition by Arthur Boyd: Allegorical Paintings, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide
GROUP
1992
Two Hundred Years of Australian Painting, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (touring)
The Complexity and the Diversity, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne
1989
Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman: Important Works, Savill Galleries, Sydney
The Antipodeans: Another Chapter, Nolan Gallery, Lanyon
1988
Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, Hayward Gallery, London
Stories of Australian Art, Commonwealth Institute, London
Creating Australia: 200 Years of Art 1788-1988, toured Australian State Galleries
Images of Religion in Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1987
The Jack Manton Prize, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Australian Impressions: 100 Years of Landscape Painting, Heidelberger Schlop, Germany
1986
Friends and Relations, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Bulleen
1984
Art and Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams, Art Gallery of New South Wales
1983
The Boyd Family: A Survey of the Bundanon Collection, Arts Council Gallery, Canberra
RAP: Recent Australian Paintings: A Survey 1970-80, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
1982
The Painter as Potter: Decorated Ceramics of the Murrumbeena Circle, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Glimpses of the Forties – Melbourne, Heide Park Museum and Art Gallery, Bulleen
1981
The Boxer Collection: Modernism, Murrumbeena and Angry Penguins, Nolan Gallery, Lanyon
1980
Australian Drawings of the Thirties and Forties, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1978
Contemporary Australian Drawing, Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth
1976
Genesis of a Gallery, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, touring
1974
The Australian Aboriginie Portrayed in Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
1970
The Boyd Family 1884-1970, Mornington Civic Centre, Victoria
Ten Printmakers 1970, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, touring
1964
Australian Print Survey, toured Australian State and Regional galleries
The Art of Drawing, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, touring
1963
Australian Painting, Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary, Tate Gallery, London
British Painting in the Sixties, Tate Gallery, London
1962
Rebels and Precursors: Aspects of Painting in Melbourne, 1937-47, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales
1960
Four Australian Painters: Streeton, Dobell, Gruner, Boyd, Western Australia Art Gallery, Perth
1959
Survey III, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The Helene Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
1957
The Crouch Exhibition, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat
1956
The Arts Festival of the Melbourne Olympic Games, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1951
Jubilee Exhibition of Australian Art, toured Australian State Galleries
Achievements, Collections & Commissions
ACHIEVEMENTS:
1995
Australian of the Year in recognition of his contribution to Australian art and to the community.
1992
Companion of the Order of Australia
1988
Irish-Australian of the Year
1979
Order of Australia (OA) for services to art
1971-72
Creative Art Fellowship, Australian National University (ANU), Canberra
1971
Britannica Australia Award for the Arts, Winner
1969
Medallion of the International Cooperation Award Committee, Adelaide, Winner
1963
Henry Caselli Richards Memorial Prize for Painting, Brisbane, Winner
COLLECTIONS:
National Gallery of Australia
Art Gallery of New South Wales
National Gallery of Victoria
Art Gallery of South Australia
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Museums & Art Galleries of the Northern Territory
Queensland Art Gallery
Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery
Other international, regional, university and public collections
Bibliography
Crumlin, R., Images of Religion in Australian Art, Bay Books, Sydney, 1988
Crumlin, R., Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, South Bank Centre, London, 1988
Dobrez, P. and Herbst, P., The Art of the Boyds, Bay Books, Sydney, 1990
Dutton, G., White on Black: The Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1974
Finemore, B., Arthur Boyd: Retrospective Exhibition (catalogue), with an introduction by Brian O’Shaughnessy, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1962
Gunn, G., Arthur Boyd: Paintings 1973-1988 (catalogue), Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Australia Council, 1988
Hetherington, J., Australian Painters: Forty Profiles, Angus & Robertson, Melbourne, 1964
Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986
Klepac, L. (ed), Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1993
McCulloch, A., ‘The drawings of Arthur Boyd’, in Meanjin, vol.X, no.2, Winter 1951, pp.155-56
McGrath, S., The Artist and the River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982
O’Connor, V. G., ‘Arthur Boyd: “Progression”’, in Angry Penguins, no.3, 1942, p.32
Philip, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967
Philip, F., Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works by Arthur Boyd (catalogue), Thames & Hudson, London, 1969
Philip, F. A., ‘On Three Paintings by Arthur Boyd’, in Present Opinion, vol.11, 1947, pp.9-14
Pringle, J., Australian Painting Today, Thames & Hudson, London, 1963
Smith, B., ‘The Antipodeans’, in Australia Today, 14 October 1959, pp.77-104
Thomas, L. and Tadgell, C., Arthur Boyd Drawings 1934-1970, Secker & Waburg, London, 1973
von Maltzahn, I., Arthur Boyd, Etchings and Lithographs, Lund Humphries, London, 1971
