Arthur Boyd & the Exile of Imagination
Australia House, London
28 June - 30 July 2000
Australia's pre-eminent artist and patron, Arthur Boyd AC, AO, OBE, Australian of the Year in 1995, died on 24 April 1999. His art was of such sustained quality and popular appeal that during his lifetime Arthur Boyd gained a special place within the wider Australian community.
Arthur Boyd belonged to a famously artistic Anglo-Australian family. His paternal grandparents, Emma Minnie Boyd (nee a'Beckett) and Arthur Merric Boyd (after whom he was named), were accomplished exhibiting artists in Melbourne from the l880s, and both exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. Arthur's father, Merric Boyd, was an influential sculptor/potter. Merric had two brothers, Penleigh and Martin - the former was painter and teacher, the latter a novelist.
The personal and professional world of Martin Boyd exemplifies the ties that bind the Boyd family to both England and Australia. Although brought up in Australia, he fought with the British forces during World War I, and in London during the l950s had a successful career as a novelist.A number of Martin Boyd's books such as The Montfords, The Cardboard Crown and A Difficult Young Man took as their theme the complex personal relationships in an upper middle class family of Anglo-Australian heritage. It is the legacy of this continually expatriate family and their perennial travels between England and Australia that forms the historical framework of the exhibition Arthur Boyd and the Exile of Imagination.
Arthur Boyd was Australian by birth, yet spent almost half his life living and working as an artist in England. He first moved to Hampstead with his young family in l959. He built a substantial exhibiting record in the UK which began in 1962, in typical style, with a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
In many ways Arthur Boyd needed England in order to see Australia. The works in Arthur Boyd and the Exile of Imagination were instigated by a journey between England and Australia during l971/72 and are testament to both the possibilities and the personal costs of purposefully looking at oneself (or one's country) from the outside. Most of the works on display were made in England, for an English audience, and were first exhibited at Fischer Fine Art in London.
The sometimes confronting images draw heavily on a European iconography - Manet, Rembrandt and Mantegna - yet are set in the landscape around Canberra and are about the wrenching call of the Australian landscape.
Arthur Boyd and the Exile of Imagination is about a journey. For Boyd this journey was most often by sea between Australia and England - each country filled a different artistic need and each allowed the artist the space to look at the other. This is a 'relationship' shared by other notable Australian expatriates including Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer. Arthur Boyd's imagery is not always pretty or comfortable; it is ethical, original and sometimes cruelly beautiful.
This exhibition of Arthur Boyd's 26 paintings and 15 drawings from the National Gallery of Australia is held in conjunction with Australia Week in London (2-9 July 2000) and is part of Australia's Centenary of Federation celebrations.
AUSTRALIA HOUSE
www.australia.org.uk
