Arthur Boyd: Agony & Ecstasy at the National Gallery of Australia

ARTHUR Boyd is like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: the troubled vision that emerges in his work is repeated throughout his career.

Arthur Boyd’s The Mining Town (Casting the Money Lenders from the Temple) (c.1946). From the exhibition Arthur Boyd: Agony & Ecstasy, National Gallery of Australia, to November 9, 2014.

COLERIDGE’S Ancient Mariner, a man who has witnessed a terrible thing and is driven to retell the tale, obsessively, to those he encounters, is a kind of allegory of the artist’s compulsion to express or attempt to express, again and again, what he has seen of reality.

It is easy to confuse this with self-expression, one of the most common misunderstandings about the nature of art. After all, the artist is expressing something intimate and urgent, and thus no doubt at some level personal. Yet the sensibility or vision expressed by an artist bears only an indirect relation to their everyday personality and feelings.

An artist whose work is austere and high-minded can be light-hearted or even flippant in person; a seemingly cheerful individual can produce work that is pessimistic. And this is because artistic creation takes place at a deeper level than that of personality, self-interest and appetite. It belongs to the more impersonal and universal level of consciousness that artists enter when they leave the world of everyday distractions and superficial social interaction.

The title of the Arthur Boyd survey at Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia, which alludes to Irving Stone’s 1961 biographical novel about Michelangelo, may seem at first sight ­appropriate to the content of his work but also can be misleading if we imagine that Boyd the man spent his life racked by such emotional extremes. The truth is subtler: that he was driven to paint, and that when he painted, the vision he expressed in his art was of an extreme or emotional nature. But it obviously would be silly to imagine that he could not sit down to dinner after a day in the studio in a normal frame of mind. That, in fact, is the difference between an artist and a madman.

Nonetheless, Boyd is in some respects strikingly like the Ancient Mariner. Though he was a gentle and kind man, the artistic vision that emerges from his work is on the whole a deeply troubled one, and it is repeated and elaborated obsessively throughout his career. Some of the roots of this vision are to be found within his family and are expressed through more or less autobiographical motifs, but at the deepest level Boyd’s artistic world speaks of the spiritual and moral suffering of the 20th century.

Nothing can better illustrate the difference between personal life and artistic vision than to set the warm, humane setting of his childhood at the family home, Open Country, beside the loneliness, hysteria and desperation of the early wartime paintings, populated by cripples, dogs, doomed lovers in graveyards and other sinister figures. Yet there is from the beginning a tendency to mythologise certain aspects of his family life and the figure of his father, who is turned into a tragic monarch, a symbol of values and authority spurned by the folly of mankind.

After the war, there is a broadening of his repertoire and the beginning of a dialogue with the great art of the past that will continue throughout his career. He borrows from Brueghel’s complex compositions of multiple tiny figures in The Mining Town (c. 1946) and from his striking landscape views in Boat Builders, Eden (1948), one of Boyd’s most serene and positive compositions.

He turns to Rembrandt by the end of the decade, particularly in connection with an important commission from his uncle Martin Boyd, the novelist, who had renovated the old family home of Boyd’s grandparents, The Grange at Harkaway. Arthur painted the walls of the living room with an a secco form of fresco: a series of biblical stories unfolding in a broad landscape of woods and rivers.

At the end of the 1960s, before the artist had achieved his later fame, the house was demolished to make way for a quarry, and this early masterpiece was largely lost. Fortunately a few sections were saved, and the most important of these, after extensive restoration, is now exhibited for the first time. It is a moving image of the return of the Prodigal Son, a favourite subject of Rembrandt and executed in colours that, even in the quasi-fresco medium, emulate the richness of Rembrandt’s palette.

It is significant that Boyd is drawn to the Netherlandish artists, for his artistic sensibility and vision are profoundly northern, rooted in the medieval rather than the classical ages, and infused with the gloomy Judaeo-Christian sense of sin and corruption rather than the brightness of Mediterranean humanism.

We can see this in what is perhaps his most famous series, although one that is represented here mostly in a few simple but highly suggestive drawings, because the paintings belong to other collections: the Half-Caste Bride paintings of the early 1950s. The subject is based on aspects of Aboriginal life, but the works have little to do with agitating for indigenous rights. They are above all an opportunity to meditate — in a new and unfamiliar setting — on experiences of alienation, loneliness and desire.

The most important series of paintings from the artist’s maturity that is fully represented in the exhibition is devoted to the biblical figure of Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian king whose overweening pride led him to madness and abjection. Here again Boyd is inspired by one of his predecessors in the northern Christian tradition, but one who followed a visionary rather than a naturalistic direction: William Blake.

To appreciate these paintings, one has to see that the artist is engaged in a difficult, indeed perilous balancing act between marshalling his craft and technical dexterity to produce harmonious, resolved compositions and endlessly varied and expressive colour schemes, and on the other hand yielding to the expression of a subject that is in essence about the loss of all such control.

For the real theme of the Nebuchadnezzar paintings is the evocation of an almost hysterical degree of abasement and dereliction that is, once again, less a direct reflection of the artist’s frame of mind than an image or metaphor of something that he perceives in the contemporary condition. It would be rather as though a novelist decided that the disorientation of the junkie was emblematic of a more general moral confusion, and set about trying to put himself into the mind of an addict, attempting to express or to imagine the pain, the humiliation, the masochistic spiralling into self-destruction.

Here, too, we can see that Boyd is deliber­ately letting go of conscious control in the painting of the figure — in a process close to the automatism of the surrealists — to become the passive, receptive vehicle for the expression of a disarray that he senses to be part of the common condition. Like an actor, he impersonates every phase of the experience from anguish to self-pity and, at moments, indeed ecstasy.

This way of working, responsive to the impulse of imagination and largely unedited by reason or logic, is characteristic of all Boyd’s work, and it is why it is pointless to look for any kind of intellectual program or conceptual coherence in it. This is the secret of his strength and his limitations.

The weakest works in the exhibition — although they are here presented as a high point — are the so-called Caged Artist pictures of the 70s. There are some striking images, some interesting pictorial ideas here and there; but, on the whole, the self-reflexive nature of the images is less enlightening than self-pitying. The basic theme is that the artist is compelled to keep working by a voracious market, and the image of the billy on the fire is an obvious rebus for potboiler.

The culmination of this series is a very large painting that sums up most of the themes of the previous pictures. The artist is seen lifted up by his legs as in the child’s game of wheelbarrow races, and compelled to paint, in apparent desperation, while the figure behind him is apparently about to chew on his testicles. Meanwhile the anguished painter reaches for a pile of gold in front of him, and on the ground below we find once again the potboiler motif.

The most interesting thing about this picture is the way that the figure of the artist becomes part of a canvas painted within the composition itself, as though he has himself turned into a figment of his own creation. Meanwhile on the right a window, closed off by chicken wire, seems to open on to the real world; one senses a longing to commune with nature instead of being compelled to manufacture more product under the Boyd brand, even at the cost of making pictures about the frustration of making pictures and so on in an increasingly sterile loop.

Boyd is at his worst when lamenting the artist’s condition and at his best when he has real subjects to work with, as in his earlier pictures inspired by Diana and Actaeon, in which he introduces thematic variations and weaves in motifs from his earlier repertoire. And we could mention too the costumes and sets for Robert Helpmann’s ballet Electra, whose central character is the dark, embittered, childless daughter of Agamemnon, consumed by her desire for revenge on her murderous mother.

The prints are, however, the most delightful revelation of the exhibition, and they demonstrate once again the enormous benefit of working from a subject with its own substance. The series of the Lady and the Unicorn, inspired by Peter Porter’s poem, is particularly rich and inventive. The shorter series of illustrations to Aristophanes’s Lysistrata — his anti-war comedy about women who go on a sex strike until their men stop fighting — is also surprising, lively and memorable.

At the same time, there are too, throughout the exhibition, some fine landscapes, from the early works to Broken Falls, The Grampians (1950) or the large study of grey dunes painted in England, that speak of simple attention to the environment without the compulsion to express anything more ambitious. This is what seems to be hinted at, as we saw, in those windows barred by chicken wire, and it was something that Boyd was able to enjoy at his Shoalhaven property, now the Bundanon Trust. There is one Shoalhaven view here, incongruously framed by a minutely literal doorway.

And there is another small and understated landscape that says much about the artist’s vision, but in an unusually quiet and intimate mode: it is a view of a beach, with a ray stranded on the shore. A dog races up towards it, to us a playful creature but to the ray a figure of menace. The distant hint of a city tells us that this is Port Phillip Bay; a reminiscence, perhaps, of something seen when the artist was a teenager, sent to live at the family beach house with his aged and widowed grandfather.

Arthur Boyd: Agony & Ecstasy, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until November 9.