Arthur Boyd’s Bride series explores issues beyond indigenous affairs

ARTHUR Boyd was a poetic, not a political painter, and the Bride series is not primarily about the plight of Aborigines.

In Half-caste child (1957), Arthur Boyd uses a simple way to visually represent the girl’s mixed parentage.

IT is a credit to the Heide Museum to be presenting this important exhibition devoted to Arthur Boyd’s Bride series, but also slightly puzzling, because one might have expected work of this significance to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria. After all, the series is the one with which Boyd established himself as one of the handful of defining Australian painters of the postwar years, and it is one whose originality and evocative power was never surpassed and perhaps not equalled in his later oeuvre.

In this regard it is comparable to Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series of a decade earlier: the Kelly pictures made Nolan’s reputation, and they remain arguably the most memorable works he produced; there was a vast output in the decades that followed, but of disturbingly variable quality.

Both series have always been recognised as outstanding contributions to the Australian art of their time, but the circumstances of their painting and subsequent ownership has meant Nolan’s Kelly series became better known. Most of them remained together in the collection of John and Sunday Reed until the latter gifted a set of 25 to the National Gallery of Australia in 1977 — confirming their place in the history of Australian art.

Boyd’s pictures did not have the good fortune of belonging to a single patron, but were sold to many collectors and scattered around the world, and have only in recent decades begun to make their way back to Australia. This made it hard to see them as a series, and many of them have rarely if ever been shown since their first commercial exhibitions. Outstanding individual pieces, such as Shearers playing for a bride (1957, NGV), Persecuted lovers (1957-58, Art Gallery of South Australia), or The Reflected bride (1957-58, NGA), are in public collections, but most remain in private hands.

It will be interesting to see how this situation evolves over the next decade or so. One would expect more works to come on to the market, and it would be a good thing if the NGV could acquire several more of the essential pictures in the series, such as Half-caste child (1957) and Bride running away (1957), as well as perhaps The Frightened bridegroom (1957-58) — this smaller version is much better painted than the larger one made in 1958, Bridegroom going to his wedding (1957-58) and one or two others from 1958. The subsequent pictures made in 1959 and 1960 generally lack the focus and intensity of the earlier ones.

We could eventually look forward to a room or bay at the NGV grouping the core of the Bride series, which would be given the prominence it deserves and become accessible as part of the narrative of Australian art in the decades after World War II. But the fact the show is on at Heide does not suggest the NGV has anything like this in mind. Perhaps it will take an enlightened gift or bequest to set something like this in train.

Part of the problem seems to be a reticence about the subject matter of the series, even a distinct angst about the artist’s treatment of Aboriginal themes. Boyd, who had hardly seen any Aborigines as he grew up, encountered the reality of their lives during a trip to the outback in 1951. He was struck by a number of things: the poverty, the exploitation and the constraints under which they lived. But as an artist, he was especially gripped by the image of brides riding to a wedding in the back of a ute, and he was moved by the pathos of half-caste children who seemed to belong neither to the indigenous nor to the white world.

There is a first picture in which some of these themes appear, but do not yet cohere into a poetic narrative: Half-caste wedding (1954). It was only in 1957 that the impressions of the trip matured in his imagination and produced two images that are fundamental to the series. In one, Half-caste child, we see what appears to be a white girl clinging to a black man; then we realise she has black legs and feet, a strikingly simple way of visually representing her mixed parentage. The narrative is clear: the weeping Aboriginal woman in the door of the hut behind is her mother, and she is the product of an adulterous relationship with a white man; the man from whom she seeks affection and who looks away so grimly is not her father.

The other remarkable early picture from the same year is Bride running away, in which the girl — here represented as all white — is shown fleeing from an older man who is presumably her father, or at least her mother’s husband.

The third fundamental early picture in the series is Shearers playing for a bride, where the girl, on the right, seems to be waiting for fate to decide which of the three black shearers will win her. The game of cards is played by moonlight, with moths gathering around a lamp above, just as the shearers are drawn to her. Her role is deeply ambiguous: she is impassive but for a certain melancholy; she holds a bouquet of flowers, while Boyd’s ramox — a dark horned beast symbolic of lust and base passions — is jumping up on her like a dog.

The reasons these pictures and themes have caused unease today is perhaps to do with what might be considered an exaggerated treatment of Aboriginal features, though any exaggerations need to be seen in the context of Boyd’s expressionistic style in which figures from the visionary early pictures to the Nebuchadnezzar series are all violently distorted. Perhaps there is concern about the subject of the half-caste bride and the alienation entailed by her mixed-raced status, especially in light of what we now know about the removal of mixed-race children.

One can see how even Boyd himself, 20 years after the pictures had been painted, could be led by changing cultural attitudes to feel a little guilty about the series. He is reported to have said he could have been more explicit or forceful in his commentary on Aboriginal disadvantage. On the other hand some recent admirers of Boyd’s work and of this series in particular have tried to argue for a politically engaged reading of his images.

But Boyd was a poetic, not a political painter, and the truth is the series is not primarily about the plight of the Aborigines any more than the Nebuchadnezzar series is literally about the Biblical character. The figures of the shearers and the brides and the half-caste children have all become, in Boyd’s imagination, universal symbols of love, desire, loss, loneliness and pain; ultimately, images of the impossibility of wholeness and harmony.

Boyd was not an intellectual, a theorist or an ideologue; he followed his imagination in searching for images that could articulate his deepest instincts about the human condition. Here we can see that quite early in the series, he abandons the half-caste theme and emphasises instead the tension of black suitor and white bride. Time and again, he evokes longing, appetite, separation and despair: the bridegroom riding a horse that has the head of the bride; the bride weeping over the dead groom. These are not subjects that can be decoded into a political iconography, they are simply intuitive images of the impossibility of union.

The impossible conjunction is primarily that of man and woman, and commentators never fail to recall the painful memories he had of his mother refusing his father entry to her bedroom. Other pictures allude, as his recent biography has shown, to a difficult time in his own life, when his wife had suffered a nervous breakdown, and he was engaged in a secret liaison with another woman. It was typical of the way Boyd’s imagination worked that whatever he was experiencing would become grist to the mill of his work.

The picture of lovers threatened by a man with a gun has been plausibly identified as reflecting his dread of being found out by his lover’s husband. Here, Boyd is the black bridegroom and the bride is his lover. It is significant that the man with the rifle is represented with a black face; Boyd clearly wanted to exclude any superficial and distracting reading of him as a white man threatening a black man. By this time the white and black colours were almost nothing to do with their original Aboriginal referent, but primarily stood for the polar opposition of male and female.

This use of the colours black and white to signify the irreconcilable difference between the lovers is much less to do with any observation about the difficulties of relations between individuals of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds than an archetypal symbol of what is antithetical and yet complementary, like male and female or the moon and the sun.

Indeed the more we look at these pictures, the more we find the overt subject transforming into poetic ideas of more general connotation. The impossibility of the union or synthesis of male and female itself transcends the objective distinction between the sexes and seems to become a more universal principle within the human subject, something like Jung’s idea of the animus and the anima.

The pictures, ultimately, seem to speak of the irreconcilable duality within the human soul: the dark and the light, the masculine and the feminine, the assertive and the receptive. In a classical and humanist view of the world, these elements may come into a harmonious synthesis or rhythmic alternation. In Boyd’s bleak post-Christian vision of a world populated with suffering, guilty sinners, they are eternally at odds, eternally in tragic opposition.

So the Bride pictures, although initially inspired by glimpses of Aboriginal life, are far wider and more general in meaning. This certainly does not mean Boyd was indifferent to the suffering of Aborigines. In the end his greatest tribute to the Aboriginal people was not in making any superficial and tendentious statement about their social situation, but rather in adopting them as powerful symbols of universal human experience and suffering.

Arthur Boyd: Brides

Heide Museum of Modern Art. Until March 9