Arthur Boyd and Saint Francis of Assisi

Margaret Pont. Melbourne: Macmillan, 2004.
ISBN 1876832-80-0

The work of Arthur Boyd, arguably Australia's most important artist, has inspired another publication; this time a small volume devoted entirely to Boyd's work on the subject of St Francis of Assisi. The St Francis works were produced in the 1960s, five years after the artist moved from Melbourne to London. In 1963, prior to his visit to Umbria, Boyd looked at the Sassetta paintings at the National Gallery, London. In the summer of 1964, he and his family travelled to Italy, visiting the towns of Gubbio and Assisi. In the autumn of the same year, Boyd produced pastel images of the 'Wolf of Gubbio'. Arthur Boyd and Saint Francis of Assisi by Margaret Pont is the first publication to reproduce the pastels in full colour, as well as tapestries produced subsequently by Maunfactura Tapecarias de Portalegre, Portugal, 1972-1974. The latter formed part of the massively generous Arthur Boyd gift to the National Gallery of Australia and have, for the most part, been in storage, or hanging in the residence of the Governor General in Canberra. This new volume is a handsome addition to the existing Boyd literature.

The 1960s were, for Boyd's career, characterised by a great interest in experimentation with alternative media such as pastel, printmaking and ceramic painting. A number of vital collaborative projects provided varied stimulus for Arthur Boyd at key moments in his career. The two most influential of these involved TSR Boase, Oxford don and Fellow of All Souls College, specialising in medieval history, and the poet Peter Porter. In the introduction to Franz Philipp's landmark book, Arthur Boyd, Boase accords his painting the highest praise. Of Boyd's frescoes (1948-) for his uncle, the author Martin Boyd, Boase states, 'Nowhere in the Southern Hemisphere has the past, the frescoed room, the famous stories, so fertilised the present.' Of his two paintings of the Expulsion, 'it is a scene that has inspired great works, but not even Masaccio's immense despair has greater poignancy than this'.1

The publication of Arthur Boyd led the publishers to commit to two further titles. Here, a rare and exceptional collaboration was engendered between inspired London publishers Thames and Hudson and the artist and chosen author. The creative importance of this initial sequence of collaborative graphic work cannot be overestimated. However, the text to accompany Margaret Pont's book falls short in appreciating how extraordinary it was for a publisher of Thames and Hudson's status to invest so greatly in a single artist in mid-career, in the 1960s. The personal commitment of Walter Neurath and editor, Tom Rosenthal, proved to be vital to Boyd's career. The critical attention he received consolidated his career and the financial ramifications were most significant after he was taken up by Fischer Fine Art, one of the most prestigious galleries in London. The resulting increase in income gave him not just the opportunity to buy property in London and Australia (and later in Italy), but the freedom to experiment with a medium such as lithography - involving assistants and expert printers - to paint prolifically and to travel extensively. At the time, the actual cost of high-quality publishing was much greater than advanced recent technology allows. The Boyd books, published by Thames and Hudson and, after the departure of Rosenthal, by Secker and Warburg, and André Deutsch, were seen from the publishers' perspective as essentially altruistic and not financially motivated.2 In apparent ignorance of this, Pont exclaims, 'How disappointed Boyd must have been when Walter Neurath of Thames and Hudson declared colour reproduction to be too expensive'.3 However, as Tom Rosenthal recalls, the text by Boase was conceived as a textbook, with some illustrations.4 After all, Thames and Hudson had just produced the Franz Philipp book, with extensive colour when compared with the standards of the time. Soon after St Francis, they produced Nebuchadnezzar with text by Boase, in which the paintings led the text. St Francis, as with all the early books, was the pride of both artist and publisher alike. Arthur would not have been disappointed - he was thoroughly unspoilt and in awe of the Neuraths and their very European, intellectual circle, including the artist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he met.

It is to Macmillan's credit that the works featured in Arthur Boyd and Saint Francis of Assisi are now presented as an almost complete and significant series, in a beautifully illustrated and designed volume. However, if Pont had interviewed Dr Jutta and Wolfgang Fischer, of Fischer Fine Art (Boyd's London dealers for 30 years), she might have been made aware of some of the problems surrounding the provenance of a number of Boyd's works in the latter part of his career. When Boyd's health began to fail, certain lifelong friendships and professional relationships were seriously compromised because of the family's concealment of the nature and extent of his illness. Perhaps the case of Willem de Kooning is particularly relevant to the effects on his late works in New York. One cannot be aware of such an impact without noting the serious financial implications for dealers and collectors. It was only years later, after a series of misunderstandings, that key individuals in Boyd's life became aware that Arthur's completely uncharacteristic duplicity in the late Nineties was a consequence of his medical condition. The painting 'St Francis' (1963-1964), to which Pont refers in the chapter 'Oil Paintings with Symbolic Connotations', is a case in point. The painting was held at Fischer Fine Art in King Street, London, for a considerable period of time and it was not, as Pont describes, 'a medium sized rough sketch of which McKenzie gives a very vague description and to date no reproduction of this work has been available'. Boyd's family sold a number of works privately, without the professional agreement between artist and dealer. As a consequence, after Arthur himself sold it privately to an individual in western Australia, its whereabouts was not properly documented. Unaware of the complex situation surrounding the sale of works in the UK during the mid-1990s, Pont makes the absurd and wholly unsubstantiated claim that my own apparently 'loose description refers to the 'St Francis with Potter Holding a Butterfly', renamed after [my] viewing'!5

In fact, if she had actually experienced the painting, she could not have made such an error, for it is an unforgettable work. If she had consulted my doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Martin Kemp, Oxford, formerly of St Andrews University and Emeritus Professor Bernard Smith, Melbourne, she would have realised how important I considered it to be and that I was not prone to renaming Boyd's works. Given that my doctorate was examined by Professor Janie Anderson of the Department of Fine Art at Melbourne University - where Pont's MA thesis on Boyd's St Francis work was carried out - my work on Boyd was surely known to exist beyond Arthur Boyd: Art and Life (Thames and Hudson, 2000). Fischer Fine Art supplied me with a small transparency of the painting, which was subsequently rejected by Thames and Hudson along with some 200 other transparencies made in the 1970s, in spite of the financial ramifications for the book which received no financial support from any source. They were sticklers for quality and determined to do justice to their long association with Arthur Boyd. Since the exact whereabouts of the painting was unknown, it could not be reproduced - the pertinent text was therefore reduced in size, a practice normal in publishing and not a reflection of its diminished significance in the author's mind. In my doctorate I wrote:

'St Francis' (1963-1964) is a large work, almost square in dimension, and iconic in significance. In the Prussian blue area surrounding the central figures, the brushstrokes have been applied in a similar manner to the pastel strokes of the St Francis pastel works. The drawn effect is carried through to the two figures, the observer on the right and St Francis in the centre. The 'Wolf of Gubbio' who was in formal terms Boyd's 'red dog' of numerous earlier works exemplifies contrition. Indeed, Boyd manages in this image to display with tremendous power and insight the feeling of an animal, the unity between man and beast. The figure of St Francis is a most exciting creation, semi-abstract in the impastoed swirls of paint in the face, so enhancing the aura of the saint. The internal framing of the figures is created by the edges of a high-backed chair. In the use of very pure (handmade) paint, St Francis in this painting is very moving: Boyd captures the essence of his persona - the innocence, the power, the miracle of his life.'6