Death of a Husband 1958

ARTHUR BOYD (1920-1999)

Death of a Husband 1958

oil on composition board
91.5 x 122.5 cm
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Provenance:
The artist
Private collection, Melbourne since 1972
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 19 August 1996, lot 160
Savill Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney
Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 21 August 2000, lot 10
Private collection, London
Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 8 September 2004, lot 42
Private collection, Melbourne
Lawson-Menzies, Sydney, 6 February 2007, lot 325
Private company collection, Melbourne
Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney, 18 June 2008, lot 27
Private collection, Melbourne
Menzies, Sydney, 24 March 2011, lot 43
Property of a business partnership, Melbourne
Menzies, Sydney, 13 September 2012, lot 38
Corporate collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Exhibition by Arthur Boyd, Allegorical Paintings, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 22 April - 5 May 1958, cat.5
Arthur Boyd Allegorical Paintings, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, June 1958, cat.5
Arthur Boyd, David Jones Gallery, Sydney, 1 - 13 October 1958, cat.13
Arthur Boyd, The Bride, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 8 November - 14 December 1986, cat.13
The Works of Arthur Boyd, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 12 May-6 June; Melbourne, 1 - 18 July, 1998, cat.8 (illus.)
A Tribute to Arthur Boyd, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 6 October - 3 November; Melbourne, 14 - 19 December, 1999, cat.10 (illus.)

Reference:
Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, cat.9.24

Estimate: $600000 - 800000

Result Hammer: $560000

The year 1958 was a momentous one for Arthur Boyd. He held three boldly new and successful exhibitions in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney; he had all but completed his Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste (The Bride Series); the National Gallery of Victoria acquired his well-known work Shearers playing for a Bride and his paintings were selected to represent Australia at the 29th Venice Biennale, together with those of Sir Arthur Streeton (1867-1943).

 

Arthur Boyd was essentially very different from other Australian artists. His Christian Science upbringing was fundamental and it instilled in him a strong work ethic and an inner self-belief that sustained him through grueling times and periods of serious poverty. Christian Science, founded in 1875 by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), stresses devotion, harmony, healing through prayer and maintains a firm belief in the spiritual rather than the material. It holds that people are born good, thus rejecting the concept of Original Sin, and sees life as a search for a clearer identification with the Creator. The very gentle and generous Boyd died a multi millionaire and was awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1992 and voted Australian of the Year in 1995. He remained intensely private and humble all his life and found it almost impossible to discuss any aspect of his work. 

 

Arthur Boyd was discharged from Australian Army service on 2 March 1944 and he married his wife Yvonne on 6 March 1945 at the Reverend Stanley Neighbour’s manse in Oakleigh on a weekday, after work. No celebrations were held and no one was invited to the marriage event. The couple honeymooned at the distant and then almost uninhabited Victorian seaside town of Apollo Bay, one hundred and fifty-four kilometres West of Melbourne. Even these few facts give some indication of the humility, intense shyness and privacy of the man. Boyd lived his life completely through his art. He had neither time nor patience for much else; as a result, very few Australian artists can claim a full sixty-two years of successful exhibitions.

 

Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-caste or The Bride Series, as it is commonly called, was created during the years 1957 and late 1958.  The theme and subject matter of the paintings most probably arose from Boyd’s personal thoughts and keen observations made on a trip to Central Australia in 1953.1 The series of sixteen paintings and five studies was first shown at the Australian Galleries in Melbourne in April 1958. The works were as follows:  Shearers Playing for a Bride; Persecuted Lovers, Groom waiting for his Bride to Grow Up; Neglected Bridegroom; Death of a Husband; The Mourning Bride; The Baptism; Protection (ceramic slab); The Frightened Bridegroom; The Reflected Bride; The Escaped Bride; Half-caste Child; Bridegroom going to his Wedding; Wedding Group; Phantom Bride; Escaped Bride (study); The Lovers (study); The Dreaming Bridegroom; The Watching Bridegroom; Bridegroom Sailing Away (study); The Lovers (sketch).2 Paintings from The Bride Series were later shown in many exhibitions, especially his first London exhibition at Zwemmers and his retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1962. The Bride Series earned Boyd praise and brought him considerable fame, although at first the paintings’ puzzling themes, raw treatments and thick impasto caused shock and incomprehension.

 

After World War II, almost every contemporary Australian artist was reading, or was aware of, two books entitled Creative and Mental Growth of 1947 and The Nature of Creative Activity of 1939 published by the Austrian/American psychologist Viktor Lowenfeld (1903-1960) in 1947. Amongst other things, he defined and defended the idea that the creative mind operates through two broad approaches – one he called the ‘visual’ and the other the ‘haptic’. The visual approach to creativity is cautious, precise, painstaking and intellectual and by contrast the haptic approach, is free, imprecise, loose and emotional. The haptic artist is characteristically uncommunicative and often quite unaware of the source and purpose of his or her art, while the visual artist is often aware and responsive since the process of art making is more rationalistic. Lowenfeld promoted ‘free creative expression’, especially for children, and he became the doyen of American and Australian art eduction right through to the late Sixties. In describing the haptic mental response Lowenfeld could almost be speaking directly of Arthur Boyd: ‘the haptic type is primarily concerned with his own body sensations and the subjective experiences in which he feels emotionally involved’. Furthermore, in contradistinction with the visual artistic response the haptic artist’s concerns are those of ‘the body-self’ wherein ‘all experiences place the self in value relationship to the outside world’. In other words, to the haptic artist the world is made up of felt experiences rather than observed occurrences. Boyd generally may be seen as a modern haptic artist in that he does not want to get it right, he wants to feel right about it.

 

An important offshoot of this new intellectually interiorised activity and stress on personal feeling was the rise of a special interest in the art of the self-taught, or autodidactic, artist – that is, artists such as Arthur Boyd and his close friend and brother-in-law John Perceval (1923-2000). In the haptic approach paint brushes were often discarded and spatulas, twigs and palette knives were used and often paint was applied by hand alla prima, that is directly on the unprimed canvas, which was left with very thick, streaked impasto and deeply textured surfaces. It was thought that the raw and unpolished impulse found in the paintings of untrained artists held a more authentic subjective power and that it was motivated by more direct and genuine emotional urges.

 

It is quite difficult to pinpoint the exact source of the brooding impact of The Bride Series, but the influence of the publicity surrounding the idea of Aboriginal Assimilation in the mid Fifties cannot be underestimated. Many of the issues that underpinned this idea were implicit in the Aboriginal Act of 1939 and its protectionist agenda, which tacitly, and sometimes not so tacitly, promoted the absorption and assimilation of Aborigines. Times have changed and assimilation was taken over by the concept of integration and then in turn by policies of self-determination. Add to this Boyd’s trip to Central Australia in 1953 where he was appalled by the ways Aborigines were treated and one has many aesthetic possibilities. It is easy to speculate that Boyd’s humanistic temper and Christian Science views were deeply offended by what was happening to Aborigines and by what was being proposed by the Australian Federal Government in the early to mid Fifties. It is quite likely that these thoughts supplied Boyd with a unifying thread that runs through The Bride Series. Typically, Boyd plays his cards very close to his chest and guards his personal opinions, but perhaps the best of The Bride Series, his Shearers Playing for a Bride of 1957 in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria gives something away. The painting shows three Aboriginal male figures gambling to claim a white bride who stands to the right of the canvas ready to give a bouquet of flowers to the claiming winner. Boyd’s black ram, his symbol of carnality, interposes between the two main elements of the picture plane. The most ominous part of this painting is placed almost directly in the centre of the canvas where a large double image of a human skull presides over the card game. Boyd’s feelings about integrationist and assimilation issues are made clear: in these schemes, the Aborigine is doomed. 

 

Arthur Boyd’s oil painting Death of a Husband of 1958 shows a dead Aboriginal male figure lying in an undersized coffin. He wears a trooper’s jacket and seems to gaze upward. At his feet a tree sprouts, much like the traditional Tree of Life, and its red tones seem to indicate that all the Aborigine’s blood has been drained from his body. Above the coffin and protruding from the red tree is the grieving head of the white bride. She holds a bouquet of predominantly blue flowers that seem destined to join those placed near the dead figure’s right hand. A blue moon throws an eerie and sombre glow over the scene and the overall impression is one of lament. One finds it hard to avoid thinking that the painting was prompted by the trauma caused to a friend upon losing a husband, which was then transformed by Boyd’s imagination to construct an analogy of the ultimate fate of the Aborigine through the processes of assimilation and inter-marriage. 

 

The allegorical and narrative tension of The Bride Series is also played out in a related painting of 1955 entitled Half-caste Wedding. In this painting the Aborigine and white woman hold each other to the left centre of the work. Immediately behind the woman is a cow skull and adjacent to this is a windmill. All of these elements point to the woman’s rural origins. By contrast, next to the Aborigine stands a kangaroo with Aboriginal marking standing on a dead Aborigine. These elements stand for the Aborigine’s background and the dead figure symbolises the future of the race. A two-storey house stands behind the embracing couple as an indication of the couple’s wedded bliss. Their embracing Chagall-like 1887-1985) bodies float in the house’s upper section in imagined happy union, while the vicar with his white collar looks over the whole scene. 

 

Boyd’s foray into the iconography of The Bride series of paintings was also most likely prompted by the rise of an interest in myth making and legend searching in Australian art and culture. Beside Boyd, the most successful of these was Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series of paintings, Albert Tucker’s Australian Head series and Patrick White’s (1912-1990), 1957 book Voss. Boyd’s oil painting Death of a Husband of 1958 sits in very fine company and is part of a historic cultural trend that searched for a distinctive Australian cultural voice in the mid Fifties. Boyd’s accomplished and very rare work Death of a Husband, with its impeccable exhibition history, fits precisely in that search and it stands as an important part of Boyd’s iconic The Bride Series of paintings. 

 

Footnotes:

1. The date 1951 has been ascribed to this trip since 1967 with the publication of Franz Philipp’s much cited book.  Recent scholarship has revealed that 1953 is the correct date. I owe this information to Dr. Darleen Bungey.  See her recent excellent study: Bungey, D., Arthur Boyd, A Life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007, see endnote 35, p. 591; endnote 12. p. 589

2. I owe this information to Dr. Darleen Bungey. ibid, endnote 35, p. 591

 

Literature

Bungey, D., Arthur Boyd, A Life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007

Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986

Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993

Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, Sydney, 1967

Smith, B., Australian Painting 1788-90, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991

 

 

Associate Professor Ken Wach

Dip. Art; T.T.T.C.; Fellowship RMIT; MA; PhD.

Emeritus Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts

The University of Melbourne.