ARTHUR BOYD

Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Infinite Art Gallery, Melboure
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Australian Galleries, 6 August - 18 August 1979, cat. no. 3

Good condition. UV inspection reveals no retouching or restoration.
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While some of Boyd's landscapes are simply beautiful, others are more complicated.  Paintings such as Sunset Cave are dense, almost impenetrable pictorial fables, in which the artist combines personal recollection, cultural reference, Freudian symbolism and moral protest.  The present work exemplifies both the intensity and the complexity of Boyd's evolving iconography.

A number of the elements Boyd uses derive from the period of his military service during WWII, from images seen and drawn in the neighbourhood of the Cartographic Company storage depot in South Melbourne. In the present work, handstand figure reverts to its canine origins. 

Boyd's tragic events and doomed relationships are often accompanied by dark animal shadows, beginning in paintings of the 1940s with the family dog Peter.  The black dog then becomes the bestial Nebuchadnezzar in the 1960s. It is variously reshaped through the influence of Piero di Cosimo's so-called Death of Procris and of Titian's deer-headed Actaeon, and by the memory of vivisection laboratory rabbits.  Finally, in 1972-3 the beast is given his Man in the Iron Mask muzzle, in works such as Figure in a cave with smoking book (National Gallery of Austalia).

Sunset Cave also borrows motifs from other sources.  The cave itself with its dentate profile comes from Paolo Ucello's St George and the Dragon, but through prior usage in Frightened Bridegroom ¹ (1958, Private collection) and Lion's Head in a Cave and Rainbow (1966-9, Private collection).  The pile of gold coins is another Nebuchadnezzar series device.  The bird flying over the cave is local, Shoalhaven landscape colour, but equally recalls the beaked Gargoyles (1944, National Gallery of Australia), the black swan flying over the Lovers in a Boat (1944, National Gallery of Australia) and the crows of the Harkaway and Wimmera landscapes.  The eucalypts are painted with the same fleshy pink trunks and powdery foliage as the little landscapes on copper of 1975-76; the smaller, more distant tree has the same curious angled easel-leg supports as those in Figure resting (1973, National Gallery of Australia).

The power of Boyd's paintings from the late 1970s and of this work in particular lies not in their message but in their mood.  As Grazia Gunn has noted, 'whereas in earlier work the elements were icongraphic fragments restructured into new compositions, the later work relies on transformation, amplification, exaggeration and transference of the images which make up Boyd's iconography.'  The present work, with its haunting, poetic ambiguity, its vivacious surface and desperate narrative testifies to this process, and to the depth of Boyd's powers of invention and reinvention.

1.  Grazia Gunn, Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, p. 15