Arthur Boyd and His ‘Prodigal Son’ Mural

A viewing of the impressive exhibition of Arthur Boyd’s works mounted by the National Gallery of Australia this spring just past, has combined with a more recent visit to Boyd’s house at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales to prompt some timely reflections on one who was arguably the most significant figure among the Australian artists of the twentieth century.

Overall, the body of Boyd’s work as a painter, ceramicist and graphic artist can be located fairly directly in the midst of the canon of the Humanist-Expressionist wing of modern art, occupying a place and adopting a series of styles which remind one very much of the leading international exponent of that school, the Austrian painter and dramatist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980). Indeed, as Dr Ursula Hoff noted in her 1986 book on Arthur Boyd, Boyd met Kokoschka in London in the 1960s, and they found each other very simpatico, both as to their respective works and general outlooks.

In reflecting on what the NGA exhibition revealed about Boyd and his place in twentieth-century art, there comes to mind Herbert Read’s comment in 1959 about Kokoschka as “the artist who, more completely and more persistently than any other in our time, has embodied in his painting a visionary and symbolic humanism”. Much the same can be said of Boyd within Australian art.

The extensive selection of works featured in the recent NGA exhibition and the atmosphere evoked at Bundanon, one of a sequence of Boyd’s houses in Australia, Italy and the United Kingdom, both combine to bring home afresh the painterly genius and the remarkable (if modest and humble, compared to Sir Sidney Nolan) personality of Arthur Boyd, who is fondly remembered and much admired by Australian art lovers. The literature on Arthur Boyd and his works has ranged from some of it, especially early on, being quite superficial, to the superb and scholarly studies by Franz Philipp (1967) and Ursula Hoff (1986).

This article records the impressions made by the NGA exhibition and especially what is Boyd’s master work, the surviving fresco mural fragment depicting, in a pastoral setting, the return of The Prodigal Son (1948-49). This mural, long thought by many to have been destroyed, had been rescued from the demolition of the old A’Beckett house “The Grange” at Harkaway in Victoria and was publicly exhibited last spring for the first time in half a century, forming the centrepiece at the NGA. It bids fair to be regarded as the finest single work by Boyd and perhaps even the most significant work by any twentieth-century Australian artist. It was part of Boyd’s extensive gift to the NGA in 1975.

This first public showing of the surviving portion of The Prodigal Son came in “Arthur Boyd: The Agony and the Ecstasy”, an exhibition based on the NGA’s own holdings of Boyd’s works, mainly comprising his generous and extensive gifts to the gallery during his lifetime. This exhibition was curated by Dr Deborah Hart of the NGA, who compiled the scholarly and detailed accompanying catalogue. Whilst the exhibition was thus not a full and exhaustive “retrospective”, it nevertheless provided a good overall conspectus of Boyd’s achievement, as shown by his treatment of most of his major subject matters or themes.

It must suffice for the present to note just a few of the things, apart from The Prodigal Son, which impressed me in the NGA’s exhibition. First, an early pair of landscapes painted on the Mornington Peninsula in 1937. These wonderful and airy pastoral views, painted in a thick, rich and creamy palette, remind us that Boyd was a very fine artist in full command of his powers and with an already fully formed technique equalling, in the pastoral field, that of his uncle Penleigh Boyd (1890–1923). Indeed (allowing for the differences in style and means) Boyd’s early works are in some ways a little reminiscent of certain landscapes from the admittedly dryer and more restrained palette of Elioth Gruner (1882–1939). It is perhaps significant and a measure of the luminous quality of this particular pair of landscape works, that Boyd retained them himself and eventually included them in his gift to the nation.

The second high point of the exhibition for me was the St Francis of Assisi Tapestries made by the Portalegre Tapestry Workshop to Arthur Boyd’s maquettes, for which Boyd travelled to Portugal to collaborate on their production. They are a remarkable cycle and serve to complete or crown Boyd’s biblical series. They are vivid in their colours but are very finely rendered in their texture as tapestry, so that there is imparted to them a subtlety of line which combines with the warmth of the hues to achieve deeply satisfying effects. These St Francis Tapestries at the NGA also remind us that the greatest public monument to Arthur Boyd is his large tapestry for Australia’s new Parliament House, inaugurated in 1988.

The centrepiece of the NGA exhibition, The Prodigal Son, is merely a portion or fragment of the mural cycle painted in 1948-49 for the walls of the dining room of The Grange, which Arthur’s uncle, the writer Martin Boyd, bought from a cousin on his return to Australia in 1948 and was redecorating. He commissioned his nephew to do these murals for 500 pounds. It was Arthur Boyd’s first commission and was to represent a turning point for his work, and for his confidence in himself and his artistic powers.

The best discussion and appreciation of Boyd’s murals at The Grange is by Franz Philipp in his superbly researched and carefully considered monograph on Arthur Boyd published by Thames & Hudson in 1967, at which time the murals, although damaged, were still in place. Philipp records:

the murals were painted “with casein tempera mixed with powder colour, which is an old [Max] Doerner recipe” and thus are not true frescoes in the Italian sense. Apart from a dado of about 2 ft 9 ins, they completely cover the wall area of a room about 15 ft 6 ins by 18 ft and nearly 12 feet high. The western wall, the only one not pierced by openings, has as its figural centre an episode from the parable of the Prodigal Son; the adjoining inner northern wall, which is divided by a door, has the story of Susannah and the Elders; the chimney wall, its left compartment broken by a door, shows over the mantelpiece the Assumption of the Virgin; and the outer wall, divided by a window, is decorated with sections of a landscape-frieze of bush and clearings which runs uninterruptedly round the whole room with linking sopraporte. The total painted area amounts to approximately 67 by 10 feet.

It is ironic, but quite symptomatic of 1960s Australia, that we owe the preservation of these details of what is arguably Boyd’s greatest work, to the careful and scholarly observation of Philipp, himself a refugee from Nazified Europe. In the then typical fashion, The Grange was acquired by a Victorian quarrying company and was ultimately demolished. Brenda Niall, after her biography of Martin Boyd and in her book on the wider Boyd family, notes that the murals might have been totally lost to the wrecker’s ball (the fate of much cultural heritage in Australia in the 1960s, as it had been in the United Kingdom in the 1950s) but for parts being saved from destruction by the timely intervention of the great Melbourne art collector and dealer Joseph Brown.

At Arthur Boyd’s pleading instigation by tele­phone from London (“Save them, Joey”), Brown arranged for skilled Italian masons to isolate and remove significant sections of the mural, by “crad­ling” them on concrete footers. This delicate and cumbersome work preserved what we now have, including the portion in the NGA show, which is about half of the whole scene of the Return of the Prodigal Son from the western wall at The Grange. Luckily, this is the central part of the scene with the key figures.

Franz Philipp notes that this mural depiction of the Prodigal Son had been preceded by “two previous renderings of episodes from the parable … [but] at The Grange, the artist depicts the ‘Return of the Prodigal’ with its message of contrition and loving forgiveness”. Philipp provides us with this description of the work:

The scene is set in a grassy clearing through which a small stream meanders, leading back into the open “landscape window”—a rising hill with ring-barked trees. The landscape, painted with wonderful warmth and freedom, is one of Boyd’s masterpieces. The focal colouristic accent of the figure group—the golden yellow of the father’s garment—rises with a warm Venetian richness out of the colour hues of the lush, sunlit river bank. Indeed the whole tonal chord of reds and blues, brown and yellowish greens meeting in that golden glow is thoroughly Venetian—an enchanted warmth rarely to be found in Australian painting. It is a landscape of truth, poetically transposed. The screen of a leafy thicket with its strongly linear rhythms of curving branches and foliage, the way the two other figure groups [now separated from the exhibited portion of the mural] are entangled within it and the more distant vistas shine through it, is again characteristic of Jacopo Tintoretto, whose influence on Boyd’s art had been in ascendancy for some years; it reaches its greatest fruitfulness in The Grange murals.

This is high praise indeed; and from an art historian and scholar who ranks amongst the most eminent and discerning to settle on Australia’s shores. Dr Jaynie Anderson’s paper on “Art History’s History in Melbourne: Franz Philipp in Correspondence with Arthur Boyd” (the Franz Philipp Memorial Lecture for 1998) shows the great qualities of Philipp and traces the illuminating course of the extensive correspondence between him and Boyd at the time when Philipp was writing his monograph on Boyd.

After discussing the two other portions of The Grange murals—Susannah and the Elders and The Assumption—Philipp offers this appraisal and summation of what Boyd had achieved in these paintings:

the murals of The Grange mark the crowning and completion of the sequence of [Boyd’s] biblical paintings. In none of the others had the landscape setting played such a prominent, if not predominant, part. One might indeed describe the murals as a continuous landscape frieze with figural accents, as a sub-genre somewhat akin to the decorative mythological frescoes which adorned some of the seventeenth-century villas of Rome.

Yet, as Professor T.S.R. Boase has pointed out, Boyd at that early date in his career (1948) cannot have seen any Italian frescoes (as such). Boyd made his first visit to Italy in 1960, when he was impressed by the works of Simone Martini, Piero della Francesca and Massaccio.

Over the years, there has been a lot of carping by Australian art critics who liked to decry the “Old Masterish” tendencies, as seen for example in the work of Sir William Dobell. There was a militancy about the embracing of “Australian” images—as if there were no universal themes. It is to Boyd’s credit that whilst of course he adopted and embodied in his works various fairly distinctive Australian motifs—such as the black scavenger crows—he also re-created or modulated (rather than imitated) certain classic images from the Western tradition of European art—for example, the very frequent appearance of a dog figure, drawn from Piero and also from Goya. Indeed, it is to masters like Goya and Piero and Massaccio (literally “Clumsy Tom”) and, as Philipp notes, Tintoretto, that we must turn when comparing and assessing Boyd’s artistic achievement.

Here one may be allowed some more general reflections on the broader significance of Boyd’s mural rendering of The Prodigal Son as a major part of Martin Boyd’s program of renovation and redecoration for The Grange in 1948. The first point to be noted is the biblical subject matter and, second, the theme of homecoming, together with the strong “sense of place” and of “dwelling”, from which it springs, that was very obvious in the lives and personalities of the Boyds as a family and of Martin and Arthur Boyd especially. Not for nothing does Brenda Niall entitle chapters in her book on the Boyd family “The Return of Martin Boyd”, “Martin Boyd: The Search for Home”, “Arthur Boyd: Every House a Studio” and “David Boyd: A House in Europe”. As well, we must remember that the murals at The Grange included the Susannah and the Elders episode and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Niall comments on the latter as reflecting Martin’s later turning towards Rome:

The Assumption was a surprising choice for someone who was not [then] a Roman Catholic. The dogma of the Assumption, proclaimed by Pius XII in 1950, was considered divisive by those who hoped, as Martin did, for unity between Rome and the Church of England. In The Cardboard Crown, the narrator explains: “When I told Julian [that is, Arthur] to paint the Assumption of the Virgin … I think my motive as much as anything else was to send the black ghost of Cousin Sarah and her hell-born Calvinism, shrieking out into the Australian Bush.” Since Cousin Sarah, in Martin’s Langton novels, represents in its most rigid form the fundamentalist Christianity in which Minnie Boyd had brought up her children, the Assumption fresco was an ambiguous choice: a celebration of divine maternity and a rejection of one aspect of Martin’s maternal heritage.

Arthur Boyd’s religious position was also somewhat ambiguous, of which more in a moment, in the wider context of his work.

The choice of the parable of the Prodigal Son for the western wall of the dining room at The Grange was thus part of the continuing story and saga of the Boyds, including the personal pilgrimages of both Martin and Arthur—which took them to Europe and back to Australia, with Martin ultimately dying in Rome—in both senses, geographical and faith.

Boyd’s The Prodigal Son mural fragment is thus of particular historical importance in the understanding and appreciation of his work; and it stands as a kind of pivot in the succession of images and themes he was later to develop in his own special brand of what one may call “Humanist Figurative Expressionism” but touched with a tinge of religious faith and more particularly, a certain Old Testament “Grandeur and Universality”. That Boyd in Melbourne in 1948 could produce such an image and paint it in fresco-like form as a mural in a private house, but without any actual exposure to the Italian Primitives and with just some viewings of later and smaller Italian Renaissance works in the National Gallery of Victoria, is in itself a commentary on his great strength and vision as a painter.

On Boyd’s murals, it is not out of place to make comparisons with the work of the likes of Massaccio or Tintoretto. When such comparisons to the earlier European Masters are attempted with respect to other Australian artists, they can seem strained; but not so here with Boyd and especially with a masterwork such as The Prodigal Son. One can fairly compare Boyd’s murals for The Grange, in their dimensions and their archetypical subject matters, to Kokoschka’s late large work for Hamburg University, his Thermoplylae Triptych (1954). Sasha Grishin has said:

in an accomplished classical style of the Old Masters, Boyd demonstrates his versatility and mastery of the language of the Biblical grand narrative, but he delivers it with an unmistakably Australian accent. The idea that scenes of Biblical significance could be tucked away in the scrubby Australian bush was to remain with Boyd for the rest of his life.

It was a privilege to see this mural fragment at the NGA in 2014.

Finally, some wider points that emerge in contemplating Arthur Boyd’s works. Boyd was clearly in some deep sense a man of faith—perhaps best stated as “non-denominational” and distinctly of the humanist stamp. Clearly he was distressed by the evils that beset the world, and the modern world especially. Many of his greatest pictures are portrayals or evocations of various instances of a certain cosmic evil that issues forth in terrestrial evils. He portrays and dramatises these concerns by the use of certain powerful images or motifs—often repeated in a series of works on or around similar subjects or themes—and this is another way in which Boyd’s works and his practice as an artist resemble Oskar Kokoschka’s. Of course, Kokoschka’s horrific experience of trench warfare and of being machine-gunned and sabred on the Eastern Front in the First World War, were altogether of a different order from Boyd’s service with the Australian Army (and only within Australia in the cartographic section) during the Second World War—yet, war service had an undoubtedly great effect upon both these artists who although “sensitive”, were also major craftsmen painters and with tough endurance.

Boyd and Kokoschka both came of fathers who were trained and artistic craftsmen. Kokoschka’s father was a goldsmith and from a long line of goldsmiths, whilst Boyd’s father Merric Boyd was a dedicated artist and lifelong craftsman potter. The importance of such things in an artist’s background ought not to be underestimated, particularly in its contribution to the development of the senses of design and colour, but also of the tactile practices of execution. Happily, one can see this in the remarkable film made in 1985, and now available on DVD, about Boyd and his artistic career and featuring footage showing Boyd’s creation of two large and late Shoalhaven pictures being painted, respectively, en plein air and in Boyd’s studio, at his home Bundanon beside a sandy beach on the Shoalhaven River. The film sequences give a strong insight.

It is significant that some of Boyd’s archetypes are variously biblical, rather than mainly ones drawn from Graeco-Roman (and, more specifically, Ovidian) mythology which was the case for the Central European Kokoschka. This reflects perhaps the stronger echo of biblical (and specifically, Old Testament) themes in the Australian consciousness compared to traditional Graeco-Roman themes, although of course Nolan essayed something of an amalgam of Greece and Australia in his Anzac series by adopting Trojan themes and motifs, and Jean Bellette had also used Graeco-Roman mythologies in many of her frieze-like images with a certain monumental quality. In Boyd’s case, there was also the strong influence of family commitment to the Christian faith, as in Minnie Boyd. It is also worth noting in passing that Arthur Boyd admired Kokoschka’s painting The Bride of the Wind depicting Kokoschka in embrace with his then paramour Alma Mahler. It was profoundly to influence and inform many of Boyd’s later paintings of lovers in various compositions.

This leads one to the question of the political in Arthur Boyd. Boyd has been generally appropriated by the Left in Australia as one of their favourite artists and indeed, with his pacifist and humanist views, Boyd’s own political sympathies seem to have been broadly leftist. However, there is also evidence that Boyd actively avoided some of the more domineering and pugnacious propagandists of Modernism in art, fearing that they would suffocate his own creativity. For instance, whilst in touch, he kept a little distance from John and Sunday Reed and their circle as he did not want to be “eaten up” by them.

As with the work of his friend Kokoschka, there is, in many of Boyd’s works, a strong element of the didactic and even the overtly political. For instance, one recalls a Boyd Shoalhaven view of a river ravine, painted sometime about the late 1970s, bearing on a depicted tree trunk the inscription “Don’t Drop the Bomb”, which adorned the foyer of the Attorney-General’s Department in Canberra during the 1980s. It is true that in many, maybe most, or even all, “Expressionist” artists, there has been a prevailing strain of the political—Herbert Read had said as much of Kokoschka in this regard; although Read, an anarchist, was wont to go further and assert that “modern painting is only explicable in its political context”. However, one needs to look beyond the didacticism in Boyd (which was indeed admittedly more than just occasional) and consider the images, the strong sense of design and composition and his supremely painterly qualities. It is in these senses and upon these points which one can and should appraise his achievement as a painter; and nowhere more so than in his The Grange biblical murals.

Consider this revealing passage from Niall’s biography of Martin Boyd about the political in regard to Arthur Boyd and his work:

Arthur Boyd did not share his uncle’s [Martin Boyd] religious faith, nor was he a conservative in the same sense. Yet to grow up in Merric Boyd’s household, with the influence of Minnie Boyd in the background, guaranteed a strong religious dimension in his imagination. He and Martin had pacifism in common, and although Arthur’s politics were of the Left, Martin felt that there was a fundamental agreement between them.

As they talked at The Grange in 1948, Martin tried to revise his nephew’s categories of Right and Left. His own distinction was to place on the Left “all those whose sole reason for working [was] to make money” and whose conception of life was materialistic: stockbrokers, bankers, scientists, mechanics. On the Right was the Duke, the peasant and the artist. In a conversation which went almost unaltered into The Cardboard Crown, Arthur Boyd protested: “I always thought the Left was right” … He was smiling but a little truculent. “Nonsense,” [Martin] said. “You don’t believe it at all. If you did you couldn’t paint as you do. Your painting would damn you at once if the Communists had power. It’s traditional, rooted in nature, Catholic, it breathes the inescapable sorrows of the human race. It denies flatly that science can cure the soul of Man. Otherwise how could I have asked you to decorate a room in this house?”

Hence the significance of The Grange murals.

To conclude, we may note what Barry Humphries, a friend of Boyd’s in Australia and in London, wrote in his review of Darleen Bungey’s Arthur Boyd—A Life (2007):

These fugitives from Central Europe [such as Franz Philipp and Peter Herbst] must have been amazed to find a young and sparsely educated Australian painter who seemed to be inherently part of a European tradition. In his formative years, Arthur could not have known the work of Max Slevogt or Lovis Corinth or Emil Nolde or Oskar Kokoschka, yet he instinctively understood Expressionism. His fellow artists in Melbourne and many local critics were bewildered when he ventured beyond his role of safe Victorian landscape painter and produced more disturbing images. I remember an exhibition of his ceramic sculptures at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1957, followed shortly by the famous “White Bride” series at the Australian Galleries, which left the critics nonplussed, without a vocabulary to describe what they had seen, except to mutter “Chagall” as earlier they had muttered “Breughel”. Boyd’s work in the late ’50s was so extraordinary it defied criticism and it was greeted with that pained scepticism with which we Australians always regard a successful or original compatriot.

On a more personal note, Humphries recalled of Boyd:

A visit to Arthur’s studio was always a treat, whether at his old Melbourne home at Beaumaris, in Hampstead Lane, their villa in Tuscany or at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River. Whatever the landscape outside, there was invariably an Australian painting on the easel, for Arthur had perfect recall of a place and even as his allegorical landscapes became more violent and disturbing he would always return to the serene landscapes he knew and loved best … Arthur was deeply emotional and, although his paintings reveal him to be a man haunted by many demons, on the surface he diffused an ingenuous, almost saintly aura. I have rarely seen him angry but I think nothing ever hurt him more than when he learnt that a picture he had generously given to a friend had been sold without telling him. To such ingrates he rarely spoke again.

It is highly significant that Franz Philipp chose to illustrate Boyd’s The Prodigal Son mural in a large (tipped-in) full colour plate in his 1967 monograph on the artist—a fact some art historians have been either oblivious of, or have chosen to ignore, in their rush to emphasise other and harsher themes in Boyd’s body of work. We should congratulate the NGA, and Dr Hart and her team, for surmounting the physical challenges of exhibiting the large and very heavy mortar and masonry support of The Prodigal Son as removed and rescued from The Grange and now in the NGA’s collection.

Allow me two timely pleas to the NGA, with its newly appointed Director, Dr Gerard Vaughan AM. Boyd’s mural should be placed on permanent show at NGA, as a national monument to Boyd and his achievement. Second, the NGA should consider the acquisition of a representative work in oils by Boyd’s friend Oskar Kokoschka. Such an acquisition would not only fill a clear gap in the holdings of twentieth-century art in Australian public galleries, but it would also provide a better and more readily accessible context for Arthur Boyd’s work as a leading “Figurative Expressionist”—both in Australia and internationally.

Dr Douglas Hassall is a frequent contributor on art. Among his articles is one on Oskar Kokoschka in the June 2011 issue.