Peter Beard - Photographs New York Monday, April 9, 2018 | Phillips

Photographs

New York Auction 9 April 2018

  • Provenance

    The Time is Always Now, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    The large and brilliantly complex work offered here combines Peter Beard’s deep interest in the natural world and his fascination with beauty. The juxtaposition of Marilyn Monroe with Beard’s aerial photographs of the carcasses of dead elephants in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park eloquently draws these themes together within an impressive and visually dazzling composition.

    While Beard’s photographic documentation of African wildlife is responsible for his early reputation, it is his collages that are among the most significant works in his oeuvre. It is perhaps the ideal medium for an artist as visually omnivorous as Beard, who makes inspired use of disparate original and found imagery drawn from a wide variety of sources and media. In Heart Attack City his inclusion of three-dimensional elements, such as the feathers, adds to the visual richness of the piece. Beard’s handwritten script appears around the entire periphery of the central images and includes daily memoranda, and statistics and history on the elephant deaths at Tsavo. Drawings by the Hog Ranch Art Department – African artists who often embellish his work – add layers of meaning and provide an injection of bright color. These illustrations fill the margins of Heart Attack City with human and animal figures whose frenzied antics recall Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

    This masterful piece shows Beard’s remarkable ability to locate beauty even in death. The tragic figure of Marilyn Monroe remains unassailably beautiful amidst the destruction that surrounds her. Beard’s aerial studies transform the bleached bones of elephants into exquisite calligraphic abstractions.

    Critic and photography historian Jonathan Green places Beard in the lineage of American collagists that includes Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell. He writes,
    “Beard, like Rauschenberg and Cornell before him, is a collector obsessively hoarding images that relate to his adopted African home, Kenya. Pasting fragments of photographs together with drawings and writing . . . Beard weaves a tapestry of inexhaustible terror and energy. His collaged images contain newspaper clippings, cellophane wrappers, travel plans, SX-70s, African identification photos, snakeskins, and handprints in his own blood. These are placed side by side with images of high fashion, primitive cultures, the last of the African wild animals, and the first twentieth-century pinups . . . Beard’s intuitive sense of organization and form transforms these mysterious and personal observations to the level of shared truths” (A Critical History of American Photography, pp. 160-161).

150

Peter Beard

Heart Attack City

1972
Gelatin silver print with ink, blood, feathers, affixed gelatin silver prints and watercolor drawings by the Hog Ranch Art Department, executed later.
39 5/8 x 48 3/8 in. (100.6 x 123 cm)
Overall 55 3/8 x 85 3/8 in. (140.7 x 217 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and extensively annotated in ink on the recto; ‘The Time is Always Now’ label affixed to the reverse of the frame.

Estimate
$500,000 - 700,000 

Sold for $603,000

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Photographs

New York Auction 9 April 2018