Book review
Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2011
The relentless, more than one hundred strong, series of paintings done by John Beard, between 1993 and 2007, of a rocky pyramid off the coast of Portugal— Adraga—is absolutely pivotal to an appreciation of the development of this ‘Welshman turned half-Australian’s’ career. For the series begins in highly-coloured, gestural abstraction; it goes through a long period of resisting the reality of the triangular rock by prioritising clouds, sunlight, waves and spray—even allowing the black and white contrasts of land and sea to meld in a glorious tumble of greys; and only right at the end is Adraga allowed to emerge triumphant, as rock qua rock, from the spume of Beard’s instinctive abstraction.
It is a glorious moment, which leads directly into the on-going portraiture work that has confirmed for Charles Saumarez Smith, the eminent writer of the ‘Forward’ in this monograph, a belief in Beard’s ‘international reputation’; has allowed catalogue essay-writer Michael Desmond to intuit ‘a fleeting glimpse of the soul’; and has encouraged the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) not only to award Beard the notorious Archibald Prize, but to elect him one of themselves!
John Beard’s progress from abstraction to figuration has also inspired essayists of the monograph, Professor Stephen Bann (of the University of Bristol) and Anthony Bond (of the AGNSW), to cogitate at length on the painterly dilemmas challenging artists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They see Beard as having outfaced these dilemmas by resolving the division between Monet’s ‘act of power over Nature’ and Cezanne’s ‘bringing the viewer over against the self-sufficient motif’.
For me, it is simply the story of the natural momentum in Beard’s