Arthur Boyd

About the artist

About the work

Australian scapegoat is a major work produced late in Arthur Boyd's career. Characteristically, the painting freely mixes references to classical mythology, Christian iconography and Australian history in the context of the Australian landscape.

Engaging with key themes such as love, heroism, death and the futility of war, Australian Scapegoat depicts a tragic narrative of epic proportions, in a bold, expressionist style. As an expression of anti-war sentiment, and the horrors of war, the work also can be seen in relation to important works internationally, such as Francesco Goya's Disasters of war series and Pablo Picasso's Guernica.

Australian scapegoat's action takes place under the stars, on a precarious strip of land, across which a series of symbolic figures play out an absurd theatre of the carnivalesque.

The scapegoat of Christian parable is an innocent victim, and appears variously in Arthur Boyd's work -- as crippled dog; the artist himself; or the scapegoat soldier, victim of war. Here, the Australian scapegoat leans over water, echoing the self-examination of Narcissus. The figure might also be identified as a prototype digger, or soldier, branded on the forehead with the rising sun insignia.

As Grazia Gunn, curator of the Venice Biennale exhibition, writes:

'The beast can ... be seen as symbolic of both the heroism of the unknown soldier and the inevitable tragedy of war. Boyd sets his beast in a no-way-out scenario. The doomed scapegoat is centrally placed between Venus, the goddess of sensual pleasure, and Mars, the evil god of war. Mars is represented as a youth holding his vindictive mother, Juno, the wife of Jupiter and queen of the heavens.'

-- Grazia Gunn, Arthur Boyd: paintings 1973-1988: The XLIII Biennale of Venice 1988, Australian National Gallery and the Australia Council, Canberra, 1988, p.41.

Throughout Australian scapegoat, Boyd's figures are at turns reverential and iconoclastic. At the left of the painting, an unnamed soldier stands tenderly behind his mother, who is an innocent victim of war, whilst the unexpectedly grotesque figure of Venus, goddess of love, violently holds aloft a dead chicken. Vulcan is depicted as a naked soldier whose head is buried in a theoretical book, the contents of which are digested and excreted as gold coins. In his appropriation of such figures, Boyduses myth to comment on the moral bankruptcy of war. He also asks us to reconsider colonial depictions of the Australian landscape as a romantic arcadia.

Finally, the artist represents himself as tragic witness in the guise of both cripple and clown, in the margins of the painting, armed with his crutch and paint brushes. This image of the artist as a figure of both potential creativity and futile paralysis is typical of the 'collision of opposites' Boyd sought to represent in his work. It also highlights the work as part of a highly personal and visionary expression of his experience of the world.

History and provenance of the work

The large triptych, Australian Scapegoat 1988 was first exhibited at the 1988 Venice Biennale, inaugurating the newly built Australian Pavilion in Australia's bicentenary year. The work was donated to the Monash University Collection by the Arthur Boyd Foundation in 1995.

The Monash University Collection contains a number of the most significant and ambitious works by Australia's leading modern artists, many of which are on display across Monash campuses, including John Perceval's Homage to Lawrence Hargrave 1961-62, in the atrium of the Hargrave Library, and Leonard French's abstract stained glass mural, Alpha and Omega 1969-70, which can be seen opposite Arthur Boyd's epic narrative painting.

For further information regarding this work, please contact the Monash University Museum of Art muma@adm.monash.edu.au or 9905 1644.