Peter Beard: From Trauma To Triumph

Peter Beard is on a roll. The Montauk artist was in Arles, France, this week installing selections of his work at the Nord-Penus Hotel. Meanwhile, his explosive mix of penned diary entries, photography, and collage is the focus of a summerlong retrospective at the Time Is Always Now gallery on Spring Street in New York City.

On Sunday, speaking from France, he said that despite a relative lack of fanfare, the New York show is better than the one that took Paris by storm in January.

That show, "Carnets Africans," at the Centre National de la Photographie, was his first retrospective. It presented four decade' worth of "mosaics" that reveal Mr. Beard's singular and unsettling vision of an overpopulated world run amok.

Much of the same work is on display now in New York. It includes pieces created by the artist in the wake of his near-fatal trampling by an elephant in the Maasai Mara Preserve on the border of Tanzania last September.

Ironic Predicament

The run-in was not without irony. Mr. Beard's pelvis was crushed, and he found himself slumped on an African anthill with massive internal bleeding at the feet of the animal whose plight he has spent 40 years documenting.

His book "End of the Game," published in 1965, first told the story with haunting photos of starving elephants and skeletons of culled elephants in Kenya's Tsavo Preserve. The plot is simple: Human society crowds out wildlife, resources, and each other.

"She got me up against the anthill. I was a human, and that's what it's all about. We're microscopically small, and doing everything wrong. It was perfect to end up there," he said in January as he prepared for the Paris show only three months after the incident.

Collector's Collage

Mr. Beard's mosaics are a feast. He is an indefatigable collector - of cobblestones from the beach in front of his house in the Montauk moorlands, of bones from around his Hog Ranch complex outside Nairobi, Kenya, of newspaper headlines, snakeskins, feathers.

If the finds are small enough, they are glued into the diary pages he began writing in the 1960s when Jackie Onassis gave him a leather-bound journal as a gift. He was keeping company with her sister, Lee Radziwill, at the time.

On the pages, on and around the collectibles and the glued photos he's taken over the years (his "dictionary of images"), he continues his written commentary on world events, in ink and blood.

The framed pieces he likes to call mosaics come in all sizes. They often include photographs of his frenetic diary intermixed with striking black-and-white images of Africa.

Time For Cunning

Typical of the Beard style and "End of the Game" theme is the mosaic he created after the elephant attack which served as the centerpiece of the Paris show. The 6-by-4-foot piece is atypically autobiographical, however - testimony to the impact the trampling has had on the artist. The piece is a wild, apocalyptic compilation of individual days.

Two magnetic resonance imaging photos that show Mr. Beard's spine and brain appear in the center. Between them is glued a plastic intravenous bag and tubing labeled "morphine." There are grisly photos of him in surgery, but then mellow pictures of his Montauk house and loving photos of his daughter, Zara.

"I had a few flashes of Zara, and I thought I'd better do something really cunning if I was going to see her again," he said, recalling his unsuccessful 100-yard dash to outrun the matriarch of the elephant herd.

Devil-May-Care Attitude

The cunning move was to hold onto the elephant's left front leg to avoid being crushed again. A tusk had gone through his thigh, narrowly missing the femoral artery.

To those who know him, Mr. Beard's dire outlook and unrelenting approach to his work have always appeared in surprising contrast to the devil-may-care attitude he projects. He has been perceived, with some justification, as a blue-blooded playboy - a friend of Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, running with a fast crowd and often setting the pace.

He was married to Cheryl Tiegs, and before that to a Newport socialite, Minnie Cushing. News stories following the trampling had predictable angles, viewing it as a comeuppance, hubris and the fall.

It was, of course, not that simple. The fall, given Mr. Beard's relationship with elephants and their sad story, was an object lesson, a prediction fulfilled upon the man who made it. He believes that much of the world's turmoil emanates from a claustrophobic reaction - like the elephant's - to overpopulation and human meddling. That nature will exact a terrible vengeance on human arrogance Mr. Beard has no doubt.

In this regard images of the O.J. Simpson trial provided as much grist for Mr. Beard as the dead and dying elephants of Tsavo. In other words, Mr. Beard's work is not without humor, black though it may be.

"The Hotel Nord-Penus is where Hemingway stayed, and Picasso, and Jean Cocteau," he said on Sunday from Arles. "Bullfighters always stayed in Room 10 the night before a fight." It is also the hotel that displayed Mr. Beard's work in 1984.

Discomfort With "Art"

"This is a Roman town. The Emperor Tertullian visited Arles," he said, going on to recite, with little hesitation, the emperor's words decrying the state of the world in 337 A.D.:

"Our teeming population is the strongest evidence: Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in the mouth, whilst nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance. In every deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, and the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race."

Despite the social stratum in which he moves, money has never been a preoccupation. More has gone out than comes in. Nor has he spent much time on self-promotion, a modicum of which would have generated substantial revenues before now.

Transformation

Perhaps it's because he has always been uncomfortable with "art" and seems to have no interest in defining what he does. Ask him the title of a particular piece and the look you get is the closest thing to contempt he can muster.

Najma, a kindly and exotic woman from a prominent Nairobi family whom Mr. Beard married in 1986, speaks of a post-trampling transformation. She was able to get through to her husband from New York soon after his initial surgery. She said "a hard shell" was broken by the elephant and that his work seems to have taken on a new importance. "I think it's his moment," she said.

Judging from the prices being paid for his mosaics, the moment will be lucrative. On Sunday he gleefully relived the bidding for a work sold at a benefit auction in Cannes, during the recent film festival.

"Demi Moore made the first bid at $10,000, then Sean Penn bid. Johnny Depp bid $20,000. A Saudi prince got it for $35,000," he said with a laugh. Larger pieces at the Time Is Always Now gallery are priced in the $60,000 to $100,000 range.

Mr. Beard plans to return home to Montauk by the end of the month, after the opening of his show at the Michael Hoppin gallery in London.