Lion at Night, 1984

“And as this world shrinks and turns and changes in front of your eyes, try and remember that what I’ve put down here is true and that Nature’s truth is always greater, stranger, more complex, and more incredible than mankind’s make-believe.” - Peter Beard

Peter Beard treats each of his photographic works as a fresh canvas, creating a distinct narrative around each work with collage, ephemera and illustrations. The striking and unique work on offer here, Lion at Night, showcases the artist’s reverence for the grandeur of the animal kingdom of Kenya, with elements so intricate and abundant that one sees something new upon each viewing.

Beginning his studies at Yale University as a pre-med student, Beard ultimately changed his major to art history. In lieu of a traditional thesis, Beard mailed back to the university diaries from Kenya. His connection to the country developed and in 1965 Beard received a dispensation from President Jomo Kenyatta to purchase a ranch with the condition that he would create films and photographs of the wildlife and communities that surrounded the property. Beard subsequently moved to Kenya to establish Hog Ranch, the setting that created his monumental book, The End Game (1965).

For the rest of his life and career Beard blurred the boundaries between photography, painting and collage. Known for shooting subjects from fashion models to distinctive photos of African wildlife, there is a common thread of grandeur and brutality in his work. Later in life Beard started to use his journals to create layered, textural mixed media collages. “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).

The central image depicted in the present lot is of an adult lion, gazing into the distance. Monumental in size, the stoic lion in the wilderness is the focus of the work, framed by a margin of vibrantly colored creatures and scenes of death. Additional collage elements and ephemera have been applied closer to the center of the work as well, aiding to connect the stream of consciousness on the periphery to the dramatic central motif.