Authentic Polaroid by Peter Beard, American, New York, USA
Peter Beard
January 22, 1938 – March/April 2020
‘Karen Blixen’, Professional Polaroid, signed, titled, dated and variously inscribed in ink and blood, 4 x 6 inches. Hand-drawn self-portrait of the artist, and dedicated/inscribed to Guy Berube, art dealer & collector.
Provenance: The Time is Always Now, Inc. (Gallery), 476 Bloome Street, NYC, N.Y. 10013.
Written on verso: “To Guy Berube” in black innk, along with self-portrait b the artist. Gallery stamp on verso including artist copyright.
“South Lake Framing Co. – Montauk Pt. L.I. NY, Framed with const. Grade Doug Fir Salvaged from an old deck at ditch plains – 11/’97: Noel Arikian”
Private Collection. Currently researching market value.
Auctions Results:
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/09/the-legend-of-peter-beard
https://www.artsy.net/artist/peter-beard
Biography
Peter Beard was born in New York City in 1938. During his childhood he spent time in Tuxedo Park, where he caught frogs, collected creatures, and was eventually given his first camera by his grandmother. By age 12, taking pictures became a natural extension of the way he already preserved his favorite memories in meticulously crafted diaries. At 17, he went on a life-changing summer trip to Africa with Quentin Keynes, the explorer and great grandson of Charles Darwin, working on a film documenting rare wildlife that began with white and black rhinos in Zululand. They then went to Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, and finally ended up in Madagascar.
Beard first entered Yale as a pre-med student but continued to pursue his many diverse interests— even setting the chin-up record there (49). It was while he studied statistics about human population growth and the ensuing devastation that it would cause that he formed his enduring hypothesis; humans are, in fact, the main disease. It was after this that he switched his focus to Art History and began studying under Vincent Scully, Joseph Albers, and Richard Lindner. Beard’s insatiable desire to explore lured him back to Africa his senior year. He never looked back and in lieu of completing his senior thesis at school, he mailed in diaries from Kenya.
Beard traveled to Copenhagen to be introduced to Karen Blixen, the author of Out Of Africa (1937). Upon his return to Kenya, with the help of President Kenyatta, Beard received special dispensation and was able to settle on a property of his own, close to Blixen, and near the Ngong Hills.
It was during this time that he worked at Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, documenting and photographing the ensuing distortion of balance that took place in nature between the people, the land, and the animals for his book, The End of the Game (1965). In Beard’s second iteration of The End of the Game (1977), he documented the overwhelming process that occurs during a population die-off, as the park’s elephants and rhinos succumbed to starvation, stress and density related diseases. During this time over 35 thousand elephants and 5 thousand black rhinos died (now roughly more than the entire surviving elephant and rhino population worldwide today). Afterwards, Beard collaborated with Alistair Graham on the book Eyelids of Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men (1973), and during the same time period wrote Longing for Darkness: Kamante’s Tales from Out of Africa (1975). Most recently, Zara’s Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa (2004) was written for his daughter, and Taschen published a monograph, Peter Beard (2006, 2008, 2013).
Beard’s first exhibition opened at Blum Helman Gallery, New York, in 1975. In 1977 a landmark, one-man exhibition of his photographs, paintings, burned diaries, taxidermy, African artifacts, and books, amongst other things, was held at the International Center of Photography, New York. In 1996, Beard’s retrospective exhibition at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris opened as the artist recovered from being trampled and speared in the leg by the tusk of an elephant. Beard continues to exhibit internationally.
Throughout his travels and career Beard has befriended and collaborated with artists including Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Richard Lindner, Terry Southern, and Truman Capote. He continues to live and work between New York City, Montauk, and Kenya with his wife Nejma, and daughter, Zara.
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“When I first went to Kenya in August 1955, I could never have guessed what was going to happen. Kenya’s population was roughly five million, with about 100 tribes scattered throughout the endless “wild—deer—ness” – it was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game — so enormous it appeared inexhaustible.Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya’s population of over 30 million drains the country’s limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa.
The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye.
The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by commercialism, arrows become AK- 47s, colonialism is replaced by the power, the prestige and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is The End Of The Game over and over.
What could possibly be next? Density and stress — aid and AIDS, deep blue computers and Nintendo robots, heart disease and cancer, liposuction and rhinoplasty, digital pets and Tamagotchi toys deliver us into the brave new world.”
Peter Beard
In Memoriam: wildlife photographer Peter Beard, 82
Photographer Peter Beard feeding giraffes at his ranch in Kenya in 2014. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
NEW YORK (AP) – Artist, adventurer and celebrated wildlife photographer Peter Beard was found dead in woods near his cliff-side home at the tip of Long Island nearly a month after his family reported him missing. He was 82.
“He died where he lived: in nature,” his family said in a statement posted on Beard’s website Sunday night.
In recent years, the once-swashbuckling explorer had developed dementia and had at least one stroke, according to the New York Times. His family confirmed that a body found Sunday in Camp Hero State Park in Montauk was Beard’s.
The Suffolk County Medical Examiner hasn’t made an official identification, but East Hampton Police Capt. Christopher Anderson said Monday “we’re reasonably confident” it’s Beard. He said the cause of death hasn’t been determined but neither foul play nor suicide is suspected.
“Peter defined what it means to be open: open to new ideas, new encounters, new people, new ways of living and being,” his family said in its statement. “Always insatiably curious, he pursued his passions without restraints and perceived reality through a unique lens.”
Beard was renowned for his photos of African wildlife, taken in the decades when he lived and worked at his tent camp in Kenya. His best-known work was “The End of the Game,” published in 1965. It documented the beauty and romance of Africa and the tragedy of its endangered wildlife, especially the elephant.
Peter Beard, Untitled (Happy New Year), 1964/2003, gelatin silver print inscribed with ink and drawings with collage and acrylic. Image courtesy of Santa Monica Auctions and LiveAuctioneers
He also photographed women in magazine fashion shoots and had well-documented romances with many of them, including Candice Bergen and Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, according to the New York Times. He was married for a time to model Cheryl Tiegs and was friends with Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Salvador Dali and the Rolling Stones.
Beard was born into a wealthy family in Manhattan in 1938 and graduated in 1961 from Yale, where he studied with the artist Josef Albers and art historian Vincent Scully.
After graduation, he traveled to Denmark and met and photographed Karen Blixen, who had written the memoir Out of Africaunder the pen name Isak Dinesen. He later bought 45 acres abutting the African coffee farm where Blixen had lived.
Beard is survived by his wife Nejma Beard, and daughter Zara.