Wild — the wayward life of Peter Beard

Peter Beard bled for his art. Literally. In Graham Boynton’s rollicking biography a friend recalls the handsome and wayward American artist stabbing himself in the thigh with a pair of Japanese scissors and drenching one of his distinctive photo collages in blood. Beard, who died in 2020 at the age of 82, insisted “blood [was] better than ink” and left behind a mixed-media oeuvre that now resembles nothing so much as a vast memento mori.

Death became Beard’s most potent subject after he witnessed the terrible fate of the elephants in Kenya’s Tsavo national park in the 1970s. Beard’s photographs, which appeared in the second edition of his seminal 1965 book The End of the Game, focused on the desiccated remains of thousands of elephants that had starved to death because of drought and overcrowding. A former big-game hunter, Beard promoted the value of culling elephant populations as a way of avoiding such tragedies.

But, as with so many public positions that Beard took up, it was not a fashionable one, so gained little traction among Kenya’s wildlife fraternity. Nonetheless Beard’s painstaking, handworked collages, which melded photographs, text and drawings, did a lot to raise awareness of the tragedy of Africa’s disappearing flora and fauna among westerners. His work earned the admiration of artists such as Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol and became much sought-after by collectors. Peter Beard went on to become the German publisher Taschen’s most popular book when it was published in 2008.

Boynton, a Zimbabwean journalist, recalls evenings spent around the campfire at Beard’s Hog Ranch encampment in southern Kenya listening to his friend’s harangues about “the burgeoning human population in Africa, the postcolonial mismanagement of Africa’s fast-disappearing wildlife, and the inappropriate, sentimental interference in Africa’s affairs by western do-gooders”.

Even into his seventies he was still taking copious amounts of drugs, seducing women less than half his age and staying up to the small hours in New York’s fashionable nightclubs

But Beard’s own recklessness, especially when it came to insisting on close encounters with dangerous animals like rhinos and elephants, did not help him to be taken seriously. Beard, who never carried a credit card or owned a mobile phone, is most often presented by Boynton as a throwback figure blessed with an iron constitution. Even into his seventies he was still taking copious amounts of drugs, seducing women less than half his age and staying up to the small hours in New York’s fashionable nightclubs.

“The world doesn’t seem to create characters like that anymore,” Philippe Garnier, former head of international photographs at Christie’s, tells Boynton. “There’s no room for them. The world is too restrictive. He was a wonderful spirit. An adventurer. A wild man. And if you bought a Peter Beard you were buying a part of that extraordinary story.”

But Wild is far from being a hagiography. Beard’s abuse of some of the women in his life (he once punched his second wife, the fashion model Cheryl Tiegs, in the stomach causing a miscarriage) and the callous way he treated many of his male friends belie the romantic image he presented to the world.

Some of the most damning testimony comes from one of Beard’s former girlfriends, who spoke to Boynton under the cover of anonymity: “He was truly sadistic and the thing about his art — the blood is there, the girls are there, the animals are there. It’s all there. I thought I could deal with it. I was in over my head. It took me years to make sense of it.”

On the subject of Beard’s lasting artistic impact, Boynton homes in one of the least explored aspects of his work: his diaries. Beard was a life-long compulsive diary keeper. Estimates vary about the American artist’s output but Boynton reckons that there could be as many as 50 diaries in existence. Beard described them as “like an addiction,” and plastered their pages with photographs, drawings, newspaper cuttings, his tight spidery script and effusions of his own blood.

All of the diaries are currently in the possession of Beard’s third and final wife, Nejma Beard. “How she chooses to share them will probably determine her errant husband’s artistic legacy,” Boynton writes. “She has yet to declare her intentions.”

Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover by Graham Boynton, St Martin’s Press, $35/£27.99, 352 pages

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