PETER BEARD (1938 2020) Cheetah Orphans in Mweiga near Nyeri

Sale 2570 - Lot 288

Unsold

Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 45,000

PETER BEARD (1938-2020)
Cheetah Orphans in Mweiga near Nyeri. Silver print, the image measuring 15 1/4x22 3/8 inches (38.7x56.8 cm.), the sheet 20x24 inches (40.6x61 cm.), with Beard's signature, title, date, and notations, in white ink, on recto; with a The Time is Always Now gallery label on frame verso. 1968; printed 1990s

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Additional Details

A gift from art dealer and artist Peter Tunney; to the Present Owner by Descent.

Peter Beard was a photographer well-known for his pictures of Africans and African wildlife. He made his first trip to the continent when he was 17, photographing with a Voigtländer camera his grandmother had given him. In 2013 Beard wrote to Robert Kolker, a journalist for "New York Magazine," "I made a life for myself in Africa that was as far as you could possibly get from art school at Yale."

In the 1960s, concurrent with a project about the demise of starving elephants and black rhinos, Beard began creating elaborate, large format photo-collage "diaries" (hardly an unheard of project for Beard; he had been making diaries with collaged imagery since the age of 12). The "diaries" incorporated everything from postage stamps to news clippings to smears of animal blood. He purchased Hog Ranch, an encampment outside of Nairobi, in the mid-60s. In the following decades, his work focused on documenting the Kenyan environment, its people, wildlife and landscape, as well as conservation and man's impact on nature. From the 1970s until his passing in 2020, Beard split his time between Hog Ranch and his home in Montauk.

This photograph, entitled "Cheetah Orphans in Mweiga near Nyeri," is one of Beard's most iconic images, a poignant and impactful depiction of two orphaned cheetah cubs. Though this image is the basis for other works, each piece is entirely unique, as each photograph is treated as a district canvas upon which Beard has added his drawings, collages, and/or handwritten text.