Remembering Peter Beard
Life of a Bon Vivant
He walked into the woods and never came out. Peter Beard, renowned artist wandered away from his Montauk, New York home on March 31st and 19 days later, his body was found in the Camp Hero State Park on Long Island. He was 82 and suffered from dementia.
Beard’s life was one of fantastic adventures. He was born into New York wealth and high society as an heir to his mother’s railroad fortune and his father’s tobacco inheritance. He had dashing movie star good looks, but he would not play the role of an aristocrat. After graduating from Yale University, inspired by Karen Blixen’s (pen Isak Dinesen) novel Out of Africa, he left for Kenya for what would become a life-long love affair of the continent, nature, conservation and the wildlife there. He worked at Tsavo National Park and photographed the destruction of the African elephant. It became the subject of his first book, The End of the Game. He purchased a hog ranch neighboring Blixen’s coffee farm and spent the next six decades between Kenya and New York.
Beard traveled among a circle of artists and celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dali. He dated Jackie Kenndy Onassis’s sister Lee Radzwill and cruised the Greek islands on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht. He appeared in several documentaries, including 2010’s Beautiful Darling, 1988’s With Peter Beard in Africa: Last Word from Paradise and Hallelujah the Hills in 1963 at the first New York Film Festival. He shot fashion spreads for Vogue and in 1972 he was hired by Rolling Stone magazine to photograph the Rolling Stones Exile On Main Street tour. But, Beard is best known as a wildlife photographer for his images of Africa. He arranged unique photo collages that he layered and combined with elements from his daily writings, newspaper clippings, quotes, dried leaves, insects, animal blood and sometimes his blood. His work has been exhibited and published since the 1970s.
An uninhibited playboy, he married three times. His second marriage to supermodel Cheryl Tiegs in 1981 ended in divorce three years later. He once said of marriage, “It’s an institution that was brought about for the sake of family and children, but biologically it’s very unnatural. It’s masochism and torture the way it’s been organized.” Still, he married again in 1986 to Nejman Khanum in Kenya and had a daughter, Zara.
His freewheeling lifestyle invited danger and excitement. He swam in crocodile-infested waters and in1996 while photographing in Kenya he was nearly killed by an elephant after being gored in his left thigh. He arrived at the hospital with no pulse but survived to continue his work. The Somali born model Iman told Vanity Fair, “He loves Africa, but we always have an argument about what Africa really is. Is it the animals and the landscape, or is it the people? For him there are no people involved: they get in the way of his myth.”
In 2006, the art book publisher Taschen produced a two-volume monograph of Beard’s work, described as “a collage of photography, ecology and diary writing.” The book has been reissued as an ode to Beard as one volume. Peter Beard, edited by his wife Nejma Beard, is 770 pages and weighs almost 12 pounds.
