Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railway, and his grandfather the tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard V, who created Tuxedo Park. Raised on the Upper East Side, he was a self-proclaimed black sheep of an illustrious family. Here is Beard and his romance with Africa, literally and figuratively, brought to life in his art.īeard was in thrall to the continent from an early age.
The book is in many ways a testament to his oeuvre, a genre-defying mash-up of stunning wildlife photography overlaid with his fashion portraits, diary extracts, found objects, newspaper clippings, ink writings, and ephemera collected from his life in New York and on the African continent, sometimes embellished with blood – either his own or animal. Published next month by Taschen ($150) in one large-format volume, it arrives within weeks of Beard’s death at the age of 82 in the Montauk woods. The enduring romance of his life was Africa, as a new edition of the definitive monograph of his work, Peter Beard, makes clear. As his friend Bob Colacello described him, Beard was “half Tarzan, half Byron.” He would eventually settle down in the mid ’90s with Najma Beard, his third wife, but not before he had a near-death experience with an elephant on the Kenya-Tanzania border. Girlfriends were legion, among them Candice Bergen, Carole Bouquet, Lee Radziwill, and the model Barbara de Kwiatkowski, who left her husband for Beard, causing a minor New York scandal (he was with Radziwill at the time). His movie star looks and restless nature (friends called him “Walkabout”) made for a complicated love life. His taste for wine, women, illegal substances, and acts of physical recklessness (often involving a camera and a charging elephant or two) remained undiminished even in old age. The world famous photographer, artist, naturalist, and playboy, described recently by the Observer as “the last of the adventurers,” had a lust for life which propelled him into the clubs of downtown Manhattan and across the savannas of East Africa. All across the city and on the far end of Long Island, New Yorkers are telling tales of Peter Beard, a man who packed many lives into his one.
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