CURATOR Deborah Hart has been grappling with “agony and ecstasy” for the past three years putting together a show about one of Australia’s greatest painters.

Dr Hart, senior curator of Australian painting and sculptor at the National Gallery of Australia, insists “Arthur Boyd: Agony and Ecstasy” is most definitely not a retrospective, but it does look at more than 120 works across the media of painting, tapestry, print and ceramics, examining the work of “one of our most accomplished arts artists in terms of stylistic matters”.

Placing a strong emphasis on figures rather than landscapes, she has enjoyed the rare opportunity of being able to look at groups of Boyd’s work to see the interconnections in works completed over a 40-year period.

We will see his disturbing “Nebuchadnezzar” series, hinting at the Vietnam War, and his “The Lady and the Unicorn” series, painted in collaboration with the poet Peter Porter and sometimes reversing the roles of hunter and the hunted.

Of special interest to Canberrans, she believes, will be Boyd’s “Caged painter” series, conceived during a residency at the ANU from 1971 to 1972 and reflecting the brilliant sunlight so long missed while he was in England.

Among the many works never exhibited before and revealing the human condition is “The Prodigal Son”, a large, preserved fragment of a mural painted for his uncle, novelist, Martin Boyd, while the artist played Beethoven’s 7th Symphony – agony and ecstasy together.

Hart tells me that the title was intended “to try and get across Arthur Boyd’s experience, and his personality”.

To her, we see the agony in his struggle in being an artist and the ecstasy in his ideas that transcend that struggle.

One thing that impressed her during the course of curating the exhibition was the profound element of compassion in Boyd’s works in the first room of the show, where we’ll see reference to the human suffering in World War II. In his biblical and mythical works too, she notes, he brings the suffering of the past and the present together.

By happy chance, Hart met Boyd during the 1980s and Boyd’s extraordinary energy and his activity struck her so much that she couldn’t imagine he ever took any time off.

“Yet he came across as the most gentle, reticent man, very humble when you consider the amount of work he had done,” she says.

Gentle and unassuming perhaps, Hart says, “but there must have been something going on inside”.

“Arthur Boyd: Agony and Ecstasy”, National Gallery of Australia, until November 9.