Renowned Wildlife Photographer and Bon Vivant Peter Beard Has Been Found Dead at Age 82, Three Weeks After Disappearing in Montauk

The artist and wildlife
photographer Peter Beard has has died at age 82. He was found dead
on Sunday in the woods near his home in Long Island after an
extensive, 19-day search effort. The artist suffered from dementia,
and had disappeared from his home last month. The cause of his
death is not yet known.

The Beard family said in a
statement that they are “all heartbroken by the confirmation of our
beloved Peter’s death,” as reported by the New York
Times, where they
added: “He died where he lived: in nature.”

Beard is best known for his
searing photographs of endangered African wildlife, though he was
also notorious among gossip columnists for his own wild lifestyle.
In art, he put himself at risk to get the best shot, swimming with
crocodiles and once getting impaled by an angry elephant during a
shoot in the 1990s. In life, he was a party animal, a resident
fixture in the halcyon days of Studio 54, and he continued partying
until dawn well into old age.

“Peter defined what it means to
be open: open to new ideas, new encounters, new people, new ways of
living and being,”  his family wrote. “Always insatiably
curious, he pursued his passions without restraints and perceived
reality through a unique lens.”

The artist’s most famous work is
the 1965 tome The End of
the Game, in which he
shone a light on Africa’s vanishing wildlife and its big game
hunters. His later work fused his photography practice with
drawings, diaristic text, and even used blood as a material, which
the artist told Interview
Magazine in 2016 “is
better than any ink or paint.” He had solo shows at New York’s
International Center of Photography and Paris’s Centre National de
la Photographie. Taschen will republish its Peter Beard monograph
later this month.

Born in Manhattan on January 22,
1938, Beard was, by his own account, the “black sheep” son of a
Wall Street broker, and the heir to fortunes from the Great
Northern Railway and Lorillard Tobacco. After growing up on the
Upper East Side, he attended university at Yale and soon dropped
out of his pre-med major to study art history with Josef Albers and
the art historian Vincent Scully.

Beard first visited Africa at
age 17. He fell in love with Kenya during the trip, which he took
with a great-grandson of Charles Darwin. Later, after a brief stint
working for a New York advertising agency, he returned to Kenya and
bought a 45-acre property, where he began to live and work on and
off over the years, splitting his time between there and his homes
in Manhattan and Montauk.

Ever a pleasure seeker, Beard
described himself for a Vanity Fair profile in
1993 as “the most irresponsible person you ever met.” His friends
included the likes of Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Salvador Dalí,
and Francis Bacon (who painted his portrait more than once). Beard
also conducted fashion shoots for magazines
including Vogue and Elle, and is credited
with discovering the supermodel Iman.

Beard’s flamboyant life was
peppered with many romances, earning him a reputation as a playboy.
These included relationships with the fashion model Candice Bergen
and Lee Radziwill, the socialite younger sister of Jackie O. He
married the supermodel Cheryl Tiegs for a spate, after his first
marriage to art collector and socialite Minnie Cushing ended in
divorce. At the time of his death he was married to Nejma Beard,
née Khanum, his wife since 1986, and with whom he had a daughter,
Zara.

A 2004 book that Beard wrote and illustrated for his daughter,
titled Zara’s Tales, offers some insight into the
approach the artist took to his own life. “Yes, if you crave
something new, something original, particularly when they keep
saying, ‘Less is more,’ remember that I say: Too much is really
just fine,” he writes. “Only by going too far can we break the
boring mold and stumble into something a little different.”

The post Renowned Wildlife Photographer and Bon Vivant Peter
Beard Has Been Found Dead at Age 82, Three Weeks After Disappearing
in Montauk appeared first on artnet News.