Of the more than 100 works on display, a number have never been exhibited before and others were last seen more than half a century ago. Deborah Hart, the curator of this exhibition, has produced a scholarly catalogue, rich in new primary source material which is being introduced into the public domain for the first time and which enhances our understanding of the artist's work.

Arthur Boyd belonged to Australia's most significant artistic dynasty, one which commenced in 1886, when two painters, Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie à Beckett, married in Melbourne and had five children, who included Merric Boyd, one of Australia's most significant early studio potters, the painters Penleigh and Helen Boyd, and Martin Boyd the prominent writer.

Merric Boyd, Arthur Boyd's father, moved to Murrumbeena in 1913, a semi-rural, emerging suburb on the south-eastern outskirts of Melbourne. The house he built there became known as "Open Country", next to which he built a studio in which he set up his pottery workshop. For about three decades, between the '20s and the '50s, Open Country was not only the Boyd family home, but also served as a general meeting place for artists – a sort of de-facto artists' colony. Much of Arthur Boyd's philosophy of art was formulated in the humanist atmosphere of Murrumbeena and much of his imagery finds a source in his father's ceramics and drawings.

Merric Boyd was an eccentric, an epileptic and a deeply religious man, where the division between reality and the Old Testament was not that readily observed. At Murrumbeena he created an atmosphere steeped in traditional humanist cultural values, where texts from the Bible were frequently supplemented with readings from Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot. The ceramics that he created belonged to a non-literal reality, they were superb in their craftsmanship and in their language usually commented on the human condition. This was to become part of the common heritage of Murrumbeena and a key source for Arthur's art.

Arthur Boyd was born in 1920 at Murrumbeena, the second of Merric and Doris's five children. He left school in 1934 and worked at his uncle Ralph Madder's paint factory, while in his spare time he was instinctively drawn to painting and, in an amateurish manner while still in his early teens, dabbled in filmmaking. Most of his education came from the alternative micro-environment of Murrumbeena, rather than through formal instruction.

While painting landscapes at Wilson's Promontory, the 14-year-old Arthur met the older McCulloch brothers, Alan and Wilfred, who were then attending the Gallery School. It was through their example he enrolled there for the last term of 1935 and the first two terms of 1936. With the death of Emma Minnie Boyd in 1936, the widowed Arthur Merric Boyd retired to a cottage in the bayside suburb of Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula, Port Phillip Bay, and Arthur joined his grandfather, escaping from both the drudgery of factory work and the discipline of the Gallery School. The resulting Rosebud paintings, such as the remarkable Self-portrait in red shirt (1937) in this exhibition, were among the earliest that this precocious teenager exhibited. They bear testimony to the vibrancy of his juvenile creations, with clear colours and bold, expressive brushwork.

By 1939 he was back at Murrumbeena, but he was soon called up and joined the army. After several miserable months in different units, by Christmas 1941 he had been transferred to the army's Cartographic Headquarters. This was later transferred to the inland city of Bendigo, which the authorities considered easier to defend if Australia was to be invaded. For Boyd it meant a separation from his family and Yvonne Lennie, the woman he met in 1942 and whom he was to marry in 1945.

By temperament the artist was totally unsuited for the army, but he persevered in the cartographic unit until his discharge in March, 1944, by which time he was already living with Yvonne. It was a troubled period in his life, where bouts of loneliness, depression and a nervous breakdown were accentuated by a disturbed private life and the general wartime atmosphere that prevailed in Melbourne. In his final years of military service his main duties consisted of driving and delivering documents fromthe cartographic depot in South Melbourne to the main headquarters in Bendigo. There were tales of the vehicle onoccasion being absent-mindedly abandoned and of top-secret maps strewn across the road from the unsecured van.

The paintings he made at this period, which are richly represented in this exhibition, and are sometimes referred to as the "South Melbourne paintings", are disturbed, haunted works full of anguish and preoccupied with the theme of metamorphosis – the change from one state of being into another. He painted about 30 relatively small easel paintings that were executed in oils on cotton gauze stretched over commercial composition board.

These paintings were accompanied by a mass of drawings. In these works Boyd established his own unique personal pictorial lexicon, with a repertoire of archetypal forms that came to populate his canvases in various manifestations for the rest of his life. These images included the man in the wheelchair, the cripple on his crutches, the tormented naked lovers, the beast (possibly the ramox) along with the chimney stacks and the gargoyles leaping from the metalwork on the old Victorian terrace house facades. These paintings can suffer through an over-literal interpretation. For example, the motif of a man in a wheelchair, which occurs in many of the paintings, may indeed relate to his father Merric. The man with the crutches may relate to his brother-in-law John Perceval (who had a limp from childhood polio), while the chimney stacks may refer to his father's pottery firing kiln. But the imagery, for its effectiveness, relies on its ability to transcend the local and the specific, to comment on the universal.

The great painting in this show, The orchard, (1943) may in fact have a reference to a setting in the orchard at home in Murrumbeena, the naked lovers Arthur and Yvonne, the cripple Perceval and his unwelcome sexual advances to Yvonne, the man in the wheelchair Merric pushed by Arthur's younger brother David, and so on. But the whole disturbing power of the work lies in its broader statement on a world out of joint, where innocence and passion are confronted on all sides by hostile tormentors.

Meaning in Boyd's paintings from the '40s onwards is almost always multilayered – for example the smokestack may find a literal decoding as a reference to his father's brick kiln. Yet, it could also refer to the crematorium that consumed the body of his paternal grandfather, as well as to the wastelands of industrial suburbia through which he travelled on the way to Bendigo and allegorically it may also refer to the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. The scenes appear almost as if stage sets, or film stills, located within the recognisable environment of Murrumbeena or the urban squalor of South Melbourne. Figures are shown in a state of heightened psychological distress, children playing with a kite are in fact floating a crucifix, while the cripple is besieged by weird creatures. Franz Philipp, Boyd's first serious scholar, termed it "agoraphobic surrealism".

The figures generally stand isolated and trapped within their setting – like the cripple in the wheelchair surrounded by attacking beasts, while behind him there is a mock crucifixion as a terrified girl is carried on the shoulders of a group of children and a severed head is playfully suspended on lances. There is also what could be termed "morbid eroticism", where the copulating couples are pursued by evil forces, whether it be within the family orchard in Murrumbeena or on the beach. Lovers are presented as victims, as Boyd was to later observe, "They suffer from being un-private, watched. Love becomes guilt because it is frustrated. Pictures with an animal or anotherhuman figure watching lovers are intended to give the idea of spying. A disturbance, a breaking into the moment of privacy."

When his uncle, the writer Martin Boyd, returned to Australia in 1948 he bought back "The Grange", the former family house at Harkaway, near Berwick. He invited Arthur and his family to stay with him and commissioned his nephew to execute some monumental murals. They were thought to have been largely destroyed when the house was demolished in the '60s to make way for a quarry. One of the great surprises of the National Gallery exhibition is the more than two-metre-square section of the murals, which has been preserved, together with the wall on which it was painted, encased within a block of concrete. The prodigal son (1948-49) is being seen for the first time in half a century and demonstrates a wonderful luminosity and monumental grandeur of Boyd's grand manner, along with a certain culmination of his religious paintings.

While painting at The Grange, Boyd also turned to the Berwick landscape and through these paintings found early commercial success. The National Gallery exhibition proceeds to explore the subsequent growth and development of Boyd's art both in Australia and in England, to where he migrated in November 1959. The show reflects the strengths of the institution's holdings, so that the Bride series, central to Boyd's art, is poorly represented in the gallery's collection and hence poorly represented in the exhibition. However, the opposite is true of Boyd's work for the theatre. In some ways this is not so important because of the intrinsic unity of Boyd's artistic vision.

At a time when militarist, nationalist and narrow chauvinistic philosophies have once again raised their ugly head on the international stage, Boyd's art appears as a timely antidote. While proud of his origins as an Australian, in the final analysis his art celebrated what it means to be human. As Maxim Gorky once famously said, "The word human should be said with pride." This exhibition celebrates a great artist, Arthur Boyd, who stands tall in any international artistic company and who has never looked better in any show.

The exhibition promises to be the most significant reappraisal of his art for a generation, but it will struggle with a couple of unnecessary handicaps.

The first is its title, which is rusted on in popular imagination to Irving Stone's sensationalist biographical novel based on the life of Michelangelo and its crass film adaptation starring Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison. No serious exhibition deserves this lead in the saddlebags.

The second is that it is a "pay admission" exhibition and as we all know, these simply do not work for Australian art. This is especially so when all of the works are drawn from the National Gallery's own collection, whose huge holdings of Boyd's work largely resulted due to a generous gift of thousands of works from the artist in 1975.

It is an expensive exhibition to mount; the sheer logistics of moving a two-tonne block of masonry and cement on which the preserved fragment of The Grange mural is painted would set any institution back financially. However, Australian art should be delivered to Australians free of charge. It will be a tragedy if viewers stay away because of admission charges, as it is such an important and ground-breaking exhibition.

Arthur Boyd: Agony and Ecstasy opens at the National Gallery of Australia on September 5 and runs until November 9.