[va-richmond-general] Info on National Gallery Audubon exhibit from the Washington Post
- From: "Kathy Kreutzer" <k-kreutzer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <va-richmond-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 14:35:47 -0500
Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!
Kathy Kreutzer
Chesterfield, VA
Audubon's Birds, Flightless, And Soaring
By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, November 26, 2005; C01
There are 1,065 birds in John James Audubon's "The Birds of America,"
that 19th-century encyclopedic tour de force. Their images appear on 435
separate sheets. It took a team of 50 to etch and print and paint by
hand those sharply detailed pages, most of which were early on trimmed
and pierced with needles and sewn into big books.
Only two whole sets survive whose loose, undamaged sheets were never
trimmed for binding, and still look the way they did when they first
came from the print shop. One of these "double-elephant" folios (the
printer's term suggests the pachydermic size of its 40-inch-high pages)
has been, since 1945, in the permanent collection of the National
Gallery of Art.
The Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, the one shown on the
dollar bill, is more than a mere painting. The mighty Lincoln statue,
too, is more than a mere sculpture. The same fate has befallen Audubon's
great bird book. It's more than just a work of art. It's become a
national monument. It's part of who we are.
Usually its feathered stars stay, unframed, in drawers, though every now
and then the gallery does display them. "Audubon's Dream Realized:
Selections From 'The Birds of America,' " now in the West Building, is a
show of 50. Its prints, says Carlotta Owens, the curator who chose them,
"include most of the images that people ask to see when they're not out
on the walls."
The passenger pigeon (now extinct), and the ivory-billed woodpecker
(which was thought extinct, but apparently isn't) are among the birds on
view. The fish-eating bald eagle, emblem of the nation, has also been
selected, as has the Baltimore oriole, the California condor, the raven
and the mockingbird and, of course, the wild turkey (in an image touched
with gold).
Not everyone will love these birds. They look a little stiff, perhaps.
(Most have just been shot.) They also look generic instead of
individual. And their beadiness of eye is frequently reptilian. But none
of this much matters. What somehow matters more is the undeniable
patriotic aura that shimmers round this art.
Birds, of course, are emblems -- the eagle on the flagpole, the dove of
peace, the hawk. These, too, have become symbols -- of America's New
Eden, that place of natural wonders, where daring pioneers live in close
proximity to God's amazing handiwork, and make amazing art.
Like "Dumbo" by Walt Disney, or the faces on Mount Rushmore carved by
Gutzon Borglum, or Andy Warhol's can of soup, Audubon's big birds have
become part of America's patrimony. Hanging them is easy. Striking in
their impact, they're also tastefully descriptive. They're as much at
ease with modern furniture as they are with antiques. These nationalist
embellishments decorate hotel rooms, and the offices of lawyers, and
steak houses, and classrooms. They've been endlessly reproduced.
All patriotic viewers who haven't seen them should.
In the hokum of their marketing, in their muscular graphic oomph, in
their hugeness of ambition and their hunger for top dollar, Audubon's
big etchings are as American as can be.
And as British. And as French.
Though the artist is remembered as notably American, he wasn't wholly
ours. J.J. Audubon was born Jean Rabine in Haiti in 1785. Until he was
18 the painter lived in France, and it was surely in that rich,
cultivated country -- not while tramping across our trackless woods, or
wading through our swamps -- that he first absorbed the stylish scrolls
and luxurious arabesques and ripe rococo curls that activate his art.
His birds may be American, but these prints aren't. They were made in
London. Audubon supplied the detailed watercolor drawings on which his
prints were based, but skillful English craftsmen, led by London's
Robert Havell (1793-1878), etched their copper plates, and put them
through the press, and applied their watercolor hues. Publication, which
began in 1826, was completed in 1838.
Europe offered Audubon something else he sorely needed -- competitive
buyers rich enough to afford his costly art. "It is not the naturalist
I wish to please," he wrote in 1826, "it is the wealthy part of the
community."
In this he well succeeded. King George IV of England, King Charles X of
France, the Duchess of Clarence and Charles Bonaparte, who one day would
become King Louis Philippe of France, were among his subscribers. A full
set of "The Birds" cost $1,000, and a rich man's private library grand
enough to house it -- a library with leather chairs and 40-inch-high
bookshelves and long well-ordered rows of rich morocco bindings -- cost
even more than that.
Audubon knew just how to hook his wealthy customers. Once he got to
England he became the Noble Savage, the artist as a natural, the diamond
in the rough. He called himself "The American Woodsman." He claimed he'd
hunted with Daniel Boone. He came on like Natty Bumppo from "The Last of
the Mohicans." In London, Audubon strode into grand drawing rooms with
fringes on his buckskins, and bear grease in his hair.
His pictures are displayed against bare walls at the National Gallery.
The drawing rooms where Audubon showed them off were different. There
the table legs and candlesticks were carved with smooth acanthus leaves.
Underfoot were figured carpets. Everywhere one turned one saw curlicues
and swirls and swooping arabesques. All beauty is dependent on the
beauty of the S-curve, so England's William Hogarth had taught his
nation's aestheticians. Audubon's compositions -- those glimpses of the
New World designed to reassure the Old -- rely upon it, too.
Audubon, the artist, was a pretty good ecologist. His birds don't perch
in bell jars. His pictures show the foods they eat (catfish, baby
alligators, many sorts of moths) and the branches they inhabit, and
glimpses of the landscapes through which he'd watched them fly.
To give the man due credit, he was a great graphic designer. His birds
don't really move; they swoop or tumble. He never shows them blurred.
Their energy derives from the power of their outlines, and from the
unexpected ways they've been fit onto the page.
Otherwise they're static. Their floating feathers do not float, they
look glued to the paper. Audubon's birds feel pinioned, too. Instead of
lively flying things, they tend to look like corpses pinned to boards
with nails, or held in place by metal wires -- which shouldn't be
surprising for that's just what they are.
Audubon's Dream Realized: Selections From 'The Birds of America' will be
on display in the National Gallery's West Building, Fourth Street and
Constitution Avenue NW, through March 26. The 50 prints on view have
been chosen from a folio that Mrs. Walter B. James presented to the
gallery 60 years ago. An Audubon oil painting, "Osprey and Weakfish"
(1829 or later), a recent gift of Richard Mellon Scaife, is also on
display. General Dynamics sponsored this exhibit. The gallery is open
Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and from 11 a.m. to 6
p.m. on Sundays. Admission is free. Go to http://www.nga.gov/ or call
202-737-4215 for more information.
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