About American Wildlife Art
Foreword
If there ever was a book appropriate to its time, it’s American Wildlife Art. Never in history has there been a time when wildlife or the environment has figured so large in our collective consciousness. Although this awareness is now a global phenomenon, environmental consciousness in America had its origins with men like John Muir and Aldo Leopold. For Europeans of my generation, Rachel Carson had the greatest impact. I was in art school and working at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm when her book Silent Spring came out. It mobilized research and made us conscious of the vulnerability of the environment like nothing else before.
Nowhere is the interest in nature as great as in the United States. A survey taken by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service twenty years ago estimated that 135 million Americans enjoyed watching and photographing wildlife. Since then, the number has grown exponentially. In a 2005 Harris Poll, seventy-four percent of U.S. adults agreed that environmental protection is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high and that additional environmental improvements should be made regardless of cost. No wonder environmentalism has been on most every presidential platform since the 1960s.
Wildlife images have become powerful symbols in popular culture as well as fine art. Such clearly recognizable images as a whale fluke or the distinctive black-and-white outline of the giant panda are now a standard part of our iconographic lexicon. Today you can barely open a magazine without seeing some kind of wildlife icon. Often these icons promote corporations interested in positioning themselves as friends of the environment. (When corporate America, with all its marketing know-how, associates itself with wildlife, you know these images have real power.) Of course, wildlife images are also used to promote the efforts of conservation organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund.
Never before have there been so many artists working with wildlife imagery. Since artists are mirrors of their time, there must be a relationship between environmental consciousness and the popularity of wildlife art. Collected in the form of paintings, sculptures, prints, or stamps, wildlife art is probably the most popular genre the United States has ever seen. Clearly then, American Wildlife Art is not only timely but important to our understanding of the phenomenon that wildlife art has become. I know of no man better qualified to write this story than David Wagner. Dave possesses an exceptional combination of intellectual prowess and arts administration acumen. Since he is the leading scholar in this field, we would expect his research and interpretation to be exceptional, and indeed it is. But American Wildlife Art is also very accessible. With logical organization and a natural, flowing style, it makes for excellent reading.
I first got to know Dave during his ten-year tenure as director of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, which he established as a world leader in bird art during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, Dave’s career has encompassed a broader spectrum of art, but he has always continued to serve and promote wildlife art—and in very special ways. As a museum director, he commissioned new work from living artists, including two monumental sculptures from me. Dave has curated and directed numerous exhibitions, including my traveling exhibition, &Kent Ullberg: A Retrospective,& and he has served as a juror for the most important wildlife art shows. As a scholar, he has written insightful articles and exhibition catalogues and lectured widely.
It has been my privilege to represent my fellow artists at gala openings of exhibitions that Dave has directed both in the United States and overseas and to share the platform with him. I have heard Dave speak in such diverse places as the Chautauqua Institute, where he designed the most important international forum on wildlife art ever assembled; the Denver Rotary Club Show; and the Beijing Museum of Natural History in China. After these and other openings and events, we have spent many a late night arguing about art philosophy over a bottle of wine. (Dave never turns down a good art argument.) In the process, I have found that Dave is a man with a keen intellect and a good eye for art.
Wildlife art could not have a more eloquent or knowledgeable spokesperson than David Wagner, and I’m sure that all artists working with wildlife today feel the same gratitude that I do for Dave dedicating so much of his life and talent to our field.
Kent Ullberg
Corpus Christi, Texas
Loveland, Colorado
Introduction: The State of Wildlife Art Today
The state of wildlife art is in a surprising ascendancy or, rather, has been since the late 1970s. When I was growing up in the 1940s, wildlife art was almost entirely a branch of illustration. The great painters of the nineteenth century big-game scenes—Carl Rungius, Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors, and others—were already a spent force by early in the twentieth century. I remember the wonderful works of Louis Agassiz (L.A.) Fuertes and Allan Brooks in the National Geographic series on birds of North America. There were bird and mammal books (plus books on other fauna and flora), including the pioneering field guides of Roger Tory Peterson. Some excellent illustrations that were, in my opinion, the closest to “art” were the works of Francis Lee (F. L.) Jaques, which he created for books such as those by Sigurd Olson. And there were illustrations for “rod and gun” magazines. Although narrow in focus, many of these were very well done: the paintings of Bob Kuhn are shining examples.
From the time I was twelve-years old, I knew that I wanted to have adventures in nature and put my ideas about nature down in paint. By the time I was twenty, I had been busy making wildlife art in the style of Brooks, Fuertes, and Peterson for a dozen years. I thought that it had all been done and decided to get a big brush and paint nature in the impressionist style and the styles of the twentieth century. I was not aware of any contemporary nature easel paintings hanging in frames on walls. It was all in books and magazines.
There has been a prejudice for many centuries against showing wildlife in its own environment, eye to eye, with respect. In most other cultures, from tribal art to the art of early Egypt, wildlife has been shown as a matter of course, along with other subjects. Since the medieval period in western culture, wildlife has dropped out as a mainstream subject in art. Domestic animals were always there, right up to Picasso, but wildlife was shown either as quarry at the end of a spear or hanging by its feet with a bunch of grapes, ready for the table. It is odd that contemporary art museums can show humans, wine bottles, guitars, automobiles, and pink motels, but not wildlife in its own world.
In about 1965, under the influence of Andrew Wyeth, who had recently emerged as an artist, I began painting my local landscape, including its mammals and birds. I was amazed that my first show of this type of painting, in 1967, was a sellout. It seemed that people wanted to hang realistic renderings of nature on their walls. Gradually, more painters adopted this style, and by 1975, in the landmark Royal Ontario Museum show Animals in Art, it seemed a new art movement was in full swing.
This movement was, of course, part of historical and demographic trends. It was given a boost in the late 1970s and 1980s by the growth in the market for signed and numbered, limited-edition reproduction prints, which meant that high-quality renderings of art works could be made more widely available at a fairly reasonable price. The post–World War II economic boom had matured, and suburbia was expanding. The so-called &yuppies& had disposable income and new homes with blank walls. These people had been imprinted as toddlers in the 1950s by television shows such as the Wonderful World of Disney and Marlin Perkin’s Wild Kingdom. They felt rather than knew that nature was wonderful, precious, and threatened. A nature print on the wall became an icon of purity and goodness in an increasingly aggressive, industrialized world. Some have said that nature art replaced religious art and crucifixes as symbols to hang on the wall (or to wear as t-shirts, for that matter).
Wildlife art flourished so much in the 1980s that it became a mainstay of art auctions, particularly for charity fundraisers. &Collectability& became the cry, and a feeding frenzy developed, not only for originals but for reproduction prints. As one would expect in a market economy, when demand increased, prices rose. It became fairly common for reproductions to sell for many hundreds of dollars, and for originals to sell for tens of thousands.
As young people with artistic talent (or in many cases, limited talent) saw this phenomenon, they hoped for careers and easy riches while having a nice life in association with nature. Quite often their hopes and dreams came true, but the majority have been disappointed. Any &gold rush& atmosphere results in large-scale flocking and small-scale success stories. As I said in the beginning, however, I am surprised and, of course, pleased by the popularity of wildlife art. Although some minor talents seem to have found a significant measure of fame and fortune as a result of skillful marketing, the majority of these are appreciated only by friends and neighbours, and this appreciation is still positive because it raises consciousness about nature and brings a measure of personal satisfaction. The good news is that a number of talented young people have found an interesting way of life and a means to express themselves. The bad news is that this genre is so market targeted that creativity and the expansion of styles and subject matter is cramped, to say the least.
The scene in Britain and Europe shows far more tolerance for the explorations so essential for the vitality of true art. The market over there, however, while broader, is not as developed as it is in North America. There seem to be many critical but envious glances &across the water& at the prices and popularity of wildlife art in America. Could this also be a phenomenon of history and demographics? The Old World is more patrician, the New World more plebeian? Many of the most superb European and British wildlife artists find little interest except among their peers in North America.
Wildlife art, sadly, has very little breadth these days. If wildlife includes all fauna and probably flora (according to the World Wildlife Fund), the current crop of painters barely scratches the surface. Almost all production is market driven and oriented to selling photomechanically reproduced prints. This has resulted in the &dumbing down& of subject matter and styles to appeal to the lowest common denominator of taste. The same few furrows are plowed over and over—wolves, bears, big cats, loons, game birds, and backyard avian favourites. The rest of the huge and complex world of nature is all but ignored.
Even the subject matters that are overworked are dealt with superficially. The intricate issues facing wolves or loons (for example) in their individual lives and in their relationship with their ecosystems and with humans are almost never explored. In many ways, I regret the term “wildlife art.” By definition it creates a ghetto. I think of myself simply as a Canadian painter, just like the members of the Group of Seven I used to emulate. As with any artist, my creativity is based on what I love or what interests me the most. I love landscape and natural ecosystems, and in real life I find them more interesting when they are inhabited by a bird or a mammal. So that is what I paint. I also paint a variety of other things that interest me. Although I participate in the “clubishness” of the wildlife art groups, I long for a future in which painters and their works are not so compartmentalized.
Judging by the popularity of wildlife art, it must have meaning and value to a great number of people, qualities reinforced in my case by the numerous comments and letters I have received through the years. The general thrust of these communications is that nature is wonderful and the art helps to spotlight and focus attention on it. The art also brings the viewer to a vicarious visit with nature. Sometimes it recalls a past pleasant experience. At other times it hints at hoped-for adventures in nature. I have been told that my pictures bring a sense of peace and fulfillment and have even been used (through books and prints) in hospitals and palliative care centres. The true meaning and value of art is a mystery, of course, and always should be so. So it may be that artists who portray nature in an accessible, realistic manner will perhaps be a major cultural legacy of late-twentieth-century painting.
I feel that the significance of wildlife art in raising public consciousness about the need to protect nature is generally overrated. To me, television documentaries and magazines are far more important in this area. In fact, most wildlife art is so sweet and easy to swallow that it can be soporific and lull the public into a bland acceptance of the status quo. Anyone who is paying attention knows that the status quo—or present trends if they continue at the present pace—will destroy our precious natural heritage in a few decades. It is happening now. I occasionally create a heavy-hitting “message” painting. These are mostly used as vehicles in my lectures to reinforce my message about threats to our natural world.
The question of the relationship of wildlife art to various audiences is an interesting one. I have the impression that the segment of society most engaged with wildlife art is white, middle class to upper-middle class, and well educated. While there are numerous exceptions involving people of other races and lower income, I think the pattern is overwhelming. Most people are probably not even aware of wildlife art or any other art for that matter.
One group that is very aware of art has a hostile view toward wildlife art. These are the modernist art fans who consider themselves too sophisticated and elite to give more than a sidelong glance in the direction of so popular a phenomenon as wildlife art. I suspect that the mere fact of its popularity is a major strike against it. But I think that wildlife art is here to stay, largely because as nature becomes more threatened and more precious, the longing for images of it will increase. Realism is here to stay as well. The early twentieth century flirtation with the modernist philosophy—&It’s been done before, don’t do it again&—played itself out by the 1960s. All of those &isms& are a rather quaint piece of history. Artists will continue to paint what they love, the public will continue to pay for what they love (maybe even in public museums), and nature will probably grow in importance in the public mind. Perhaps the feeding frenzy of “collectability” will calm down. That would be good for creativity. I hope that the general public will open its eyes wider and take in a greater variety of subjects, styles, and techniques in the realm of art of the natural world. I also hope that the general public will open its eyes and hearts to the urgency of the need to halt our destruction of nature. We and all the other living things on the planet can have a beautiful future, but we humans are going to have to pay attention, and we are going to have to pay for it. I think that it is worth it.
Robert Bateman
Salt Spring Island, British Columbia