Reaktion
Review by David Starkey
Before turning to Roberta J.M. Olson’s Audubon as Artist: A New Look at the Birds of America, in a gorgeously reproduced edition by Reaktion Books, it’s worth looking more closely at the book’s subject. Back in 2023, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning about racial injustice that followed, the Audubon Society, which was founded in 1905, seriously considered changing its name. The gist of the argument in favor of the name change was that Audubon was a “racist enslaver” who did not deserve to be associated with an organization dedicated to environmental and ornithological preservation. Here’s the Society’s own description of their namesake:
It’s fair to describe John James Audubon as a genius, a pioneer, a fabulist, and a man whose actions reflected a dominant white view of the pursuit of scientific knowledge. His contributions to ornithology, art, and culture are enormous, but he was a complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day. He was contemporaneously and posthumously accused of—and most certainly committed—both academic fraud and plagiarism. But far worse, he enslaved Black people and wrote critically about emancipation. He stole human remains and sent the skulls to a colleague who used them to assert that whites were superior to non-whites.
Granted, in the nightmarescape of Trump 2.0’s America, Audubon might be considered a national hero by certain individuals for those “accomplishments,” but hopefully most of us would not see such a person as someone worth admiring or emulating.
So how does an author validate the art without lauding the artist’s behavior? Olson, who as a curator and art history professor has spent a great deal of time with Audubon’s original watercolors, mostly circumvents the issue of “escalating identity politics” by stating that Audubon’s “contradictions are better left to an in-depth biographical study.” Instead, she prefers to focus mostly on his art, with some mention of his “early contributions to a culture awakening to the fact that civilization was destroying wildlife and the natural environment.” In fairness, she does offer some passages from his letters that show him as eco-aware, and it is indisputable that the organization he inspired has done excellent work in conservation for a hundred and twenty years.
Let’s be honest, though, neither Audubon’s nascent but imperfect environmentalism–after all, he shot and killed the birds he painted–nor his artistry will be enough for those determined to vilify his legacy. And yet readers willing to set aside their issues with Audubon the man will find their interest in Audubon the painter richly rewarded.
The Audubon we meet in Audubon as Artist is a kind of “nineteenth-century American Leonardo da Vinci, who married art and science in his work.” Yes, he has a “difficult personality,” but he is a “brilliant artist and innovator.” As you flip through the book’s pages, it is hard to argue against Audubon’s skill as an observer of birds, as well as his unique way of rendering them on the page. The individual features of particular species are clearly recognizable, but there’s something stranger and grander about Audubon’s parakeets and egrets, turkeys and eagles, kingfishers and cardinals. Their odd postures, the way their necks frequently poke at the edge of the page, the general air of creatures who are active yet unsettled–all of these qualities make an Audubon watercolor distinctive and quite clearly a work of art at least as much as it is a depiction of a “mere” bird.
And then there is the drama. His mortally wounded Great Black-backed Gull, with its right wing extended to the top of the pictorial space and its bright red insides spilling onto the grey ground evokes the same sympathy we might feel for a dying human taking their final few breaths. And surely someone who could depict such a scene was capable of feeling sympathy for the perishing creature?
Perhaps the most theatrical of Audubon’s paintings is that of a rattlesnake threatening a nest of northern mockingbirds. The snake’s rattle points menacingly at one of the birds, and its gaping mouth seems on the verge of striking, and swallowing, another. Olson points out that critics on both side of the Atlantic complained that rattlesnakes neither “climb trees nor have fangs that curve outward at their tips.” Yet she notes that “Audubon was correct on both counts and was vindicated,” while also acknowledging that the artist “did not always allow absolute accuracy to interfere with a good story.”
One of the book’s pleasures is seeing the work of older painters whose work rhymes visually with Audubon’s, even if the largely self-taught artist wasn’t aware of it when he was painting his Birds of America. And when he was, as Olson writes of an illustration of the passenger pigeon, “By layering his observations over artistic prototypes, he raised his portrayal…above mere ornithological reportage.”
The book ends with some examples of Audubon’s artistic legacy, which Olson sees in “the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, Walton Ford…among many others.” This influence might not be immediately apparent when thinking of O’Keeffe or Wythe’s work, but looking at side by side color plates by Audubon and Winslow Homer, it’s remarkable how much the common goldeneye ducks in flight painted by Homer in 1909 resemble a study done by Audubon in the 1830s.
We also see some Audubon-inspired murals and posters, but Audubon the artist is not so much notable for his influence as for his singularity. Indeed, while one may begin, as I did, by reading Audubon as Artist with great reservations about the painter, it’s hard not to be carried away by the author’s enthusiasm for her subject. The recent reassessment of his life has meant Audubon is in dire need of a defender, and he has found an able one in Roberta Olson.
