Bird: Exploring the Winged World
Phaidon Press, 2021
Bird: Exploring the Winged World presents more than three hundred examples of artful depictions of birds. It covers a vast span of time – from an Archaeopteryx siemensii fossil (p. 26) dating back one hundred and fifty million years to an ancient Egyptian fresco of geese (Bean, Greater white-fronted, and Red-breasted) (p. 77) to a 2020 painting (Black and Part Black Birds) by Kerry James Marshall (p. 36). Most of the works, however, date from after about 1500, and a good number are modern or contemporary. There are representations from many regions of the world: West Africa (Bird (Sejen), p. 139), Zimbabwe (Great Zimbabwe Bird, p. 206), Iran (Habiballah of Sava’s Concourse of Birds, p. 79), Japan (Ohara Koson’s Egret in the Rain, p. 135), Australia (Quail Petroglyph, p. 276) and Peru (the Hummingbird of Nasca, p. 109). But it must be said that these are so dominated by works from Europe and the United States that they feel tokenized.
There are famous, even iconic works: Albrecht Dürer’s Wing of a European Roller (p. 166), Carol Farbritius’ The Goldfinch (p. 209), Jan Asselijn’s The Threatened Swan (p. 97), John James Audubon and Robert Havell’s American Flamingo (p. 177), and Pablo Picasso’s The Dove of Peace (p. 187). Peeter Boel’s Study of a Crowned Crane (p. 161), on the other hand, is — for me — a welcome surprising discovery. While these are all paintings, drawing or prints, there are also works made of silk, metal, glass, wood, even x-radiographs (Arie van ‘t Riet’s Kingfisher Feeding, p. 231). Among the more dazzling (for different reasons) uses of media are Wallace Chan’s The Lark (p. 149), a brooch made of diamonds, sapphires and garnets, and a Greater bird of paradise (p. 213) sculpted entirely of paper by Diana Beltrán Herrera in a bravura display of trompe l’oeil.
For the most part, these are arranged as juxtaposed pairs which share something in common, whether it be a type of bird (Jakob Bogdány and Frans Lanting’s Scarlet macaws, pp. 10–11) or a visual similarity (Henry W. Elliott and Robert Ridgway’s Seedeating Birds and Duke Riley’s The Filmmakers, pp. 54–55). Some of these pairings work particularly well. Giacomo Balla’s painting Flight of the Swallows is paired with Étienne-Jules Marey’s Bird Flight, Duck Landing, a photograph that inspired it (pp. 262–63). Nick Cave’s Soundsuitplays off a seventeenth century musical plate (pp. 72–73). Lyette Yiadom-Boakye’s Strip Lit considers Robert Rauschenberg’s Canyon (pp. 188–89). Less obvious, but quite poignant, are Fred Tomaselli’s Bird Blast and Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s The White Duck (pp. 322–23) both of which speak to the fragility of life in complex ways. Brief essays accompany each image, providing background on the artist, the artwork and/or the birds.
This is a lovely book to leaf through, with a clean and simple layout of striking images and short, easily digestible texts. Many people will enjoy it that way, and that is the intention of the creators.
I say “creators” because this is a book without an author; it was put together by commissioning editor Victoria Clarke whose previous projects include Map: Exploring the World and The Modernist House. Clarke gathered numerous people, primarily art historians and ornithologists, to make contributions. But, perhaps because of that construction process, those parts never meld into a whole with a distinctive point of view. Thus, this is ultimately nothing more than just a lovely book that could have been much, much more.
I truly admire artists who work economically, using the simplest means to achieve spectacular effects. This requires masterful technique, demonstrated here by such works as Saul Steinberg’s Birds (p. 15) and Josef Albers’ Owl (II) (p. 83). But there is an enormous difference between being economical and taking short cuts. The latter seems to have been the modus operandi of the committee that put together this book.
In part, it is a matter of the generic versus the specific. Think of the difference between looking out on a lake and seeing a bunch of ducks rather than seeing Mallards, American Black Ducks, Gadwalls, Northern Pintails, Northern Shovelers, and a Blue winged Teal. And then there is an American Coot that kind of looks like a duck and kind of swims like a duck but is not a duck (not being a member of the family Anatidae, itself comprised of several genera).
The title of the book could not be more generic and in no way tells the potential reader what might be inside. How are we, per the subtitle, “exploring the winged world?” Perhaps a more descriptive name would have been something like “Aves: Birds in Art from Pre-History to Now.” The fact that the title parallels an earlier project by the editor suggests a kind of branding of this genre of book, intended for a pre-existing audience. The cover, a vibrant Big Bird (p. 94) yellow, is certainly eye catching; the central design, a wing made of a variety of feathers, is not one of the images inside. The book is large but, at 352 pages, not overly hefty.
The introduction by Katrina van Grouw, the author and illustrator of the intricately observed and dryly witty Unfeathered Bird (Princeton University Press, 2013). Her delightful presentation for the Linnaean Society in November of 2013 was fascinating and memorable. However, this essay is rather bland and reads as if she is writing it as a favor.
The images that comprise the core of the book are in no particular order. The arrangement is not chronological nor taxonomic nor geographic nor “functional:” feathers, advertisements, migration, symbols or human interaction. This is deliberate, but possibly someone thought at the last minute that it would not be obvious; thus, a disclaimer — strangely located on the copyright page – states this outright.
A large number of the works are either in private collections or exist in multiples: photographs, prints and printed books. Another big group is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These were likely ones for which getting images and the rights to print them were quite straightforward. As the images are not divided into sections, there is no need to have groupings of roughly equal length; what could easily be found could be used.
What is omitted from any selection is as telling as what is included, as it speaks to decisions that have been made. There is a cautious avoidance of the potentially controversial. For example, while there are some gorgeous objects made of feathers – a hummingbird aigrette by Joseph Chaumet (p. 18), Zen der Eiule by sculptor Rebecca Horn (p. 147), and a Brazilian Ray crown (p. 199) — we do not see the quetzalāpanecayōtl known as “Moctezuma’s headdress,” currently in Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology, an object about which an entire book could be written. (Images of this and others mentioned here are easily found on the internet.) The text on Irving Penn’s photograph Woman in Chicken Hat mentions modern restrictions on the trade in feathers but not that such millinery mania led to the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet.
The images are strictly PG. There are no provocative human nudes such as Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot at the Metropolitan Museum, Dosso Dossi’s Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, or Bronzino’s Portrait of the Dwarf Morgante at Palazzo Pitti. Included is Peter Paul Rubens’ Abduction of Ganymede (p. 50) but not his much more (literally) visceral Prometheus Bound at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. While there are images of dead birds, including the previously mentioned Oudry as well as a painting by Williem van Aelst (p. 132) and a macabre assemblage by Polly Morgan (p. 40), none have the grim weight that Francisco de Goya’s Dead Turkey and Dead Fowl at the Prado would have.
Also missing are openly Christian symbols, a rich topic specifically mentioned by van Grouw in her introduction. There are innumerable examples of pelicans piercing their breasts to feed their young with their own blood and of goldfinches grasped by infant Jesuses, emblems of the Passion because they eat thorny plants. We do not get Giotto’s avian audience to the preaching of St. Francis nor Raphael’s vigilant cranes watching the Miraculous Draft of Fishes. By keeping the majority of the works after 1500, they can easily stay in secular territory.
As this is a book meant to be looked at rather than necessarily read, the design is a crucial aspect. Flipping through, the “compare and contrast” layout (a staple of traditional art history courses) gets monotonous; when there is a single image spread out over both pages, such as Katsushika Hokusai’s Phoenix screen (pp. 52–53) it is a relief.
All the essays are almost exactly the same length, arranged in three columns each ten lines long. Some of the writers very neatly and almost exactly fill the space, but most were able to complete at least half of the last column. Sometimes that required stringing together virtually unrelated facts to make up the length. The essay on William Holman Hunt’s The Festival of St. Swithin (The Dovecote) (p. 37), bounces from influences on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the use of dove dung as a fertilizer in ancient Iran to folk traditions of weather prediction. Only the texts on Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Let Go) (p. 182) and Milton Glaser’s Birds (p. 248) fall short. This uniformity of text length makes design much simpler — the text, like the images, can just be dropped into a template — but also monotonous, like a print version of Instagram.
At the end are shorter sections (essentially appendices) which literally seem like after thoughts. While the ones by Jen Lobo on bird classification and orders and on bird topography and bill morphology are clear and concise, similar information can be found in any bird guidebook, most of which are smaller and thus much less awkward to use as references. There are mini-biographies about some of the makers of the works, though not for Barbara Kruger nor Milton Glaser about whose works so little was written. For these, consult Wikipedia. The short and wildly uneven glossary chooses only sixty-three words including “apotropaic,” “feather,” “psittacofulvins,” and “wingspan.”
Two of the appendices stand out in a good way. The essay on urban bird watching by David Lindo aka The Urban Birder gives useful advice to those who might be inspired to look at some actual birds. He manages to link his charming essay to ten birds depicted in the book that an urban birder might see.
The timeline appendix — a world history of humans studying, depicting, and interacting with birds — is well researched and highly creative, for me, the highlight of the whole book. This could have been the basis of a really interesting book, but it is not tied back to the main images except (rarely) referring to a page number. The author of this section, Rosie Pickles, is one of the few contributors not to get her name in bold, so I am doing that here.
The winged world and the art world are both far richer and far stranger, more beautiful and more brutal than what is presented here. That is what allows them to be life-long passions. Enjoy browsing through this book as you would enjoy a walk along a lake looking at ducks. But, over there, is an American Coot, and they are fascinating.
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Jean Dommermuth, a Linnaean member, is a lecturer at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and a paintings conservator in private practice in New York. She is a recent recipient of the Susan Deal Booth Rome Prize, for which she spent extended time in Rome, Italy studying Sixteenth Century Florentine canvas painting.
van Grouw Response to Bird Review
I was the external expert—on both birds and bird art—brought in to help the full-time Phaidon staff with the selection of images and to advise on the accuracy of the text of Bird. As the Consultant Editor it was my job to write the book’s Introduction—which was the part I’d been looking forward to most!
Unfortunately for me, it turned out that Phaidon expected the introductions to this series to conform to a rigorously strict house style. The subject of each individual paragraph was set out in stone. With the entire Introduction virtually dictated to me, I had to fight—really fight—to preserve the little flourish of expressive writing in the last few paragraphs as it reaches its climax with Archaeopteryx lithographica, lithographic limestone, and the joy of birds. It was a test of diplomacy vs. tenacity and, under the circumstances, I think I did rather well!
I’m in full agreement with much of the reviewer’s assessment of Bird. Nevertheless, the suggestion that this was because I didn’t care about it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’m grateful for the reviewer’s high opinion of my other writing. However, an off-target guess at the reason for the disappointing writing is not fine. I was not compromising—I was being compromised. I cared, and still do care, a great deal.
— Katrina van Grouw, July 2023