A MONA Moment Recently, as I walked up the steps to our museum, I noticed a pigeon lying dead on the sidewalk. Pigeons and museums are well known to each other, and are not always on the friendliest terms. Pigeons tend to congregate on the cornices of neoclassical edifices like MONA, and leave deposits that have no redeeming aesthetic value to the building. Like many people, I have never thought much about pigeons, except as stately beggars of the urban landscape.
But for some reason, I was drawn to this pigeon lying still on the sidewalk. As I looked at it, I saw grace and beauty. On its gray back was a dapple of white, striking, set against the deep gray down of its wings: a fugitive cloud in a dark sky. The head of the pigeon had a finish of pink iridescence, restrained and elegant. But the real surprise was the spray of tail feathers, a deep, pleasing gray with dramatic black tips, in a near perfect half circle.
Looking at it from above, the perspective had the flavor of a rendering by John James Audubon, one of America's great, 19th century artists. Currently the Museum of Nebraska Art celebrates Audubon with an exhibition of wildlife art, in conjunction with the annual migration through the region of the Sandhills Cranes.
If you love wildlife, you must see the work of Audubon. Audubon's opus, The Birds of America, is one of the great landmarks of American art. In the early 1820s, Audubon roamed America and parts of Nebraska, making watercolors and drawings of some 489 species of birds. The results of six years of work were four volumes of hand colored prints copied from his drawings. The double elephant folio size of the prints made this the largest book ever published up to that time.
There is no misplaced sentimentality in Audubon's work and his depiction of wildlife. We see a Barn Swallow pounce on a snake. Smaller species are pictured less dramatically but accurately in the context of their normal habitat.
What elevates this work to the highest level of artistic standards is what our curator James May refers to its' "essential aliveness," Audubon's unique ability to communicate something of the specie's personality through his art, and through long and careful observations of their habits.
When we think of the great portrait artists, we typically think of Rembrandt, Goya and Eakins, the penetrating insight they convey to us about their subjects. In this light, perhaps Audubon is their equal in the world of wildlife. He conveys through gesture, movement, context of the situation, habitat, a feeling for the animal's fundamental nature. Not in the anthropomorphic sense--not transposing his human culture on them--but providing us with a window into the true nature of their existence.
Which leads me back to that dead pigeon, at the foot of the steps up to MONA's entrance. For all the grandeur of our museum's great, Renaissance Revival facade, it could not surpass the humble beauty of this pigeon lying at its feet. And I had a fleeting wish to bring back Audubon for a time, just long enough to render this pigeon, to make explicit what my mind's eye saw, a being unique, timeless, and entirely beautiful.
Audubon
By Ron Roth
Director
Museum of Nebraska Art
