Audubon’s Aviary: Portraits of Endangered Species” is the fourth in a series of five planned annual exhibitions drawn from the New-York Historical Societys unique holdings of watercolors by John James Audubon. The Society owns all of the known 435 original paintings the superstar ornithologist made for the rare double-elephant folio edition of his Birds of America (1827–38), all but one of which were acquired from his widow, Lucy Bakewell Audubon, in 1863. The large-scale masterpieces reveal Audubon not only as a pioneering naturalist, but as a sensitive and innovative artist. Painted on fine English paper, the largest then available, Audubon’s representations are life-size wherever possible and exquisite in their detail and intensity of color. He drew them in minute detail in graphite before adding combinations of watercolor, black ink, gouache, glaze, and occasionally charcoal and oil paint, which means that, more than 150 years after they were made, they still positively glow. Equally remarkable is Audubon’s ability to capture the complexity of the birds’ movement in space, with dramatic foreshortening and representations of complex twists and turns of their heads, wings, and tails.

Because of the work's sensitivity to light, the Society can exhibit each piece only once a decade—they spend the intervening time in storage facilities in the society's main building on Central Park West. The current exhibition, on view through March 16, combines 42 of the works with a soundtrack of bird calls and large-scale video projections of the birds themselves.

ARTINFO toured “Audubon’s Aviary” with its curator, Roberta J. M. Olson, and asked her a few questions about the show.

Roberta, why is it so important to show these works only once a decade?

Watercolor is highly fragile and perishable in any case, but these are even more so because Audubon was an experimental artist who developed his own techniques of collage, layering, and combining watercolor and pastel. They can only be exhibited in what is called “five foot candlelight” for a maximum of three months.

But he didn’t always look after them so well himself, did he?

No. It’s a miracle that they have survived as well as they have. They weren’t always so protected. They didn’t have this UV-treated glazing, for example. Audubon took them all on his travels in the wild – his “wanderings” as he liked to call them —and he would send them across to England to be engraved. Audubon was a great entrepreneur. He hung them up in road shows to raise money to print Birds of America; you can still see some pinholes where they were tacked up. 

Many of the watercolors are accompanied by recordings of bird calls. Why did you decide to do that?

We wanted to present as much information as we could about the birds, and the calls are such an integral part of ornithology, with a third of all identifications done through sound. Birds like the yellow rail are so secretive that few people have ever seen them, but many people have heard them. In his journals Audubon actually gives the phonetic equivalents of the calls.

There is an ambient soundtrack as well.

Yes, an hour-long program. We have a number of fly-overs, like the whooping crane that flies from end to end and the barn owl that comes out and circles. There’s also a red cockaded woodpecker. We wanted to try to simulate what you would get in nature.

And then there’s a video screen with shots of the birds in nature.

It’s to make the birds come to life.

Doesn’t that depart from how Audubon saw the birds?

No. He was cinematic. Panoramas were already big in his day, plus he was also an artist who had what is called eidetic vision: He didn’t just remember a bird’s coloration, he remembered how it moved, as though his mind were a tape, recording it.

The theme of this show is endangered species, but in the portrait that you’ve included Audubon is shown with a shotgun across his knee. Did he kill the birds that he painted?

Audubon lived in an era when birds were harvested for food. He shot birds like everybody did, but he also shot them to draw them, and to dissect them, and to measure them with a compass. In fact, ornithologists still kill birds today.

How did you choose what to include?

It’s always a challenge, because our holdings of Audubon are so rich. But I wanted to mix stories. We have three species here that are definitely extinct. Then there’s the eskimo curlew, which has not been seen since 1962—and the image is so terribly moving, because it has the male looking at its dead mate, as though he can’t believe that she’s dead. But then we have success stories like the condor, which has just been taken off the endangered species list, or the whooping crane—there were fewer than 20 in 1941, but then they were brought back from the brink.

All of these birds are like the canaries in the coalmine for our planet. If their habitat goes, they go. They are all endangered. Just as our way of life is endangered.

Would the show's 21st-century environmental message have made sense to Audubon?

Audubon was environmentally concerned long before the word “ecology” was ever coined. In his later writings he talked about how man is a destroyer. For him what had begun as a passion for discovery became a passion for preservation as well.