Walton Ford, now in his early sixties, is showing drawings and paintings of animals—in particular a black panther and a Barbary lion. There is also a selection of animal drawings chosen by Ford from the Morgan Library collection. The practice of depicting animals, a distinctive art sub-genre we could say goes back to the Lascaux caves, is not practiced now to the extent it was earlier, as late as the 19rh century, when the French romantic painter Delacroix accurately captured the form and spirit of tigers. Today, panthers and lions have a very difficult time surviving in the wild, as their habitat continues to be erased by human habitats. We look at these animals now not only with a degree of awe but also a wistfulness, based on the hope that wild beasts might return to an unaltered landscape favoring their continued presence in an untouched places.
But it has been decades, and likely centuries, since the flora and fauna outdoors have lived without human influence. This means that Walton’s animals not only belong to a romantic tradition, they also belong to an elegiac one. Seeing the black panther, who escaped from a zoo in1933 In Zurich, does remind us of the beauty and savage grace of such an animal, but the city buildings in the background of several of Ford’s efforts tell a sadder tale than we would care to admit—namely, the inexorable destruction of land that once served as the grounds of wild beasts, not to mention the death of the panther at the hands of a hungry farmer, who captured and ate it.
There is little, it seems, we can do to stop the further encroachment of the landscape. Permanent change is occurring everywhere. Glaciers are melting, making life more than difficult for polar bears. Lions have been absent from North Africa since the middle of the last century. Our relation to animals thus becomes both idealized, in the sense that we feel we are seeing the last of a breed, and cynical, in our refusal to take responsibility for the ongoing destruction of natural habitat. So relations to Ford’s accurate, often idyllic treatments of animals no one sees any longer in the wild are complicated. If we idolize the independent nature of a big cat, at the same time we find that admiration hard to keep alive, especially when watching a caged animal in the zoo. There is nothing sadder than seeing these trapped animals, once the apex predators of the landscape, obsessively repeat the few steps available to them in a cage.
It is too late to restore the animals to a genuine freedom. But Ford’s drawings and paintings keep alive an earlier time, when.the animals had the dignity of open space. The romanticism of his description keeps the animals alive. This is achieved in part by technical skill; Ford describes the fierce nature of the beasts, whose energies exist in contrast to the bored, passive animals seen in zoos. Still, the black panther we see in Ford’s drawings escaped a zoo; the buildings of Zurich serve as a backdrop rather than a dense forest. Its fate was abject; a farmer caught and killed the animal for supper.
Thus, bathos, not pathos, enters into our relations with nature, since we alone have destroyed the animals we are now trying to save. The need to control the wild is written into our knowledge that it is mostly gone. Yet the animal’s nature cannot be compromised, even if ours can. Ford’s treatment of historically noble creatures silently suggesgts a future in which the animals may well no longer inhabit the earth.
In one review of the show, a tie is made to the construction of the Dachau concentration camp earlier in 1933, before the panther found freedom for two weeks. It is difficult to see why the connection was made in the article—does Ford intend a political allegory in his portrayal of a noble animal killed in a weakened state? This is hard to suppport; perhaps the larger contrast—between civilization and natuer—makes more sense. It doesn’t seem possible for the sad story of a caged animal’s death after it had escaped the zoo. The anecdote is greatly difficult to connect to historical events of the time. Instead, we should see the panther’s death as inexorable and tragic: a moment of freedom that was deadly from the start.
Ford’s drawings emphasize the romanticism of a caged panther st free in a major city. In a study for Verfolgen (2018), the artist places the panther high up on a tree, which stands desolate before a field of snow.The animal’s eyes glow and emphasize its wildness. A long tail hangs below the branch on which it sits, while its black coat has a red glow that shows subtly from beneath the fur. Beyond the expanse of snow, the left is a mountain that climbs into blue sky, most of its angular height covered with snow; it is shadowed by a peak covered with evergreens to the left. The scene seems strange, being a kind of deliberate effort to praise a lone animal whose freedom would be entirely brief.
In another painting, called Die Zeige and made in 2016, Ford showss us the panther ona limb extending horizontally from the right into the middle of the composition. It holds in its front paws a domestic goat, likely a pet as it has a red ribbon with a bell around its neck. The animal is dead, framed on the right by a tall evergreen whose branches are heavy with snow. Off to the left, sanding at a distance in deep snow, is man with an upraised right arm holding a knife; we assume that this is the farmer who did in fact kill the panther. He stands on a hill, while behind him are sharply angular mountains. Those studying the image find themselves feeling both pity—for the dead, harmless goat—and fear—for the death of the panther, at the hands of the farmer.
In light of the diminution of territory, most people would see Ford’s illustrations as tragic—exercises in hopelessness, no matter their skill of execution, We are meant to consider the death of a noble species. This may not be entirely true, but, for example, it has been noted that North Africa, former home to the Barbary lion, has not supported such an animal since before the middle of the previous century. In the show’s notes, it has been remarked that of all lions, the Barbary lion possesses the most magnificent mane. Its loss of habitat means a loss of nobility in nature. In Ford’s hands, the animal is given a fierce beauty, which is sadly undercut by its near exctinction in the wild. Ford therefore is attempting to save the lion from visual extinction when its death in the wild comes close and closer to taking place.
The watercolor work titled Ars Gratia Artis was produced by Ford in 2017. It is a horizontally aligned piece narrow in height. In it a fierce lion with a huge mane glares at us; it is illuminated by some sort of light or fire we can’t see. It is dark out; the sky is a dark blue, to the point of being nearly black. To the left and right we find a series of low hills and cliffs, and to the right, the illuminated interior of a building, likely a home contrasts with the wildness of the animal: domestication against a (diminished) freedom. The forefront, just before the lion, is white; it doesn’t seem to be snow but rather some unidentified natural material. And the lion looks angry as well as proud; perhaps it knows the fate of its kind.
Inevitably, even if Ford’s drawings and paintings aren’t overtly sad, their fate results in viewer melancholy. It is impossible to view the panther without the awareness of its doom, just as we sadly ponder the collapse of the lion’s species. Zoos keep these animals alive, but they cannot erase the hopelessness of their present and future, fated as they are to exist in ever smaller numbers in sites inevitably losing their capacity for support. In the study for Augury (2018), Ford shows a magnificent lion with a beautiful black mane circling his head; his fierceness is completely apparent as he holds a raw piece of meat. So far, so good, but just behind him we say the bluish gray bars of his cage. To the left of the composition, slightly behind the lion, we see a door opening to the appearance of two tigers. The door can clearly be closed easily, accentuating the tigers’ limited freedom. This is clearly a zoo without any embellishments, such as ground cover, that would make the tigers’ and lion’s lives happier.
By contrasting the greatness of the lion’s spirit with the brutal confines containing him, Ford judges the human need to control nature. The situation is more than tragic; it is inestimably violent in its disregard for the freedom the animals need and represent. Ford finds precedent for his instincts in his choice of animal drawings taken from the Morgan Museum’s archives. For example, in Eel. a work by British artist Thomas Pennant, done about 1769, we see the entire snake-like body of the fish curving in a near loop behind its gills and small head. The dark green, gray body is in sharp contrast with the cream-colored background, that of the paper itself. More sharply detailed than Ford’s romantic approach, Pennant’s eel is slightly other in its presentation.
Antoine-Louis Barye, a French artist active in the 19th century, has a study of a lion repose, done in the 1850s. In contrast to the works by Ford, who seems to suggest a tragic set of circumstances whenever he draws, Barye shows a lion not beset by loss of habitat. Stretched out under a small hill, whose light colored wall creates a marked difference with the animal’s darker markings and the general milieu, the lion attends to its own concerns. It is still fully free; it was so at the time the drawing watercolor was made. It must have been exhibitating for the artist to present the animal in circumstances far from those Ford sadly makes clear.
The two drawings chosen by Ford are more true studies of nature than they are mediations on the compromised context Ford has chosen to present. Because these two drawings are older, they can exist without irony. Ford’s drawings cannot. Indeed, the present relationship of people to nature is seriously damaged; we cannot resurrect what we ourselves have destroyed. Today, no one is able to walk away from a general sense of responsibility in the continuing death of
nature. choosing the fierce power of the great cat over any other animal. Ford romanticizes his creativity, hoping perhaps that doing so would result in new kind of bond between humans and wild animals. No such luck: the lion today is permanently imprisoned, being a creature of the zoo rather than the savannah. Time will not heal what time has done. The best we can do is to commemorate the past and risk aggrandizing our reading of the past. Ford, in this exhibition, has stayed close to the harsh truths of the present, our need to indict ourselves for our losses outdoors. He does a good job of preserving our wish to apotheosize our animals, even as we keep them in cages.
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