The Brooklyn Rail

In 1515, Albrecht Dürer, the polymathic German Renaissance artist, created a wondrously bizarre woodcut of a rhinoceros—a creature he had never seen alive— featuring fish-like scales and an exoskeleton akin to a knight’s armor. To modern eyes, Dürer’s rhino is both familiar and uncanny, scientific yet utterly fantastical, as much a tall tale as it is wildlife reportage. The same can be said of Walton Ford, an artist who fuses heady fantasy with zoological empiricism, the result of which is an ongoing body of work that is nothing short of a visually arresting, modern bestiary, one in which the animal kingdom continues to capture man’s attention—and occasionally eats him, too.

Bringing together sixty-three prints and studies Ford donated to the Morgan Library Museum, several of the artist’s large-scale watercolors, alongside historical pieces by other artists held in the Morgan’s collection, Birds and Beasts of the Studio is a compact whirlwind of a show, brimming with Ford’s work while also deftly touching upon complex issues such as colonialism’s legacy, ongoing species extinction, and threats from climate change. Ford is perhaps best known for large-scale, technically exquisite watercolors featuring a menagerie of fanciful creatures—rarely are humans present—creating works that would seem to fuse the scholarly style of John James Audubon’s nature studies with the surreal fantasies of Alice in Wonderland illustrator John Tenniel.

While there are several grand watercolors included in the show, Ford’s donated trove of drawings, sketches, and other ephemera is the star, as the exhibition’s title would suggest. Brought into the artist’s “studio” as it were, completed works are displayed alongside various preparatory illustrations and wall texts with quotes, offering a glimpse into Ford’s creative process. In the case of Die Ziege (2016), a large-scale watercolor portrays a black panther fresh from the hunt, perched on a snowy tree branch high above a wintry alpine vista. A nearby wall text quoting Ford reveals inspiration for the piece came from the real-life escape in 1933 of a black female panther from the Zurich Zoo. “This is the way I work,” Ford explains of his artistic method, in accompanying wall text, “a firsthand account, however brief, will fuel the fantastic.” Such is the case with Study for “Flucht” and Study for “Verfolgen” (both 2018), loose sketches in watercolor, gouache, and ink depicting the same black panther riding atop clouds of billowing black smoke. While it is believed by some the fugitive panther was ultimately shot and eaten by a Swiss farmer, no remains were ever found; their absence gave rise to local lore and more than one ghostly sighting by the villagers. Folklore is a rich territory Ford often draws from in his compositions, and, in his images of a spectral feline riding atop billowing plumes, he can be seen weaving in elements of magical realism, a fanciful counterpoint to the anatomical verity his imagery evinces. Meanwhile Ford’s fabulist pairing of wildlife history and animal legends is evident in numerous works depicting several species of lions, including the extinct North African Barbary Lion. Among them, the large-scale watercolor Ars Gratia Artis (2017) imagines the iconic roaring MGM lion in retirement, an allegory of Hollywood burnout as it were, replete with archetypal tropes of burned-out stardom and its trappings: Richard Neutra estate, chic pool, loose with the alcohol.

In many ways, a fascination with all things cinematic has long been an element at play in Ford’s work, not only as a source for inspiration, but also as a narrative device for his compositional approach. As with Study 2 for “Leipzig” (2018) and Study for “Neues Rathaus” (2019)—sketches depicting escaped lions wandering the foggy streets of Leipzig at night—Ford’s various studies have a storyboard quality to them, a solitary frame from a sequence of shots laid out for director and cinematographer alike. Ford has long been interested in filmmaking, and there is throughout Birds and Beasts of the Studio a sense that he relishes the discovery of improbable yet true stories, animating them, as it were, through his art.

A storyteller at heart, Ford matches his voracious curiosity and knowledge of all things zoological with his knowledge of historical artists, traditions, and genres that find inspiration in them. A fitting coda to Birds and Beasts of the Studio, a selection of works from the Morgan’s private collection, curated by Ford, features works that conjure the animal world, a richly textured etching by Rembrandt, The Hog (1643) and a surrealist collage by Max Ernst, With Astonishment I Note That the Horse … (1938) among them. As these historical works make clear, the animal kingdom has fascinated artists and amateurs alike since the age of Lascaux, Ford most decidedly among them.