Fierce Friends~Artists and Animals~ at The Carnegie Museum

Saturday, 01 July 2006 11:29

Pittsburgh, PA - An extensive and thought-provoking exhibition examining the complex and changing relationship between humans and animals is view at Carnegie Museum of Art through August 27, 2006.  Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900 reveals how scientific discoveries, exploration, and new ideas during the Industrial Age affected the way artists in Europe and America thought about and depicted animals.  Through paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, illustrated books, scientific specimens, and decorative arts objects, Fierce Friends explores the ways in which artists not only derived inspiration from science, natural history, and literature about animals, but also inspired and influenced these fields.

Fierce Friends builds on the interdisciplinary approach to art history developed by the curatorial team of Andreas Blühm, formerly of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and Lulu Lippincott, Carnegie Museum of Art.  They organized the award-winning exhibition Light! The Industrial Age, 1750­–1900, presented at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 2000 and 2001.  Similarly, Fierce Friends premiered in Amsterdam, where it was enthusiastically received by international art reviewers, and makes its second and final stop in Pittsburgh.

Despite the crucial role animals have played throughout human history, and despite the symbolic resonance of animals in human imagination, animal art has been a dormant subject in the art historical canon, particularly in museum exhibitions.  Fierce Friends is the first serious, full-scale examination of the subject of animals in art, and it is the first to incorporate scientific materials and concepts.  The core of artworks in the exhibition on view in both Amsterdam and Pittsburgh comprises 95 paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts objects selected by Lippincott, curator of fine arts at Carnegie Museum of Art, and Andreas Blühm, former head of exhibitions and display at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The central objective of Fierce Friends is to encourage the audience to think about how humans and animals have interacted over time and to reexamine common beliefs and attitudes.  The exhibition is an ambitious exploration of the radical changes in 18th-century attitudes about animals as a result of advances in scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment, the discovery of dinosaur bones and fossils in the 19th century, and Darwin’s publication of his theory of evolution.  To expose these issues, art works appear next to objects as diverse as actual fossils, taxidermy specimens, illustrated books, fish bowls, and glass models of sea-creatures.

Fierce Friends is presented in five sections.

The exhibition is organized around five main themes that explore controversies and intellectual debates about animals in the 18th and 19th centuries—controversies that may still resonate with viewers today.

Section I: Property of the Human Race
The most common and traditional role of animals in human life is as useful property.  Animals have long been used by humans as a source of food, transportation, companionship, and labor.  Many of the works in this section of the exhibition show animals as meat.  Before the 20th century, meat was a luxury item, rare and expensive.  Images like A Hare and a Leg of Lamb (1742) by French painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry depict animals as precious trophies hung on a peg on a wall.  The animal’s sinews glisten in the light of a larder, a drop of blood still clings to the nostril of the hare.  Animals, particularly horses, were also important sources of power.  Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (1855) shows a number of Percherons, French draft horses, at a weekly horse sale near Paris.  The massive, rippling haunches and shoulders of the surging herd convey the power and energy of animals, once a necessary resource in farming, industry, and transportation.

Section II: Beauties of Nature
Not all animals are useful.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, European explorers brought back thousands of previously unknown, exotic animal specimens that were shocking or surprising in appearance or behavior.  Exotic birds were collected in the 18th century for their beauty, and because they were easy to capture, transport, and maintain.  As such animals became more popularly known, they were documented in highly treasured illustrated books and painted porcelains.  In this section of the exhibition, visitors will be able to compare numerous 18th-century decorative arts objects, such as dishes from the Sèvres porcelain factory decorated with colorful hand-painted vignettes of exotic birds and richly detailed porcelain figurines from the Chelsea Porcelain Factory and the Meissen factory in Germany. 

Before 1800 few Europeans had the opportunity to see live giraffes, orangutans, and elephants. French imagination and inspired the 1827 painting The Nubian Giraffe by Swiss artist Jacque-Laurent Agasse.  Increasingly, in the 19th century, exotic animals were collected in royal menageries or by national scientific societies, where artists could study them.

Section III: Mysteries of Life
The discovery of thousands of new animal species in the 17th and 18th centuries inspired attempts to classify and arrange the animals into an orderly system.  These attempts included efforts to compare the external form, surface patterning, and the motions of different species.  Eadwaerd Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion series included sequential photographs of a Tigress, Walking, Turning Around (1887).  The images break down the animal’s motion into steps that seem recognizable, at least superficially, across species.

This section of the exhibition includes numerous samples of skeleton reconstructions from Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and works such as Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ bronze sculpture Iguanodon (c. 1850), a speculative attempt to represent a type of early Cretaceous-era dinosaur.

Section IV: Creatures of the Imagination
Artists attempting to depict the lives and habitats of rare animals for a curious audience often based their work on more familiar models, such as domestic animals or people.  Animals in this section of the exhibition often take on recognizably human characteristics, such as Antoine Louis Barye’s 1865 sculpture of ape riding a gnu or Jean-Siméon Chardin’s The Monkey As Painter (c. 1740). 

These images are unrealistic precisely because they filter animal depictions through human lenses or preconceptions.  Images of animal families are idealized and based on human ideas about the “natural” family, rather than on real animal behaviors.

Section V: Mirrors
Artists recognized the visual connection between apes and humans even before Charles Darwin, and others argued for a biological connection as well.  This section of the exhibition there are various representations of apes and monkeys that mirror human behavior in comical or disturbing ways.

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