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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon

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John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin, April 26, 1785 - January 27, 1851) was a French-American self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America. He was notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations, which depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a color-plate book titled The Birds of America (1827-1839), is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Audubon is also known for identifying 25 new species. He is the eponym of the National Audubon Society, and his name adorns a large number of towns, neighborhoods, and streets across the United States. Dozens of scientific names first published by Audubon are still in use by the scientific community.

Audubon was born in Les Cayes in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) on his father's sugarcane plantation. He was the son of Lieutenant Jean Audubon, a French naval officer (and privateer) from the south of Brittany, and his mistress, Jeanne Rabine, a 27-year-old chambermaid from Les Touches, Brittany (now in the modern region Pays de la Loire). They named him Jean Rabin. Another 1887 biographer has stated that his mother was a lady from a Louisiana plantation. His mother died when he was a few months old, as she had suffered from tropical disease since arriving on the island. His father already had an unknown number of mixed-race children (among them a daughter named Marie-Madeleine), some by his mixed-race housekeeper, Catherine "Sanitte" Bouffard (described as a quadroon, meaning she was three-quarters European in ancestry). Following Jeanne Rabin's death, Audubon renewed his relationship with Sanitte Bouffard and had a daughter by her, named Muguet. Bouffard also took care of the infant boy Jean.

The senior Audubon had commanded ships. During the American Revolution, he was imprisoned by Britain. After his release, he helped the American cause. He had long worked to save money and secure his family's future with real estate. Due to repeated uprisings of slaves in the Caribbean, he sold part of his plantation in Saint-Domingue in 1789 and purchased a 284-acre farm called Mill Grove, 20 miles from Philadelphia, to diversify his investments. Increasing tension in Saint-Domingue between the colonists and slaves, who greatly outnumbered them, convinced the senior Audubon to return to France, where he became a member of the Republican Guard. In 1788 he arranged for Jean and in 1791 for Muguet to be transported to France.

La Gerbetière, mansion owned by Audubon's father in Couëron, where young Audubon was raised

The children were raised in Couëron, near Nantes, France, by Audubon and his French wife, Anne Moynet Audubon, whom he had married years before his time in Saint-Domingue. In 1794 they formally adopted both the children to regularize their legal status in France. They renamed the boy Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon and the girl Rose.

From his earliest days, the younger Audubon had an affinity for birds. "I felt an intimacy with them...bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through life." His father encouraged his interest in nature:

He would point out the elegant movement of the birds, and the beauty and softness of their plumage. He called my attention to their show of pleasure or sense of danger, their perfect forms and splendid attire. He would speak of their departure and return with the seasons.

In France during the years of the French Revolution and its aftermath, Audubon grew up to be a handsome and gregarious man. He played flute and violin, and learned to ride, fence, and dance. Audubon enjoyed roaming in the woods, often returning with natural curiosities, including birds' eggs and nests, of which he made crude drawings. His father planned to make a seaman of his son. At twelve, Audubon went to military school and became a cabin boy. He quickly found out that he was susceptible to seasickness and not fond of mathematics or navigation. After failing the officer's qualification test, Audubon ended his incipient naval career. He returned to exploring fields again, focusing on birds.

Plate 41 of The Birds of America by Audubon, depicting ruffed grouse

In 1803, his father obtained a false passport so that Jean-Jacques could go to the United States to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars. 18-year-old Jean-Jacques boarded ship, anglicizing his name to John James Audubon. Jean Audubon and Claude Rozier arranged a business partnership for their sons John James Audubon and Jean Ferdinand Rozier to pursue lead mining in Pennsylvania at Audubon's Pennsylvania property of Mill Grove. The Audubon-Rozier partnership was based on Rozier's buying half of Jean Audubon's share of a plantation in Haiti, and lending money to the partnership as secured by half interest in the lead mining.

John James Audubon, Long Haired Squirrel, c. 1841.

Audubon caught yellow fever upon arrival in New York City. The ship's captain placed him in a boarding house run by Quaker women who nursed Audubon to recovery and taught him English. He traveled with the family's Quaker lawyer to the Audubon family farm at Mill Grove. The 284-acre (115 ha) homestead is located on the Perkiomen Creek a few miles from Valley Forge.

Audubon lived with the tenants in the two-story stone house, in an area that he considered a paradise. "Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment; cares I knew not, and cared naught about them." Studying his surroundings, Audubon quickly learned the ornithologist's rule, which he wrote down as, "The nature of the place-whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs-generally gives hint as to its inhabitants."

His father hoped that the lead mines on the property could be commercially developed, as lead was an essential component of bullets. This could provide his son with a profitable occupation. At Mill Grove, Audubon met the owner of the nearby Fatland Ford estate, William Bakewell, and his daughter Lucy Bakewell.

Audubon set about to study American birds, determined to illustrate his findings in a more realistic manner than most artists did then. He began drawing and painting birds, and recording their behavior. After an accidental fall into a creek, Audubon contracted a severe fever. He was nursed and recovered at Fatland Ford, with Lucy at his side.

Risking conscription in France, Audubon returned in 1805 to see his father and ask permission to marry. He also needed to discuss family business plans. While there, he met the naturalist and physician Charles-Marie D'Orbigny, who improved Audubon's taxidermy skills and taught him scientific methods of research. Although his return ship was overtaken by an English privateer, Audubon and his hidden gold coins survived the encounter.

Audubon resumed his bird studies and created his own nature museum, perhaps inspired by the great museum of natural history created by Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia. Peale's bird exhibits were considered scientifically advanced. Audubon's room was brimming with birds' eggs, stuffed raccoons and opossums, fish, snakes, and other creatures. He had become proficient at specimen preparation and taxidermy.

Deeming the mining venture too risky, with his father's approval Audubon sold part of the Mill Grove farm, including the house and mine, and retaining some land for investment.

In volume 2 of Ornithological Biography (1834), Audubon told a story from his childhood, 30 years after the events reportedly took place, that has since garnered him the label of "first bird bander in America". The story has since been exposed as likely apocryphal. In the spring of 1804, according to the story, Audubon discovered a nest of the "Pewee Flycatcher", now known as the eastern phoebe ( Sayornis phoebe), in a small grotto on the property of Mill Grove. To determine whether the other phoebes on the property were "descended from the same stock", Audubon (1834:126) said that he tied silver threads to the legs of five nestlings:

I took the whole family out, and blew off the exuviae of the feathers from the nest. I attached light threads to their legs: these they invariably removed, either with their bills, or with the assistance of their parents. I renewed them, however, until I found the little fellows habituated to them; and at last, when they were about to leave the nest, I fixed a light silver thread to the leg of each, loose enough not to hurt the part, but so fastened that no exertions of theirs could remove it.

He also said that he had "ample proof afterwards that the brood of young Pewees, raised in the cave, returned the following spring, and established themselves farther up on the creek, and among the outhouses in the neighbourhood ... having caught several of these birds on the nest, [he] had the pleasure of finding that two of them had the little ring on the leg." However, multiple independent primary sources (including original, dated drawings of European species) demonstrate that Audubon was in France during the spring of 1805, not in Pennsylvania as he later claimed. Furthermore, Audubon's claim to have re-sighted 2 out of 5 of the banded phoebes as adults (i.e., a 40% rate of natal philopatry) has not been replicated by modern studies with much larger sample sizes (e.g., 1.6% rate among 549 nestlings banded; and 1.3% rate among 217 nestlings banded). These facts cast doubt on the truth of Audubon's story.

Lucy Bakewell Audubon

In 1808, Audubon moved to Kentucky, which was rapidly being settled. Six months later, he married Lucy Bakewell at her family estate, Fatland Ford, Pennsylvania, and took her the next day to Kentucky. The two shared many common interests, and began to explore the natural world around them. Though their finances were tenuous, the Audubons started a family. They had two sons, Victor Gifford (1809-1860) and John Woodhouse Audubon (1812-1862), and two daughters who died while still young, Lucy at two years (1815-1817) and Rose at nine months (1819-1820). Both sons eventually helped publish their father's works. John W. Audubon became a naturalist, writer, and painter in his own right.

Audubon and Jean Ferdinand Rozier moved their merchant business partnership west at various stages, ending ultimately in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a former French colonial settlement west of the Mississippi River and south of St. Louis. Shipping goods ahead, Audubon and Rozier started a general store in Louisville, Kentucky on the Ohio River;[when? ] the city had an increasingly important slave market and was the most important port between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Soon he was drawing bird specimens again. He regularly burned his earlier efforts to force continuous improvement. He also took detailed field notes to document his drawings.

Due to rising tensions with the British, President Jefferson ordered an embargo on British trade in 1808, hurting Audubon's trading business. In 1810, Audubon moved his business further west to the less competitive Henderson, Kentucky, area. He and his small family took over an abandoned log cabin. In the fields and forests, Audubon wore typical frontier clothes and moccasins, having "a ball pouch, a buffalo horn filled with gunpowder, a butcher knife, and a tomahawk on his belt".

He frequently turned to hunting and fishing to feed his family, as business was slow. On a prospecting trip down the Ohio River with a load of goods, Audubon joined up with Shawnee and Osage hunting parties, learning their methods, drawing specimens by the bonfire, and finally parting "like brethren". Audubon had great respect for Native Americans: "Whenever I meet Indians, I feel the greatness of our Creator in all its splendor, for there I see the man naked from His hand and yet free from acquired sorrow." Audubon also admired the skill of Kentucky riflemen and the "regulators", citizen lawmen who created a kind of justice on the Kentucky frontier. In his travel notes, he claims to have encountered Daniel Boone. The Audubon family owned several slaves while he was in Henderson, until they needed money at which point they were sold. Audubon was condemned contemporaneously by abolitionists. Audubon was dismissive of abolitionists in both the US and the United Kingdom.

Audubon and Rozier mutually agreed to end their partnership at Ste. Genevieve on April 6, 1811. Audubon had decided to work at ornithology and art and wanted to return to Lucy and their son in Kentucky. Rozier agreed to pay Audubon US$3,000 (equivalent to $54,936 in 2023), with $1,000 in cash and the balance to be paid over time.

The terms of the dissolution of the partnership include those by Audubon:

I John Audubon, having this day mutual consent with Ferdinand Rozier, dissolved and forever closed the partnership and firm of Audubon and Rozier, and having Received from said Ferdinand Rozier payment and notes to the full amount of my part of the goods and debts of the late firm of Audubon and Rozier, I the said John Audubon one of the firm aforesaid do hereby release and forever quit claim to all and any interest which I have or may have in the stock on hand and debts due to the late firm of Audubon and Rozier assign, transfer and set over to said Ferdinand Rozier, all my rights, titles, claims and interest in the goods, merchandise and debts due to the late firm of Audubon and Rozier, and do hereby authorize and empower him for my part, to collect the same in any manner what ever either privately or by suit or suits in law or equity hereby declaring him sole and absolute proprietor and rightful owner of all goods, merchandise and debts of this firm aforesaid, as completely as they were the goods and property of the late firm Audubon and Rozier.

In witness thereof I have set my hand and seal this Sixth day of April 1811

John Audubon

Ed D. DeVillamonte

John James Audubon house, Henderson, Kentucky.

Audubon was working in Missouri and out riding when the 1811 New Madrid earthquake struck. When Audubon reached his house, he was relieved to find no major damage, but the area was shaken by aftershocks for months. The quake is estimated to have ranked from 8.4 to 8.8 on today's moment magnitude scale of severity, stronger than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 which is estimated at 7.8. Audubon writes that while on horseback, he first believed the distant rumbling to be the sound of a tornado,

but the animal knew better than I what was forthcoming, and instead of going faster, so nearly stopped that I remarked he placed one foot after another on the ground with as much precaution as if walking on a smooth piece of ice. I thought he had suddenly foundered, and, speaking to him, was on point of dismounting and leading him, when he all of a sudden fell a-groaning piteously, hung his head, spread out his forelegs, as if to save himself from falling, and stood stock still, continuing to groan. I thought my horse was about to die, and would have sprung from his back had a minute more elapsed; but as that instant all the shrubs and trees began to move from their very roots, the ground rose and fell in successive furrows, like the ruffled water of a lake, and I became bewildered in my ideas, as I too plainly discovered, that all this awful commotion was the result of an earthquake. I had never witnessed anything of the kind before, although like every person, I knew earthquakes by description. But what is description compared to reality! Who can tell the sensations which I experienced when I found myself rocking, as it were, upon my horse, and with him moving to and fro like a child in a cradle, with the most imminent danger around me.

He noted that as the earthquake retreated, "the air was filled with an extremely disagreeable sulphurous odor."

A cinnamon bear by J.T. Bowen after Audubon

During a visit to Philadelphia in 1812 following Congress' declaration of war against Great Britain, Audubon became an American citizen and had to give up his French citizenship. After his return to Kentucky, he found that rats had eaten his entire collection of more than 200 drawings. After weeks of depression, he took to the field again, determined to re-do his drawings to an even higher standard.

The War of 1812 upset Audubon's plans to move his business to New Orleans. He formed a partnership with Lucy's brother and built up their trade in Henderson. Between 1812 and the Panic of 1819, times were good. Audubon bought land and slaves, founded a flour mill, and enjoyed his growing family. After 1819, Audubon went bankrupt and was thrown into jail for debt. The little money he earned was from drawing portraits, particularly death-bed sketches, greatly esteemed by country folk before photography. He wrote, "[M]y heart was sorely heavy, for scarcely had I enough to keep my dear ones alive; and yet through these dark days I was being led to the development of the talents I loved."

Audubon worked for a brief time as the first paid employee of the Western History Society, now known as The Museum of Natural History at The Cincinnati Museum Center. He then traveled south on the Mississippi with his gun, paintbox, and assistant Joseph Mason, who stayed with him from October 1820 to August 1822 and painted the plant life backgrounds of many of Audubon's bird studies. He was committed to find and paint all the birds of North America for eventual publication. His goal was to surpass the earlier ornithological work of poet-naturalist Alexander Wilson. Though he could not afford to buy Wilson's work, Audubon used it to guide him when he had access to a copy.

In 1818, Rafinesque visited Kentucky and the Ohio River valley to study fishes and was a guest of Audubon. In the middle of the night, Rafinesque noticed a bat in his room and thought it was a new species. He happened to grab Audubon's favourite violin in an effort to knock the bat down, resulting in the destruction of the violin. Audubon reportedly took revenge by showing drawings and describing some fictitious fishes and rodents to Rafinesque; Rafinesque gave scientific names to some of these fishes in his Ichthyologia Ohiensis.

On October 12, 1820, Audubon traveled into Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida in search of ornithological specimens. He traveled with George Lehman, a professional Swiss landscape artist. The following summer, he moved upriver to the Oakley Plantation in Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, where he taught drawing to Eliza Pirrie, the young daughter of the owners. Though low-paying, the job was ideal, as it afforded him much time to roam and paint in the woods. (The plantation has been preserved as the Audubon State Historic Site, and is located at 11788 Highway 965, between Jackson and St. Francisville.)

Audubon called his future work The Birds of America. He attempted to paint one page each day. Painting with newly discovered technique, he decided his earlier works were inferior and re-did them. He hired hunters to gather specimens for him. Audubon realized the ambitious project would take him away from his family for months at a time.

Audubon sometimes used his drawing talent to trade for goods or sell small works to raise cash. He made charcoal portraits on demand at $5 each and gave drawing lessons. In 1823, Audubon took lessons in oil painting technique from John Steen, a teacher of American landscape, and history painter Thomas Cole. Though he did not use oils much for his bird work, Audubon earned good money painting oil portraits for patrons along the Mississippi. (Audubon's account reveals that he learned oil painting in December 1822 from Jacob Stein, an itinerant portrait artist. After they had enjoyed all the portrait patronage to be expected in Natchez, Mississippi, during January-March 1823, they resolved to travel together as perambulating portrait-artists.) During this period (1822-1823), Audubon also worked as an instructor at Jefferson College in Washington, Mississippi.

Lucy became the steady breadwinner for the couple and their two young sons. Trained as a teacher, she conducted classes for children in their home. Later she was hired as a local teacher in Louisiana. She boarded with their children at the home of a wealthy plantation owner, as was often the custom of the time.

In 1824, Audubon returned to Philadelphia to seek a publisher for his bird drawings. He took oil painting lessons from Thomas Sully and met Charles Bonaparte, who admired his work and recommended he go to Europe to have his bird drawings engraved. Audubon was nominated for membership at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia by Charles Alexandre Lesueur, Reuben Haines, and Isaiah Lukens, on July 27, 1824. However, he failed to gather enough support, and his nomination was rejected by vote on August 31, 1824; around the same time accusations of scientific misconduct were levied by Alexander Lawson and others.

With his wife's support, in 1826 at age 41, Audubon took his growing collection of work to England. He sailed from New Orleans to Liverpool on the cotton-hauling ship Delos, reaching England in the autumn of 1826 with his portfolio of over 300 drawings. With letters of introduction to prominent Englishmen, and paintings of imaginary species including the "Bird of Washington", Audubon gained their quick attention. "I have been received here in a manner not to be expected during my highest enthusiastic hopes."

The British could not get enough of Audubon's images of backwoods America and its natural attractions. He met with great acceptance as he toured around England and Scotland, and was lionized as "the American woodsman". He raised enough money to begin publishing his The Birds of America. This monumental work consists of 435 hand-colored, life-size prints of 497 bird species, made from engraved copper plates of various sizes depending on the size of the image. They were printed on sheets measuring about 39 by 26 inches (990 by 660 mm). The work illustrates slightly more than 700 North American bird species, of which some were based on specimens collected by fellow ornithologist John Kirk Townsend on his journey across America with Thomas Nuttall in 1834 as part of Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth's second expedition across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.

The pages were organized for artistic effect and contrasting interest, as if the reader were taking a visual tour. (Some critics thought he should have organized the plates in Linnaean order as befitting a "serious" ornithological treatise.) The first and perhaps most famous plate was the wild turkey. Among the earliest plates printed was the "Bird of Washington", which generated favorable publicity for Audubon as his first discovery of a new species. However, no specimen of the species has ever been found, and research published in 2020 suggests that this plate was a mixture of plagiarism and ornithological fraud.

The cost of printing the entire work was $115,640 (over $2,000,000 today), paid for from advance subscriptions, exhibitions, oil painting commissions, and animal skins, which Audubon hunted and sold. Audubon's great work was a remarkable accomplishment. It took more than 14 years of field observations and drawings, plus his single-handed management and promotion of the project to make it a success. A reviewer wrote,

All anxieties and fears which overshadowed his work in its beginning had passed away. The prophecies of kind but overprudent friends, who did not understand his self-sustaining energy, had proved untrue; the malicious hope of his enemies, for even the gentle lover of nature has enemies, had been disappointed; he had secured a commanding place in the respect and gratitude of men.

Colorists applied each color in assembly-line fashion (over fifty were hired for the work). The original edition was engraved in aquatint by Robert Havell Jr., who took over the task after the first ten plates engraved by W. H. Lizars were deemed inadequate. Known as the Double Elephant folio for its double elephant paper size, it is often regarded as the greatest picture book ever produced and the finest aquatint work. By the 1830s the aquatint process had been largely superseded by lithography. A contemporary French critic wrote, "A magic power transported us into the forests which for so many years this man of genius has trod. Learned and ignorant alike were astonished at the spectacle ... It is a real and palpable vision of the New World."

Audubon sold oil-painted copies of the drawings to make extra money and publicize the book. A potential publisher had Audubon's portrait painted by John Syme, who clothed the naturalist in frontier clothes; the portrait was hung at the entrance of his exhibitions, promoting his rustic image. The painting is now held in the White House art collection, and is not frequently displayed. The New-York Historical Society holds all 435 of the preparatory watercolors for The Birds of America. Lucy Audubon sold them to the society after her husband's death. All but 80 of the original copper plates were melted down when Lucy Audubon, desperate for money, sold them for scrap to the Phelps Dodge Corporation.

King George IV was among the avid fans of Audubon and subscribed to support publication of the book. Britain's Royal Society recognized Audubon's achievement by electing him as a fellow. He was the second American to be elected after statesman Benjamin Franklin. While in Edinburgh to seek subscribers for the book, Audubon gave a demonstration of his method of supporting birds with wire at professor Robert Jameson's Wernerian Natural History Association. Student Charles Darwin was in the audience. Audubon also visited the dissecting theatre of the anatomist Robert Knox. Audubon was also successful in France, gaining the King and several of the nobility as subscribers.

The Birds of America became very popular during Europe's Romantic era. Audubon's dramatic portraits of birds appealed to people in this period's fascination with natural history.

Lucy Audubon c. 1870

Audubon returned to America in 1829 to complete more drawings for his magnum opus. He also hunted animals and shipped the valued skins to British friends. He was reunited with his family. After settling business affairs, Lucy accompanied him back to England. Audubon found that during his absence, he had lost some subscribers due to the uneven quality of coloring of the plates. Others were in arrears in their payments. His engraver fixed the plates and Audubon reassured subscribers, but a few begged off. He responded, " The Birds of America will then raise in value as much as they are now depreciated by certain fools and envious persons." He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1830 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1831.

He followed The Birds of America with a sequel Ornithological Biographies. This was a collection of life histories of each species written with Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray. The two books were printed separately to avoid a British law requiring copies of all publications with text to be deposited in copyright libraries, a huge financial burden for the self-published Audubon. Both books were published between 1827 and 1839.

During the 1830s, Audubon continued making expeditions in North America. During a trip to Key West, a companion wrote in a newspaper article, "Mr. Audubon is the most enthusiastic and indefatigable man I ever knew ... Mr. Audubon was neither dispirited by heat, fatigue, or bad luck ... he rose every morning at 3 o'clock and went out ... until 1 o'clock." Then he would draw the rest of the day before returning to the field in the evening, a routine he kept up for weeks and months. In the posthumously published book The Life of John James Audubon The Naturalist, edited by his widow and derived primarily from his notes, Audubon related visiting the northeastern Florida coastal sugar plantation of John Joachim Bulow for Christmas 1831/early January 1832. It was started by his father and at 4,675 acres, was the largest in East Florida. Bulow had a sugar mill built there under direction of a Scottish engineer, who accompanied Audubon on an excursion in the region. The mill was destroyed in 1836 in the Seminole Wars. The plantation site is preserved today as the Bulow Plantation Ruins Historic State Park.

In March 1832, Audubon booked passage at St. Augustine, Florida, aboard the schooner Agnes, bound for Charleston, South Carolina. A gale forced the vessel to berth at the mouth of the Savannah River, where an officer of the United States Army Corps of Engineers on Cockspur Island where Fort Pulaski was under construction, transported Audubon upstream to Savannah, Georgia, on their barge. Just as he was about to board a Charleston-bound stage coach, he remembered William Gaston, a Savannah resident who had once befriended him. Audubon stayed at City Hotel, and the next day sought out and found the acquaintance, "who showed but little enthusiasm for his Birds of America" and who doubted that the book would sell a single copy in the city. A dejected Audubon continued to talk to the merchant and a mutual friend who, by chance, had appeared. The merchant, having further considered his position, said, "I subscribe to your work", gave him $200 for the first volume, and promised to act as his agent in finding additional subscriptions.

In 1833, Audubon sailed north from Maine, accompanied by his son John, and five other young colleagues, to explore the ornithology of Labrador. On the return voyage, their ship Ripley made a stop at St. George's, Newfoundland. There Audubon and his assistants documented 36 species of birds.

Audubon painted some of his works while staying at the Key West house and gardens of Capt. John H. Geiger. This site was preserved as the Audubon House and Tropical Gardens.

In 1841, having finished the Ornithological Biographies, Audubon returned to the United States with his family. He bought an estate on the Hudson River in northern Manhattan. (The roughly 20-acre estate came to be known as Audubon Park in the 1860s when Audubon's widow began selling off parcels of the estate for the development of free-standing single family homes.) Between 1840 and 1844, he published an octavo edition of The Birds of America, with 65 additional plates. Printed in standard format to be more affordable than the oversize British edition, it earned $36,000 and was purchased by 1100 subscribers. Audubon spent much time on "subscription-gathering trips", drumming up sales of the octavo edition, as he hoped to leave his family a sizeable income.

Audubon made some excursions out West where he hoped to record Western species he had missed, but his health began to fail. In 1848, he manifested signs of senility or possibly dementia from what is now called Alzheimer's disease, his "noble mind in ruins". He died at his family home in northern Manhattan on January 27, 1851. Audubon is buried in the graveyard at the Church of the Intercession in the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum at 155th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, near his home. An imposing monument in his honor was erected at the cemetery, which is now recognized as part of the Heritage Rose District of NYC.

Audubon's final work dealt with mammals; he prepared The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-1849) in collaboration with his good friend Rev. John Bachman of Charleston, South Carolina, who supplied much of the scientific text. His son, John Woodhouse Audubon, drew most of the plates. The work was completed by Audubon's sons, and the second volume was published posthumously in 1851.

Audubon developed his own methods for drawing birds. First, he killed them using fine shot. He then used wires to prop them into a natural position, unlike the common method of many ornithologists, who prepared and stuffed the specimens into a rigid pose. When working on a major specimen like an eagle, he would spend up to four 15-hour days, preparing, studying, and drawing it. His paintings of birds are set true-to-life in their natural habitat. He often portrayed them as if caught in motion, especially feeding or hunting. This was in stark contrast to the stiff representations of birds by his contemporaries, such as Alexander Wilson. Audubon based his paintings on his extensive field observations. He worked primarily with watercolor early on. He added colored chalk or pastel to add softness to feathers, especially those of owls and herons. He employed multiple layers of watercoloring, and sometimes used gouache. All species were drawn life size which accounts for the contorted poses of the larger birds as Audubon strove to fit them within the page size. Smaller species were usually placed on branches with berries, fruit, and flowers. He used several birds in a drawing to present all views of anatomy and wings. Larger birds were often placed in their ground habitat or perching on stumps. At times, as with woodpeckers, he combined several species on one page to offer contrasting features. He frequently depicted the birds' nests and eggs, and occasionally natural predators, such as snakes. He usually illustrated male and female variations, and sometimes juveniles. In later drawings, Audubon used assistants to render the habitat for him. In addition to faithful renderings of anatomy, Audubon also employed carefully constructed composition, drama, and slightly exaggerated poses to achieve artistic as well as scientific effects.[citation needed ]

The success of Birds of America may be considered to be marred by numerous accusations of plagiarism, scientific fraud, and deliberate manipulation of the primary record. Research has uncovered that Audubon falsified (and fabricated) scientific data, published fraudulent data and images in scientific journals and commercial books, invented new species to impress potential subscribers, and to "prank" rivals, and most likely stole the holotype specimen of Harris's hawk ( Parabuteo unicinctus harrisi) before pretending not to know its collector, who was one of his subscribers. He failed to credit work by Joseph Mason, prompting a series of articles in 1835 by critic John Neal questioning Audubon's honesty and trustworthiness. Audubon also repeatedly lied about the details of his autobiography, including the place and circumstances of his birth. His diaries, which might have cleared up some of these issues, were destroyed by his granddaughter, who published a doctored version that realigned the "primary" record with some of his false narratives.

The litany of misconduct in Audubon's scientific career has drawn comparisons to others such as Richard Meinertzhagen. Similar to early biographies of Meinertzhagen, Audubon's scientific misconduct has been repeatedly ignored and/or played down by biographers, who defend Ornithological Biography as a "valuable resource and a very good read".

Audubon in later years, c. 1850

Audubon's influence on ornithology and natural history was far reaching. Nearly all later ornithological works were inspired by his artistry and high standards. Charles Darwin quoted Audubon three times in On the Origin of Species and also in later works. Despite some errors in field observations, he made a significant contribution to the understanding of bird anatomy and behavior through his field notes. The Birds of America is still considered one of the greatest examples of book art. Audubon discovered 25 new species and 12 new subspecies.

He was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Linnean Society, and the Royal Society in recognition of his contributions.

The homestead Mill Grove in Audubon, Pennsylvania, is open to the public and contains a museum presenting all his major works, including The Birds of America.

The Audubon Museum at John James Audubon State Park in Henderson, Kentucky, houses many of Audubon's original watercolors, oils, engravings and personal memorabilia.

In 1905, the National Audubon Society was incorporated and named in his honor. Its mission "is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds ..."

He was honored in 1940 by the US Post Office with a 1 cent Famous Americans Series postage stamp; the stamp is green.

He was honored by the United States Postal Service with a 22¢ Great Americans series postage stamp.

On December 6, 2010, a copy of The Birds of America was sold at a Sotheby's auction for $11.5 million, the second highest price for a single printed book.[114]

On April 26, 2011, Google celebrated his 226th birthday by displaying a special Google Doodle on its global homepage.[115]

Audubon's life and contributions to science and art was the subject of the 2017 film Audubon.

Audubon discovers that his work has been eaten by a rat, in a Japanese woodcut depicting Western people from Lives of Great People of the Occident, published by the Japanese Ministry of Education in 1873.

Audubon is the subject of the 1969 book-length poem, Audubon: A Vision by Robert Penn Warren. Stephen Vincent Benét, with his wife Rosemary Benét, included a poem about Audubon in the children's poetry book A Book of Americans.

Audubon's 1833 trip to Labrador is the subject of the novel Creation by Katherine Govier. Audubon and his wife, Lucy, are the chief characters in the "June" section of the Maureen Howard novel Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring. In the novel Audubon's Watch, John Gregory Brown explores a mysterious death that took place on a Louisiana plantation when Audubon worked there as a young man.

George Voskovec plays Audubon in the 1952 American film The Iron Mistress, which stars Alan Ladd as James Bowie. The film imagines a friendship between the two men.

In 1985, The National Gallery of Art 20C History Project produced a documentary, "John James Audubon: The Birds of America", now widely available online.

In July 2007, PBS's American Masters series aired an episode titled "John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature", Supplemental material is available on the PBS website.

Audubon appears in the short story "Audubon In Atlantis" by Harry Turtledove, published in the 2010 collection Atlantis and Other Places.

The choral oratorio Audubon by James Kallembach was premiered on November 9, 2018, in Boston, Massachusetts by Chorus pro Musica. The work depicts scenes of Audubon's life and descriptions of the birds he drew with text drawn from the 2004 biography by Richard Rhodes.

Clipper ship Audubon

Audubon Park and Zoo in New Orleans, where he lived beginning in 1821

Audubon and Audubon Park, both in New Jersey. Many streets in Audubon Park are named after birds drawn by him.

Audubon, Pennsylvania, also has the Audubon Bird Sanctuary. Most of the streets in this small town are named after birds that he drew.

Audubon Middle School (formerly Junior High) in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

Audubon Nature Institute, a family of museums, parks, and other organizations in New Orleans, eight of which bear the Audubon name

Audubon Park and country club in Louisville, Kentucky, is in the area of his former general store.

Several towns and Audubon County, Iowa

John James Audubon Bridge (Mississippi River), connecting Pointe Coupee and West Feliciana Parishes; over thirty of Audubon's bird paintings were created in West Feliciana Parish.

The northbound span of the Bi-State Vietnam Gold Star Bridges was originally named the Audubon Memorial Bridge.

Audubon Park, in Memphis, Tennessee, is associated with the nearby Botanic Garden.

John James Audubon State Park and the Audubon Museum (located within the park) in Henderson, Kentucky

Audubon Parkway, also in Kentucky, is a limited-access highway connecting Henderson with Owensboro, Kentucky.

Rue Jean-Jacques Audubon in Nantes and Rue Audubon in Paris, France

Rue Jean-Jacques Audubon in Couëron, France

Lycée Jean-Jacques Audubon in Couëron, France.

Marais Audubon between Couëron and St Etienne de Mont-luc, France

Audubon Circle, a major intersection and neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts; Park Drive (parkway), which runs through the Audubon Circle, was formerly named Audubon Road.

John James Audubon Parkway in Amherst, New York

Audubon Avenue in New York, New York

Audubon Bird Sanctuary, Dauphin Island, Alabama[125]

Audubon National Wildlife Refuge, Coleharbor, North Dakota

Audubon Park, a park and neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis, Minnesota

Audubon Park, a park and neighborhood in Orlando, Florida. The streets are named after birds, such as Falcon Drive and Raven Road.

Wildcat Glades Conservation and Audubon Center in Joplin, Missouri

Audubon International, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that administers a wide range of environmental education and certification programs on properties such as golf courses, hotels, school campuses, ski areas, cemeteries, corporate parks, and agricultural lands[126]

The Scioto Audubon Metro Park in Columbus, Ohio[127]

Audubon Recreation Center in Garland, Texas[128]

Mount Audubon (13229 ft/4032 m), Colorado

Audubon Mountain, in Chugach Mountains of Alaska

Audubon High School in Camden County, New Jersey, and many primary schools around the United States

Audubon Golf Trail - a collection of golf courses spread throughout Louisiana

John James Audubon Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois[129]

Pascagoula River Audubon Center in Moss Point, Mississippi[130]

Audubon House & Gallery in Key West, Florida[131]

Audubon Street, home to the Audubon Arts District and The Audubon New Haven apartment building, in New Haven, Connecticut

Audubon Swamp Garden, part of the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens park along the Ashley River in Charleston, South Carolina

Some of Audubon's bird specimens survive in the collections of the Natural History Museum, London, the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and there are 5 specimens in the collections of World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

John James Audubon, Selected Journals and Other Writings (Ben Forkner, ed.) (Penguin Nature Classics, 1996) ISBN 0-14-024126-4

John James Audubon, Writings & Drawings (Christoph Irmscher, ed.) (The Library of America, 1999) ISBN 978-1-883011-68-0

John James Audubon, The Audubon Reader (Richard Rhodes, ed.) (Everyman Library, 2006) ISBN 1-4000-4369-7

Audubon: Early Drawings (Richard Rhodes, Scott V. Edwards, Leslie A. Morris) (Harvard University Press and Houghton Library 2008) ISBN 978-0-674-03102-9

John James Audubon, Audubon and His Journals (The European Journals 1826-1829, the Labrador Journal 1833, the Missouri River Journals 1843), edited by Maria Audubon, volumes 1 and 2, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1897 (in Wikisource).

Anon. (1887) Sketch of J.J. Audubon. The Popular Science Monthly. pp. 687-692.

Arthur, Stanley Clisby (1937). Audubon; An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman. New Orleans: Harmanson. OCLC 1162643 view excerpts online

Audubon, Lucy Green Bakewell, ed. (1870). The Life of John James Audubon, the Naturalist. New York: G.P.Putnam & Sons.

Burroughs, J. (1902). John James Audubon. Boston: Small, Maynard & company. OCLC 648935

Chalmers, John (2003). Audubon in Edinburgh and his Scottish Associates. NMS Publishing, Edinburgh, 978 1 901663 79 2

Ford, Alice (1969). Audubon By Himself. Garden City NY: The Natural History Press

Ford, Alice (1964; revised 1988). John James Audubon. University of Oklahoma Press

Fulton, Maurice G. (1917). Southern Life in Southern Literature; selections of representative prose and poetry. Boston, New York [etc.]: Ginn and Co. OCLC 1496258 view online here

Jackson E Christine (2013). John James Audubon and English Perspective Christine E Jackson Archived September 22, 2013, at the Wayback Machine

Herrick, Francis Hobart (1917). Aububon the naturalist: A History of his Life and Time. D. Appleton and Company, New York. Volume I Volume II (combined 2nd 1938 edition)

Logan, Peter (2016). Audubon: America's Greatest Naturalist and His Voyage of Discovery to Labrador. San Francisco, California: Ashbryn Press. ISBN 978-0-9972282-1-2.

Norman, Ana. "Audubon Collecting Guide: An Overview of the Antique Original Editions of Audubon's Birds of America" Joel Oppenheimer, Inc. https://www.audubonart.com/audubon-collecting-guide/

Norman, Ana. "What are the differences between an Audubon Havell engraving and Bien Lithograph? How to differentiate between the two Double-Elephant folio Editions" Joel Oppenheimer Gallery, JUNE 20, 2023. https://www.audubonart.com/what-are-the-differences-between-an-audubon-havell-engraving-and-bien-lithograph/

Norman, Ana. "A Guide to the Watermarks and Paper Types Found in Audubon's Havell edition of The Birds of America" Joel Oppenheimer Gallery, MAY 26, 2023. https://www.audubonart.com/a-guide-to-the-watermarks-and-paper-types-found-in-audubons-havell-edition-of-the-birds-of-america/

Norman, Ana. "Audubon's Miniature Folio - The Octavo Edition of Birds of America" Joel Oppenheimer Gallery, JUNE 21, 2023. https://www.audubonart.com/audubons-miniature-folio-the-octavo-edition-of-birds-of-america/

Olson, Roberta J.M. (2021). "Hiding in Plain Sight: New Evidence about the Birth, Identity, and Strategic Pseudonyms of John James Audubon". Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. 163 (4): 129-150. doi:10.3099/MCZ70. ISSN 0027-4100. Discusses the series of names assigned to Audubon as a youth.

St. John, Mrs. Horace (1884). Life of Audubon, the naturalist of the New World, His Adventures and Discoveries. Philadelphia: J.B.Lippincott & Co.

Audubon Birds of America at New York Historical Society

Works by John James Audubon at Project Gutenberg

Works by or about John James Audubon at Internet Archive

Works by John James Audubon at Toronto Public Library

Works by John James Audubon at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

John James Audubon at American Art Gallery

Audubon's Birds of America at the University of Pittsburgh, a complete high resolution digitization of all 435 double elephant folios as well as his Ornithological Biography

The John James Audubon Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

"Audubon biography", National Audubon Society

"Louise Hauss and David Brent Miller Audubon Collection", Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art, Auburn University

John James Audubon State Park Archived May 10, 2011, at the Wayback Machine in Henderson, Kentucky

Audubon's Birds of America, podcast from the Beinecke Library, Yale University

John James Audubon and Audubon family letters, (ca. 1783-1845) from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

View works by John James Audubon online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Watercolors for Birds of America at the New York Historical Society

Burgwin Family Papers, 1844-1963, AIS.1971.14, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. Includes Audubon-Bakewell family materials.

John James Audubon Collection at the Library of Congress

Identification guide to Audubon print editions

Blue jay: Corvus cristatus by John James Audubon at the Cleveland Public Library Art Collection

Victor Gifford Audubon Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Audubon Art Gallery. Online gallery of John James Audubon art prints.

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John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin, April 26, 1785 - January 27, 1851) was a French-American self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America.

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Chéri Samba est l'un des artistes contemporains africains les plus connus, ses œuvres figurent dans les collections d'institutions comme le Centre Georges-Pompidou à Paris ou comme du Museum of Modern Art de New York. Il a été invité à participer à la Biennale de Venise de 1997.

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https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2009/heat-waves-in-a-swamp-the-paintings-of-charles-burchfield/

http://legomenon.com/charles-burchfield-paintings-of-houses-haunted-house-pictures.html

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https://www.nst.com.my/lifestyle/pulse/2019/02/456701/paper-artist
This article has some things that inspired me

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https://www.healing-power-of-art.org/artist-diane-burko-raises-awareness-about-climate-destruction/

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Impressionism - Biography of Camille PISSARRO

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An history of the Impressionist Movement and biographies of the greatest Impressionists : Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Bazille, Caillebotte, Czanne, Guillaumin, Gauguin, Van Gogh.

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https://www.biography.com/news/frida-kahlo-bus-accident

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What first got you interested in painting?

I began with studying art back in LA as a young kid. I first went to art school when I was about 11 and went to big museums in Southern California. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the late 80's and was very much a part of the environment that was driven by some of the defining elements of hip-hop: the violence, anti-social behavior, streets on fire. I was fortunate because my mother was very much focused on getting me, my twin brother, and other siblings out of the hood. On weekends I would go to art classes at a conservatory. After school, we were on lockdown. It was something I hated, obviously, but in the end it was a lifesaver. In art school, I just liked being able to make stuff look like other stuff. It made me feel important. Back then, it was basic apples and fruit and understanding light and shadow. From there I did the body and a lot of self-portraiture. So much of what I do now is a type of self-portraiture. As an undergrad at the Art Institute of San Francisco, I really honed in on the technical aspects of painting and being a masterful painter. And then at Yale it became much more about arguments surrounding identity, gender and sexuality, painting as a political act, questions of post-modernity, etc.

How do you select countries to be a part of The World Stage?

The World Stage is comprised of what I believe are countries on the conversation block in the 21st century. Many of the reasons why I choose certain sites have to do with a level of curiosity, but it also has to do with their broader, global, political importance- strategically for America, and the world community at large. One of the reasons I chose Brazil, Nigeria, India and China is that these are all the points of anxiety and curiosity and production that are going on in the world that are changing the way we see empire. As I've been traveling, I started to notice that the way many people in other parts of the world interact with American culture is through black American expression. It's an interesting phenomenon. And increasingly, I want to engage with that question. If I am finding completely unknown guys on the streets of America, what does that look like when it happens in West Africa, in India? And when I started to do that, I had to ask myself some questions. Am I going to base this project on Western painting? Increasingly the answer was no because there was a wealth of history in each of these countries.

Outside of The World Stage, why do you mainly paint African Americans?

I loved when I walked into LACMA as a kid and seeing Kerry James Marshall's grand barbershop painting. But it was thrown into very sharp relief when thinking about the absence of other black images in that museum. There was something absolutely heroic and fascinating about being able to feel a certain relationship to the institution and the fact that these people happen to look like me on some level. One of the reasons I've chosen some of these zones had to do with the way you fantasize, whether it be about your own people or far-flung places, and how there's the imagined personality and look and feel of a society, and then there's the actuality that sometimes is jarring, as a working artist and traveling from time to time. Being in southern India, that black American hip hop culture is everywhere and to see it in sharp relief on these brown bodies in south Asia is something extraordinary, something that I wanted to get down without even fully understanding the entirety of the cultural context. I think it's important to destabilize yourself, and I do it because I want to see people who look like me.

How do you find your models?

I cast all my models on the streets of New York, and in the case of The World Stage, on the streets of that respective country. I have a camera crew with me, examples of my work and usually an attractive woman with me because there's something homoerotically charged about this whole interaction. Me as a male talking to another male, and predisposing that there's some kind of beauty being exchanged or desired. Usually on the American street there's this kind of celebrity culture where people aren't shocked, but they've been found. "Of course you discovered me, it's about time". Whereas in places like Nigeria or Brazil, even Sri Lanka, people didn't know what was going on. It took a lot more explanation, and they would still say, "Well, why me?" In America, it's, "Of course me". When street casting, I would say I look for alpha male behavior and sensibility, but what that ultimately ends up looking like can be sometimes conflicting. Sometimes someone who is very large in presence and gait is in the same photo shoot as someone rather small. I don't think I have a formula for it, but it's sort of in the process that it all comes out.

What typically inspires a painting?

Classical European paintings of noblemen, royalty and aristocrats. My goal was to be able to paint illusionistically and master the technical aspects, but then to be able to fertilize that with great ideas. I was trained to paint the body by copying the Old Master paintings, so in some weird way this is a return to how I earned my chops - spending a lot of time at museums and staring at white flesh. If you look at my paintings, there's something about lips, eyes, and mucous membranes. Is it only about that? No. It asks, "What are these guys doing?' They're assuming the poses of colonial masters, the former bosses of the Old World. Whenever I do photo shoots for paintings, I pull out a stack of books, whether it be something from the High Renaissance or the late French Rococo or the 19th century, it's all thrown together in one big jumble. I take the figure out of its original environment and place it in something completely made up. Most of the backgrounds I end up using are sheer decorative devices. Things that come from things like wallpaper or the architectural façade ornamentation of a building, and in a way it robs the painting of any sense of place or location, and it's located strictly in an area of the decorative. For the backgrounds in the World Stage Series, I look for traditional decorative objects, textiles, or devotional objects of that culture to draw upon.

Why the shift to painting women in your An Economy of Grace series?

The reason why I am painting women now is in order to come to terms with depictions of gender and the way it is featured art historically--a means to broaden the conversation. Any consideration of male power in painting naturally includes the presence of women within that dialogue. "An Economy of Grace" is an investigation of the presence of women in painting, but in a broader sense, it is a investigation of the negotiation of power in image-making. For this body of work I looked to 18th and 19th-century society portraits for inspiration. At that time it was common practice for nobility to commission unique clothing for portraiture. By working with a major fashion house on this project (Givenchy), we're revamping that tradition for the 21st century. I've always been a big fan of Givenchy and Riccardo Tisci's work, so it was a wonderful opportunity to work with him.

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What first got you interested in painting? I began with studying art back in LA as a young kid. I first went to art school when I was about 11 and went to big museums in Southern California.

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https://www.healing-power-of-art.org/artist-diane-burko-raises-awareness-about-climate-destruction/

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Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is world-famous. Learn about Van Gogh's life, read his letters, explore his paintings and drawings, and other masterpieces.

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Welcome to the Van Gogh Gallery, the definitive reference for the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. Get an in-depth look at Van Gogh's biography, paintings, and more.

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https://theguideartists.com/index.php/featured-genres/item/25-happydartist

https://wowxwow.com/artist-profile/happy-d-ap

These articles mention the artist's intent and showcase several of her pieces.

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https://www.edvardmunch.org/

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https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/45434

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Image

A detail of "Dante (Free from the Burden of Gender or Race)" by Kara Walker. Credit Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

Art Review

After the triumphant "Sugar Baby," the artist pushes her incendiary art into the present, merging collage, political cartoons and history painting.

A detail of "Dante (Free from the Burden of Gender or Race)" by Kara Walker. Credit Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

Like most outstanding artists, Kara Walker is unrelenting. In a press statement for her latest show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., she wrote in her familiar, mock-serious yet dead-serious tone that she was "tired of 'having a voice' or worse 'being a role model' " and of "being a featured member of my racial group and/or gender niche." But Ms. Walker's desire to stand down from the demands of her particular brand of fame has not made her stand down in her art, which is as disturbing and challenging as ever, if not more so.

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Honing more insistently to her longtime theme - the bitter legacy of slavery in the United States - the works in this assured exhibition unequivocally enter new territory. Narratively, they land solidly where Ms. Walker has only lightly tread: the remorseless, racialized American present, which is suffused with the death rattle of white male domination and its multiple bigotries. Visually they find the artist returning fully to two dimensions after her triumphal public sculpture, "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby," the monumental and vexatious sugarcoated woman-sphinx of 2014. Now she is pushing with new rigor at the boundaries of her primary medium and material - drawing and paper - merging collage, political cartoon and history painting, and this gives her story line more force.

The show is a brawl of works on paper that has as much the feeling of a studio visit as an exhibition. Coming in various shapes and sizes - worked with Sumi ink, charcoal or watercolor - the paper is cut, torn and collaged, sometimes to canvas or raw linen the shade of tobacco, often with quantities of black paint and sometimes bits of color.

The show's centerpiece is the enormous "Christ's Entry into Journalism" (2017) an 11 by 18 foot collage crowded with over 80 ink drawings of heads and figures. Its title echoes numerous historical depictions of "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," the biblical event preceding his betrayal, trial, death and resurrection; but perhaps journalism's death and resurrection is the main point. The images here are not exclusively contemporary - note a man resembling the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the lower left corner - but they implicate current events. Across the top of the piece a rebus depicts a rope salesman, a white farmer with a noose, a lynched figure and a Ku Klux Klan member whose parted robe reveals a figure in a suit and an extra-long tie who could be construed as the current occupant of the White House.

More prominent images evoke Civil Rights protesters; a Confederate flag and an arm raised in a Nazi salute; a policeman in riot gear pursuing a protester with a turkey leg and a cellphone; and Batman, carrying a figure wrapped as a mummy whose swollen black face may or may not refer to Emmett Till. At the center, a bare-chested black man raises his chained hands prayerfully. Nearby the severed head of a young black man in a hoodie is seen, upright, on a tray carried by a white woman, like Salome with the head of John the Baptist. More than ever, Ms. Walker's work piles personages, events and possible interpretations before us, daring us to face her reality - and ours.

Ms. Walker emerged in the mid-1990s with incendiary works set adamantly and slyly in the past that were frequently criticized as politically incorrect for caricaturing slavery in the antebellum South. Scaling up the demure 19th-century genre of the black-paper silhouette, she brought to elegant, repellent life an unending stream of vicious master-slave narratives - a continuum of violence, abuse and violation that consumed and corrupted almost all parties, regardless of age or race. Antic, profane and riveting, these mural-like scenes replayed history as farce and masqueraded tragedy as depraved comedy. They revealed the inevitable psychic corruption of humans owning humans, brought out the sexual component of oppression in any form and implied a country still shaped by the original sin of slavery.

Ms. Walker's visual efforts have generally been aided by a sardonic ventriloquism that recycles 19th-century elocutions. The title of her current show runs 198 words and unspools in the cadences of a sideshow barker: "Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to Present the Most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!." And so on, as if to account for all possible reactions: "Collectors of Fine Art will Flock...," "Scholars will Study and Debate...," "Art historians will wonder...," "Critics will shake their heads..." "The Final President of the United States will visibly wince." One sentence is especially telling: "Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media." Ms. Walker knows that with artistic reputation, what goes up must come down. She also knows that political correctness has returned, with various factions of the righteous trying to dictate what artists and museums should and should not show. (Consider the recent examples of Dana Schutz at the Whitney Biennial and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Sam Durant at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.)

Ms. Walker's work might be seen as a three-pronged attempt to wreak havoc with racism, language - and drawing itself. Her signature black silhouettes, which have transferred well to printmaking, book illustrations and animated films, reappear, and Ms. Walker sometimes struggles to refresh them. She succeeds in "Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something)," where the black silhouette cutouts migrate to a large, seemingly whitewashed slab of canvas.

But she really cuts loose with the big collages and their rough-edged images, which recur in two other large collages, "U.S.A. Idioms" and "The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz)." Measuring some 10 by 11 feet, this last work is notable for a group of young black women in two-piece bathing suits; they bring to mind a black teenager at a pool party in McKinney, Tex., who was thrown to the ground and restrained by a white policeman.

By cutting and pasting various images, Ms. Walker is able to convincingly combine not only different times and histories, but also numerous drawing styles, which gives her art a new freedom and toughness that it has needed. Especially tough is a collage-painting titled "Spook," one of three outstanding raw linen works. Placed near the gallery's front door, it centers on a cut-out ink drawing of a black woman pleasuring herself in a dark woodland haunted by cutouts that contrast various threats: a snake, a bat, a white man with a noose. The surface is thick with tenderly applied black paint.

A different kind of combination of sensuous and tough is achieved in "Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit)," a triptych in which an assortment of figures, some pale as ghosts, sink into a vast black swamp beneath black trees. It is both morbid and mordant and contains some of Ms. Walker's most ravishing ink drawing. Other works seem almost tossed off. A poignant example is an all-black oval canvas titled "Storm Ryder" and collaged with pieces of torn paper. One scrap gives a glimpse of a storm-tossed ship reminiscent of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Others convey the wise words of the subtitle: "You Must Hate Black People as Much as You Hate Yourself." She seems to be saying that bigotry starts with unexamined self-hatred.

In her press statement, Ms. Walker claimed that her latest efforts - all made during this excruciating summer - form a show that is "not exhaustive, activist or comprehensive in any way." Maybe not. But the exhibition reveals a crossroads in her great career and she sails right through, from strength to new strength.

Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelledto present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!
Through Oct. 14, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 530 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-929-2262, sikkemajenkinsco.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C13 of the New York edition with the headline: Kara Walker Traces a Bitter Legacy. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Kara Walker Traces Slavery's Bitter Legacy With New Ways of Drawing

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Art Review After the triumphant "Sugar Baby," the artist pushes her incendiary art into the present, merging collage, political cartoons and history painting. A detail of "Dante (Free from the Burden of Gender or Race)" by Kara Walker. Credit Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times Like most outstanding artists, Kara Walker is unrelenting.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/arts/design/leonardo-da-vinci-tajan-paris-renaissance-.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FArt&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

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he moment I love most in the video Banksy has released of his latest art stunt is when a bespectacled man with the well-groomed air of an art-world professional puts his hand to his forehead in apparent disbelief at what he is seeing: a million quid being shredded. He looks genuinely frightened that the revolution has reached Mayfair and that activists are about to storm Sotheby's, where Banksy's framed picture Girl With Balloon has just mechanically self-destructed - shortly after going under the hammer for a little more than £1 m.

If this moment of artistic terrorism last Friday really had been - as at least one member of the audience appeared to think - the sign for all the collectors and dealers assembled at yet another big-selling night in the art industry to be dragged out of the auctioneer's and shot, there would be VIP blood in the gutters of New Bond Street. For Banksy put his artwork through the shredder at the climax of the busiest week in the London art market, when international collectors fly in for the Frieze art fair and its satellite parties, private views and purchases. "In the spirit of Frieze week, the October contemporary art evening auction is led by a selection of outstanding works," enthused Sotheby's about its sale. Apparently, it had no idea that one of these modern treasures was booby-trapped.

Yet, by the next morning, self-proclaimed market insiders were claiming to be the first to get Banksy's joke. (Others say the stunt is a hoax.) One, Joey Syer, an online art broker, was offering bullish "insight" to the media: "The auction result will only propel [Banksy's prices] further and, given the media attention this stunt has received, the lucky buyer would see a great return on the [£1.042m] they paid last night. This is now part of art history in its shredded state and we'd estimate Banksy has added, at a minimum, 50% to its value, possibly as high as being worth £2m-plus." Despite Syer offering no evidence for this claim, it got into the media. After all, such cynical savoir-faire sounds plausible if you have followed the freakonomics of art. Of course Banksy doubled the value of Girl With Balloon by destroying it. The art market always wins.

I beg to differ. I am not exactly Banksy's biggest fan. I walked around his anti-theme-park Dismaland with a frown on my face, not because I was part of the performance, like the grim and sulky greeters, but because I found it truly dismal. But the rush for knowing insiders to say Banksy's art is more valuable now is beside the point. Yes, rebellion is always being reclaimed. Yes, everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody knows that the good guys lost, as Leonard Cohen observed. But come on. For once, an artist has genuinely pissed all over the system that reduces art to nothing but a commodity. What happened at Sotheby's is Banksy's greatest work. He has said something that needed to be said: art is being choked to death by money. The market turns imagination into an investment and protest into decor for some oligarch's house. The only real rebellion left is for works of art to destroy themselves the moment they are sold.

Banksy's Million Quid Artwork Destroying Itself - as perhaps we should call this masterpiece of radical performance - belongs to a tradition of destruction in art that is only just 100 years old. In 1917, a porcelain urinal, titled Fountain and bearing the signature "R Mutt" in crudely daubed black paint, was submitted to a New York art exhibition. Marcel Duchamp, the man behind the stunt, is often seen as a dry, ironic wit whose "readymades" are dissected reverently as philosophical conundrums, but that does an injustice to the anger and contempt in his gesture. To call a pissoir Fountain was to urinate on high culture - and that could not be a neutral gesture in 1917. Duchamp was part of the dada movement. This deliberately reductive and primal movement - the name imitates baby talk - was begun by pacifist German draft dodgers in exile in Switzerland in 1916 and spread to Berlin, Paris and more cities by the end of the first world war.

The dadaists hated the European culture of fine art and self-conscious sensitivity that could slaughter its youth by putting them through the giant human shredder that was the western front. All sides in the first world war claimed to be defending "civilisation". The dada generation spat on that civilisation. In his 1919 work LHOOQ (which sounds like the French for "she's got a hot arse"), Duchamp drew a moustache and small goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. He also said he wanted to "use a Rembrandt as an ironing board".

The problem with the anti-art tradition that started with dada's violence against the very idea of culture is that, over the past 100 years or so, it has been assimilated into the mainstream of modern art. The sassy and slick smart alecs who are claiming that all Banksy has done is add value to his work are the latest in a long line of art-world insiders who have turned dissidence into art history. As an older man in the 60s, Duchamp was embraced by the establishment. Replicas were made of his lost Fountain. There is one in Tate Modern today.

The Young British Artists saw the commercial potential of Duchamp's ideas. You could put a shark in a tank and call it art, then turn it into money. The result is what Banksy's video of the crowd at Sotheby's shows: an international community of the well-heeled spending their money on art that has an aura of dadaist danger. As well as Banksy's Girl With Balloon, the auction included a slashed white canvas by Lucio Fontana and a painting by Piero Manzoni, whose most notorious masterpiece is a can labelled Merda d'Artista ( Artist's Shit).

Looking at these lots, the game being played at the auction is not that subtle. On the one hand, the collectors were being offered the thrill of anti-art. On the other, they were being sold nice paintings to hang at home. Beauty with just a whiff of the urinal, the artist's merda, the street. Banksy's Girl With Balloon seemed to fit this shallow Janus-faced aesthetic perfectly. He is an artist famous for working in the street, painting, with the help of stencils, images of kissing coppers, cheeky rats and flower-throwing anarchists on walls all over the world. Yet Sotheby's was selling a finely framed version of one of his most famous graffiti images - literally domesticating his art by turning it into a luxury painting, a modern Mona Lisa.

Perhaps they should have wondered why an artist known for rebellion would create something so posh-looking. But no one guessed that Banksy had been studying modern art history. For hidden inside his painting was a device inspired by one of the most stubbornly subversive offshoots of the dada tradition. The Britain-based artist Gustav Metzger invented auto-destructive art at the start of the 60s, just as Duchamp was being assimilated as glossy pop. In his most spectacular demonstration of the idea, he "painted" a sheet of white nylon with acid in front of an audience on the South Bank in London. The act of making this artwork also destroyed it.

Metzger had reasons to be angry. As a Jewish child in Nuremberg in the 30s, he witnessed some of the Nazis' biggest rallies. He was saved by the Kinderstransport, but lost his family in the Holocaust. For him, auto-destructive art was part of a lifelong refusal to be part of the capitalist system. One of his keenest disciples was a young art student who met him at Hornsey School of Art and went on to become a rock star. Pete Townshend saw his regular smashing of guitars in Who concerts as auto-destructive art.

Auto-destruction is one of the hardest acts for the commercial art world to assimilate. When Michael Landy destroyed everything he owned as an artwork, it was a conscious farewell to the commodity art of the Hirst generation to which he belongs. When the K Foundation burned a million pounds, their gesture was so far outside the ethos of mainstream art that it was barely recognised as art at all - more like a bloody stupid waste of money.

When the auctioneer's hammer came down at Sotheby's and a "modern masterpiece" began to eat itself, the stage was set perfectly. Here was the art world's moment of truth - however theatrical and multifaceted it may prove to be. Of course, this revolt will be assimilated. Of course, the market will smile and the cash tills will go on ringing. Yet for once the commodity bit back. Art turned on the hands that feed it.

In principle, all artists should do the same until the market is cut down to size and stops defining the art of our time. Most won't, of course, for good reasons such as the need to make a living. Yet Banksy has let a little light into a very claustrophobic room - and proved he is the artist who matters most right now.

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Why putting £1m through the shredder is Banksy's greatest work

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he moment I love most in the video Banksy has released of his latest art stunt is when a bespectacled man with the well-groomed air of an art-world professional puts his hand to his forehead in apparent disbelief at what he is seeing: a million quid being shredded.

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chicago-cancels-sale-important-piece-african-american-public-art-180970737/

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/t-magazine/pedro-da-costa-felgueiras-recreating-lost-colors.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FArt

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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/terracotta-army-damage-china-officials-steal-thumb-punishment-philadelphia-vandal-a8218106.html

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The world's largest photography show features works that go far beyond traditional two-dimensional prints. Some were even made without a camera.

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"Maria Friis," a 2017 photograph by French photographer Charlotte Abramow, from her series "They Love Trampoline" shot in the Faroe Islands. Credit Credit Charlotte Abramow, via Fisheye Gallery

PARIS - Is it possible to create meaningful photographs in a world awash with images? Or should photographers instead work with the flood of images already out there? Could photographs from the past help us understand who we are today? Does photography necessarily require a camera?

Those were some of the questions posed by the displays of 166 galleries exhibiting at Paris Photo, held again this year at the Grand Palais, the 19th-century iron-and-glass masterpiece by the Seine River, running through Nov. 11.

The international fair showcases works spanning the history of photography.

While many of the artists on show seemed happy with photography's traditional flat prints, others departed to find new forms of expression, incorporating techniques such as weaving, cutting, painting and sculpture.

Here are edited extracts in which some of the artists explained their work.

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"The Faroes are a self-ruling Danish archipelago in the North Atlantic, but everyone I met had a map of the world at home. And a trampoline, although I never saw anyone jumping. I called the series 'They Love Trampoline.' "

"For each collage, I find a detail that is the touchstone of the image: hands, eyes, the curve of a hip, intertwined arms. The original images are very suggestive, sometimes erotic, but the way I've reassembled them makes that difficult to see and grasp. I've injected cinema, time and rhythm into the images. The viewer is the one operating the filmstrip."
E douard Taufenbach is represented by Galerie Binôme.

"I learned to weave in Swazi factories. Back in my Catskills studio, I wove that fabric through their printed faces, bringing their DNA, their sweat, their hair, into the portraits. Metaphorically, they are shrouded, peering from behind the bars imposed by their culture and government.

"Weaving is a methodical process, very meditative. Each of these pieces takes from 20 to 60 hours to produce and is unique.

"These people have very little choice. As an artist, I wanted to do something to give them a voice."

"To me, the length of an exposure is magical. It is all about time, and the images are actually in movement because if I expose the paper to light just five seconds longer, the crimson red will turn to dark burgundy.

"I am not nostalgic for analog, I shoot digital images like everyone else, but they are two entirely separate mediums. These images are not photographs, they are created in my lab with no representation of reality. I feel like I am inside my camera."

"I juggle two sets of memories: those of Morocco, my birthplace, formerly under French control; and those of France, where I grew up and went to school. I used to feel there was a civil war inside me because neither country has properly addressed the issue of decolonization.

"My work is about healing memories. To do this, it is necessary to address facts of the past and accept them as part of our history. Only then can we make peace with our identities and move forward.

"In this work, I have used colonial-era postcards showing young Moroccan prostitutes in Bouzbir, a French military district in Casablanca. These women's bodies were the obscene battleground of French domination. On the pictures, I have digitally overlaid a grid of tiny images of female genitals and uteruses.

"Today, I feel my French and my Moroccan heritages are at peace within me."

"I see the history of photography as an orchard with many types of trees and fruit. I am just picking fruit."

"I live in Beijing. It can be politically sensitive to work with archival photographs in China, and I've had work censored twice. In some respects, nothing has changed from earlier periods."

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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8 Artists at the Paris Photo Fair Who Show Where Photography Is Going

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The world's largest photography show features works that go far beyond traditional two-dimensional prints. Some were even made without a camera. PARIS - Is it possible to create meaningful photographs in a world awash with images? Or should photographers instead work with the flood of images already out there?

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Da Vinci was one of the great creative minds of the Italian Renaissance, hugely influential as an artist and sculptor but also immensely talented as an engineer, scientist and inventor.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a local lawyer. He was apprenticed to the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence and in 1478 became an independent master. In about 1483, he moved to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza family as an engineer, sculptor, painter and architect. From 1495 to 1497 he produced a mural of 'The Last Supper' in the refectory of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.

Da Vinci was in Milan until the city was invaded by the French in 1499 and the Sforza family forced to flee. He may have visited Venice before returning to Florence. During his time in Florence, he painted several portraits, but the only one that survives is the famous 'Mona Lisa' (1503-1506).

In 1506, da Vinci returned to Milan, remaining there until 1513. This was followed by three years based in Rome. In 1517, at the invitation of the French king Francis I, Leonardo moved to the Château of Cloux, near Amboise in France, where he died on 2 May 1519.

The fame of Da Vinci's surviving paintings has meant that he has been regarded primarily as an artist, but the thousands of surviving pages of his notebooks reveal the most eclectic and brilliant of minds. He wrote and drew on subjects including geology, anatomy (which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately), flight, gravity and optics, often flitting from subject to subject on a single page, and writing in left-handed mirror script. He 'invented' the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and parachute some 500 years ahead of their time.

If all this work had been published in an intelligible form, da Vinci's place as a pioneering scientist would have been beyond dispute. Yet his true genius was not as a scientist or an artist, but as a combination of the two: an 'artist-engineer'. His painting was scientific, based on a deep understanding of the workings of the human body and the physics of light and shade. His science was expressed through art, and his drawings and diagrams show what he meant, and how he understood the world to work.

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Da Vinci was one of the great creative minds of the Italian Renaissance, hugely influential as an artist and sculptor but also immensely talented as an engineer, scientist and inventor. Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a local lawyer.

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Thailand has stepped up its efforts to reclaim bronze and stone sculptures that have been in US museum collections for decades. The Kingdom of Thailand's culture minister announced last week that the country is seeking the return of 23 antiquities, some of which have been housed in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art since the late 1960s.

Unnamed Institutions in the UK and Australia are also in the Thai government's sights as it intensifies its efforts to recover sculptures and other artifacts it claims were illegally removed from temples and archaeological sites. Culture Minister Vira Rojpojchanarat is leading a task force to recover more than 700 artifacts in collections abroad that Thailand claims were stolen, the Bangkok Post reports.

The Met's sculpture of the four-armed Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, which the museum purchased in 1967, is among the artifacts that Thailand is reportedly claiming. The standing figure of the deity is currently on view in the Met's gallery of Southeast Asian art, according the the museum's website. It will be one of the first requests to land on the desk of the Met's new director Max Hollein. More are sure to follow as countries beyond Thailand step up their efforts to recover cultural heritage objects.

Thailand is also seeking the return of carved stone lintels from temples in Northern Thailand, which are now in the collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. They include one acquired by Avery Brundage, the Chicago industrialist and former president of the US Olympic Committee, who donated his vast collection to San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s on the condition that the city build a museum to house it.

A spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum tells artnet News that the institution has not been contacted by the government of Thailand. She stresses that works from Thailand in the museum's collection "were properly purchased in the 1970s and 1980s or donated" but that the institution will cooperate with the appropriate authorities. The Asian Art Museum and the Met did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.

The Thai culture ministry also announced last week that two individuals-the US citizen Lisette Christiansen, who inherited ancient Thai artifacts from her late father-in-law, and a US-based Thai physician-have both volunteered to return 38 prehistoric artifacts.

Joyce White, the executive director of the Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology in Philadelphia, tells artnet News that the Thai government's current push to recover objects they consider to have been illegally exported means that museums and collectors "can no longer assume disinterest on the part of the Thai concerning these activities." She urges institutions to be more transparent about their past acquisitions, including by publishing collecting histories.

"Shining a light on this murky area of the museum world will hopefully be a trend in the 21st century," White says. "If museums have clear legal backing for particular acquisitions, they can make their case in a court of law. Transparency should not be a problem for them."

Thailand has successfully recovered lost cultural heritage in the past. After a joint operation by US and Thai authorities, two US dealers were convicted in a case that in 2014 resulted in the Bowers Museum in Southern California returning 542 ancient vases, bowls, and other artifacts to Thailand. They were among the looted objects the museum acquired from disgraced Los Angeles-based dealer Jonathan Markell and his wife Cari.

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Thailand Is Ramping Up Efforts to Recover Cultural Heritage From US Museums, Including the Met | artnet News

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Thailand has stepped up its efforts to reclaim bronze and stone sculptures that have been in US museum collections for decades. The Kingdom of Thailand's culture minister announced last week that the country is seeking the return of 23 antiquities, some of which have been housed in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art since the late 1960s.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/arts/design/show-us-your-wall-terrence-mcnally.html

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'A Space of Their Own' aims to build comprehensive digital database of 15th- to 19th-century women artists

smithsonian.com

The late Jane Fortune's quest to resurrect the world's forgotten female artists began with a simple question: "Where are the women?"

Back in 2005, Fortune was touring the Italian capital of Florence. As she made her way through the city's unparalleled collection of Italian Renaissance creations, she couldn't help but notice that nearly all of the women represented on her trip were confined to the canvas. Conspicuously absent were works made by women, which were overwhelmingly left to gather dust in museum archives or hang underappreciated in out-of-the-way galleries.

Fortune-a lifelong philanthropist and arts patron who died of ovarian cancer in late September at the age of 76-resolved to disrupt that state of affairs. The year after her trip, she sponsored the restoration of 16th-century Dominican nun Plautilla Nelli's " Lamentation With Saints"-a large-scale fresco painting that, pre-conservation, was lusterless, dirt-caked and infested with woodworms-and in 2009, she officially launched the non-profit Advancing Women Artists (AWA).

As Katharine Q. Seelye notes for the New York Times, AWA aims to identify, restore and exhibit works by Florence's female artists. At the time of Fortune's passing, the foundation had successfully restored 61 paintings and sculptures, all of which were delivered with the caveat that they remain on view instead of consigned back to storage. In addition to restoring dozens of works, AWA has identified a staggering 2,000 forgotten pieces-including Artemisia Gentileschi's " David and Bathsheba," which had languished in storage at the Palazzo Pitti for 363 years.

"I'm more concerned about saving art that has very little chance of surviving," Fortune said. "And the interesting part about all of this is that many of the works we found-well, nobody knew they were there. Nobody knew anything about the artists. ... They weren't important, but rather beholden to their fathers, mothers, and husbands. They had no voice."

Lovingly dubbed "Indiana Jane" by the Florentine press, Fortune not only championed the cause of Italy's forgotten artists, but that of female artists across the world.

Over at Hyperallergic this week, Karen Chernick notes that Fortune was also linked to A Space of Their Own -a soon-to-be launched illustrated database of United States and European painters, pastellists, printmakers and sculptors active between the 15th and 19th centuries.

The project, led by researchers at Indiana University, Bloomington's Eskenazi Museum of Art, is co-sponsored by AWA and funded with a pilot grant from Fortune. Its name is pulled from Virginia Woolf's proto-feminist 1928 essay A Room of One's Own, which famously stated a "woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (or in this case, create art).

As Adelheid Gealt, project director and art historian at Indiana University, Bloomington, tells Smithsonian.com, the database, Fortune's "brainchild," is projected to be the most comprehensive of its kind, with offerings including artist biographies, images of works and information on their viewing availability, a directory of essential outside resources, and exclusive articles detailing the ever-growing body of scholarship on female artists.

To date, the team has compiled a master list of 643 artists. Gealt estimates they'll identify another hundred or so more by the time the database goes live in spring 2019. Once launched, the "virtual museum" will be continually updated.

According to Hyperallergic's Chernick, researchers are pulling from the collections of several thousand museums across the U.S. and Europe. In a recent call-to-action directed at European institutions, A Space of Their Own noted it was "particularly interested in works by women that are in your storages/deposits that cannot be seen."

Some of the artists uncovered during this preliminary stage of research are relatively well-known, at least amongst art history buffs. One artist Chernick cites, the 16th-century Italian noblewoman and court painter Sofonisba Anguissola, is actually at the center of an upcoming exhibition at Madrid's Prado Museum.

Others are more obscure: Take Anna Morandi Manzolini, an 18th-century Bolognese anatomist and sculptress who created eerily lifelike wax figures based on her study of the human body, or Isabella Catanea Parasole, a 17th-century Italian printmaker who crafted detailed engravings of swirling lace designs.

A Space of Their Own has ambitions of being more than a database. "It does not end with the database," as AWA director Linda Falcone tells Chernick. "It begins with the database."

Following the legacy that Fortune chartered, the initiative aims to open up the ouevre of these historic women artists to the general public and lead museums to reconsider the place of these artists in their collections. The proof is in the database, which Gealt tells Smithsonian.com demonstrates the "powerful way.... historic women artists have contributed to their visual culture against incredible odds."

"Women's history is not a given," she continues on a serious note. "The fact that many of these women were famous in their own day and now are almost forgotten tells us a lot."

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About Meilan Solly

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Legacy of Jane Fortune, Champion of Forgotten Women Artists, Lives on in New Initiative

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smithsonian.com The late Jane Fortune's quest to resurrect the world's forgotten female artists began with a simple question: "Where are the women?" Back in 2005, Fortune was touring the Italian capital of Florence. As she made her way through the city's unparalleled collection of Italian Renaissance creations, she couldn't help but notice that nearly all of the women represented on her trip were confined to the canvas.

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Before There Was Streaming, the Victorians Had "Magic Lanterns"

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smithsonian.com Beginning in the early 1800s, British "lanternists" brought projections of painted or photographed images to life via sound effects, narration and various personal touches. These 3D slides and moving sequences, which were similar to modern-day GIFs, quickly became a staple of Victorian entertainment.

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https://www.vnews.com/Art-Notes-for-Nov-8-2018-21392183

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Most Famous Artists of All Time, from Michelangelo to Warhol

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The most famous artists of all time have made lasting impacts on their mediums, producing iconic works of art.

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When the famed

artist died in 1987 at age 58, newspapers were shocked that a simple operation like a gallbladder removal could have spurred the heart attack that killed him. And, in the three decades since, that's remained the prevailing view. But new research, presented in February by medical historian and retired surgeon Dr. John Ryan, indicates that

had actually suffered gallbladder problems for almost 15 years. (Ryan has been researching the artist's death since his retirement four years ago, encouraged by his brother-in-law, the prominent art historian Hal Foster.) Warhol's condition was so severe that, during the 1987 surgery, the doctor found Warhol's gallbladder full of gangrene-so full, he said, that the organ fell apart during removal. The artist's health was worsened by an addiction to speed, severe malnourishment and dehydration, and the long-term effects of a 1968 gunshot wound at the hands of Valerie Solanas. That final gallbladder operation, it seems, was ultimately too stressful for his fragile body; Warhol's heart gave up hours after he appeared to be recovering from the surgery.

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The Most Remarkable Art-Historical Discoveries of 2017

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When the famed artist died in 1987 at age 58, newspapers were shocked that a simple operation like a gallbladder removal could have spurred the heart attack that killed him. And, in the three decades since, that's remained the prevailing view.

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https://mymodernmet.com/scary-art/

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Why This Painting Will Make David Hockney the Most Expensive Living Artist - Artsy News

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Why This Painting Will Make David Hockney the Most Expensive Living Artist - Artsy News

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David Hockney's iconic "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" is expected to bring as much as $80 million at Christie's this month.

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https://www.momondo.com/discover/article/art-events-around-the-world

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Scientists have identified the oldest figurative art in the world, and it can be found in a cave in the Borneo jungle. Created more than 40,000 years ago, the faint image depicts wild cattle, painted in iron oxide, or ocher. The cave, in Kalimantan, Indonesia, also features ancient hand stencils and more recent paintings of human figures, from 13,000 to 20,000 years ago.

The findings were announced in the journal on Wednesday. The drawings were first discovered in 1994. "Who the ice age artists of Borneo were and what happened to them is a mystery," project co-leader Pindi Setiawan, an archaeologist from Indonesia's Bandung Institute of Technology told the Independent.

Previously, the world's oldest figurative art was believed to be ivory figurines of humans and animals carved in Germany and discovered in 2003, but those were 40,000 years old at most.

There are older man-made images, but they only show lines and abstract patterns; archaeologists announced the discovery of what they purport to be the world's oldest artwork, a series of red lines dating back 73,000 years, in September. (Those marks would be 30,000 years older than any previously discovered artwork, and not all experts are convinced they were made intentionally by humans.)

With artifacts this old, scientists run into obstacles with radiocarbon dating, as there may not be enough carbon left to test. An alternate method is flowstone dating. When water runs down the walls of a cave, seeping into the limestone, a calcite flowstone forms. A flowstone contains uranium, which will decay at a predictable rate, turning into thorium. Testing the ratio of the two elements allows scientists to nail down an accurate date for the flowstone's formation.

The scientists tested the flowstone both on top of and sometimes underneath the cave paintings, allowing them to find maximum and minimum ages for the works-some of which could date back up to 52,000 years.

The distinction between abstract and figurative art is an important one, reflecting human development and the way early Homo sapiens saw themselves and the world around them. The newly dated Indonesian paintings prove this shift was taking place at roughly the same time in both Asia and Europe.

"It's essentially happening at the same time at the opposite ends of the world," Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia, who co-authored the Nature article, told the New York Times. His team also published a 2014 article about cave art found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, using flowstone dating to find art created up to 40,000 years ago.

For their latest study, Aubert and his team traveled deep into the rain forest to conduct their research, traveling upriver by canoe and backpacking the rest of the way through the brush, blazing a trail during their four-day walk.

More work is ahead. "We are planning archaeological excavation in those caves in order to find more information about these unknown artists," he told CNN. "Rock art was made for a purpose and we can see how people lived a long time ago in a way that archaeology can't provide. It's also like they're still talking to us today."

See more photos of the cave art below.

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Scientists Have Discovered the World's Oldest Figurative Art: a 40,000-Year-Old Cave Painting of Cattle | artnet News

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Scientists have identified the oldest figurative art in the world, and it can be found in a cave in the Borneo jungle.

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ISABELLA How Art throughout history influenced Math

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ISABELLA How Art throughout history influenced Math

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https://theconversation.com/did-artists-lead-the-way-in-mathematics-75355