Child's Play

John Haber
in New York City

Beatrix Potter, Wanda Gág, and Walton Ford

Was Peter Rabbit an environmentalist? Maybe not, but his creator was. Beatrix Potter fought for England's Lake District as a natural reserve, and she willed her considerable holdings to the National Trust to make it so.

To ask the Morgan Library, she had a love of nature since childhood, and it informs the naturalism of her friendly creatures and her art. An exhibition gets both main galleries, a rarity, to recreate what she saw and the home she knew. This is not, the Morgan insists, just for kids. Call it child's play, if you wish, or call it art, with loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum. At the very least, as the show's title has it, it is "Drawn to Nature." Potter would have appreciated the gentleness of the pun.

Soon after in America, Wanda Gág brings a greater darkness to both children and nature. But then not all animal stories are suitable it for children. Some might weep for men thrown to the lions. Walton Ford thinks first of the lions. His works on paper delight in their pleasure, also at the Morgan. Is this nature in captivity or set free?

After two thousand years, the cruelty of ancient Rome still inspires sadness and terror, but Ford is not cowering or crying. Nor will he waste his art on prisoners and gladiators sent to their fate. He pictures instead creatures raised in captivity to face a violent, unnatural death. What should they care about blood, bread, and circuses? What good does it do them if a lion roars at the start of an MGM movie? William Butler Yeats wrote of "The Circus Animals' Desertion," but not even that might help.

That rascally rabbit

As for Peter's politics, I am not so sure. He does, after all, raid his neighbor's garden to gobble up as much of it as he can, like a corporate farmer today. Or was he just a rabbit, reclaiming his habitat from human incursion, like a proper environmentalist? Standards back then were different, and Beatrix Potter, with her brother, collected everything in sight. (They dissected dead animals as well.) She learned from zoos and science museums, counting everything, however humble, as fellow beings and friends.

Potter drew insects and made a particular study of wild mushrooms in watercolor. She could never match the crisp sublimity of John Constable, although she admired him, and an 1850 still life by William Henry Hunt, of a bird's nest and blossom, stands out from hers for its intricacy and color. Still, her mushrooms seem almost to tremble, and that, too, suggests her closeness to what she observed. Her landscapes stop short of Constable's clouds, in favor of the land before her eyes. When she does cut loose, it is for the middle distance, a place to which she could belong. She reserves her most startling color and perspective for a valley or a garden path.

Her brush leaves its mark back and forth in gray, for ripples beneath a boat on otherwise placid waters. This is nature, but inhabited by insects, animals, and humans alike. It is also, sure enough, a lake. Potter might seem an unlikely naturalist. Born in 1866, she grew up in and around London, but she relished vacations in Scotland and summers in the Lake District, to which she dreamed of returning for good. She got her wish at last with a late marriage and increasing income from her children's books and their merchandising, which she took the lead in developing.

She called the property Hill Top Farm, which itself sounds like a children's book, but this was hilly country in fiction and in fact. She also took farming seriously, like everything else. She managed flocks of sheep personally, just as she insisted on miniature or folding books and designed her own end papers. The family made its money from the textile business, which may have influenced her close care in such things as bedspreads and wallpaper. The Morgan places related photos and sketches within quaint walls to convey their intimacy. She grew up with Wedgewood pottery as well.

She was always a proper Victorian, from a childhood that John Singer Sargent might have painted to her death in 1943. That includes her faith in science, which her family encouraged with the gift of a pocket microscope. An uncle, a chemist, introduced her to a Bunsen burner. It also includes the moral basis of her stories. Engaging as he is, Peter never makes it home from his trespasses without losing his clothes or gaining a whipping. They were nice clothes at that, down to a gentleman's blue coat and shoes.

Still, Potter took comfort in his human impulses and gave comfort as well. The first of her books came out in 1902, but it had its origins in a "picture letter" nineteen years earlier to a sick child. There is no getting around, too, a serious case of the cutes, but such was her calling. From the moment her brush turns to warm-blooded animals, the faces get shyer and more endearing, even as they acquire more closely observed fur. But then, to her credit, Peter grows older over the course of the books, and one can excuse him and his cousin, Benjamin Bunny, for their place between species. When they head off to scavenge for goodies, they, too, are drawn to nature.

A small world

One thing about parenting could drive anyone crazy, but children eat it up. Who as a child could not take comfort in Disney's "It's a Small World After All," the song introduced at the 1964 World's Fair, with its lilt, simplicity, and endless repetition? And who could not identify with something small as you but still an entire world? Wanda Gág got the message long before, and her art was equally obsessive, in prints and children's books alike. Now the Whitney sets aside a modest room off the permanent collection for "Gág's World." It's a small world after all and just maybe enough.

It is also a dark world—or at least a ghostly one. Her prints are not peopled but haunted, like that of Christmas Eve, where no child dares to enter, much less to peek. If Gág troubles with presents, a ghost has carried them away. In a reader, C is for crash, with what might be a wrecking ball, D is for dash, and E is for elsewhere. An enchanter carries off, as another title has it, millions of cats—like a pied piper who cannot be bothered with motley and cares too much for rats. And you know what they say about herding cats.

Perhaps I should have said that her ghosts are her gifts. I cannot swear that her prints count as modern art rather than, as the old put-down had it, illustration. She lends the simplest of scenes enormous detail—not in what she includes, but in how she renders it. Lithographs have the sharp edges of woodcuts, in black and white, but with a greater freedom, and the strokes encroach on one another as woodcuts never could. Her subjects, too, stick to what others might mistake for calendar art, like Winter Twilight. Prewar American Modernism's social realism, Surrealism, and formal experiment are nowhere in sight.

Does her small-town America have more in common with Grant Wood than with Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton? The curators, Roxanne Smith and Scout Hutchinson, make the case for an artist after all. It has just those two spreads from children's book amid prints, also from the Whitney's collection, and they share a small wall with Christmas Eve. Still, she did not become an artist all at once. Born in 1893 to immigrants from Bohemia, Gág left Minnesota in her thirties to study at the Art Student League, when it was a touch less conservative. She mingled and exhibited easily with her peers.

Like Potter, she was also a student of nature, and she settled in the outer edge of suburbia, with an ingenious home at that—a balcony atop a porch as a cylindrical addition to a square home, both with gabled roofing. Like Potter, too, hers is a humanized nature, but without the cuddly, intelligent animals. Plants run wild only as dangerous companions. Plain wood homes cannot rise in straight lines either, and streets cannot afford escape or access. One can only imagine the strange life within. They are observed all the same, which makes the ghosts that much stranger.

Ghosts worthy of their name require a ghostly light, and Gág's is neither plainly natural nor artificial. It bears down on a scene face on, leaving broad areas of light and white outlines. Does it makes her an illustrator at heart, taking care for her subject more than anything? No doubt, but her idea of community is both familiar and imagined. It might not so be bad for children after all. Besides, they get to carry with them from their reading Millions of Cats. Could there be worlds within worlds?

To the lions

Walton Ford imagines creatures in the wild, if only for a moment and far from their native habitat. Does he himself exploit nature's resources to his own ends? What if the whole idea of a savage beast is a human fiction? Yet that is precisely his theme, and it takes him not to Africa and Asia, but to the zoo and to countless hours in the American Museum of Natural History with its preserved beasts and created habitats. There, he points out, they have nowhere to hide. His watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink will not become children's books as for Potter and Gág, but it tells a story all the same.

He is drawn to real-life narratives from the past, like the Barbary lions in Rome. They are stories of escape, recapture, and death, although his work skips over the ending, because he cannot stop for death. A black panther escaped Zurich's zoo in 1933, surviving ten days in the alpine snow before a farmer cooked and ate him. A trolley crashed into a circus caravan in 1913, setting lions free from their cage, and do not ask what happened to them. Oh, and MGM kept a real Barbary lion as a mascot. Ford titles it after the studio's motto, Ars Gratia Artis, but this is not just an act, and it refuses to roar.

He can work large, on the scale of a mural, and he calls it painting. One work not on display runs across several sheets and thirty feet. More often, he works small and fast. The show celebrates his gift of sixty-three studies—all tied up in his favored narratives. They climax with single set pieces, on loan, of the lion and panther. He is thinking what could have happened to the animal on the loose, not perfecting a portrait or a story.

The panther prowls the snow with the still-quaint village behind him in the dusk, thinking perhaps of home in India. He sets upon a goat, and who knows? It might have happened. He had to eat something in ten days. He leaps upon the bare branch of a tree bending away from its narrow trunk, but never coming into flower. Blood might have dripped on the ground and colored the sky, unless its red is merely his shadow in the snow and sunset in the clouds.

Vistas may open up all to one side of the snowy hills, but the action is all in the foreground, right before one's eyes. Ford is not above observation, as of a lion's whiskers. Yet creatures take on almost human personalities, for the viewer to put in words. The large portraits are sedentary by comparison but no less human and no less concerned with artifice. The MGM motto means art for art's sake, as if Hollywood ever thought that way, but it could well be speaking of him. The show's subtitle speaks of "Birds and Beasts of the Studio," and the studio is surely the artist's.

Born in 1960, he found his subject in the 1990s, but the work is mostly recent. The curators, Isabelle Dervaux and Christina M. Pae, also give him access to the Morgan's collection, and his selections speak of him, too. They run to observers like John James Audubon and Edwin Henry Landseer, but also such literary types as Potter and Edward Lear. Audubon has squirrels climbing a tree much like the panther, and Indian art has an elephant turning on its trainer. Could Rembrandt, as Ford thinks, have prepared his etching in the open air, the better to observe? I cannot swear that Ford respects animals half as much as his imagination, but they are still ready to pounce.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Beatrix Potter ran at The Morgan Library through June 9, 2024, Walton Ford through October 20. Wanda Gág ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through December 2.