Category Archives: Art

The Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler has done a series of works centering around what visitors don’t ever see when they go to the magnificant Vienna Museum of Natural History.

He stumbled upon a back room and his artist’s antennae went up. There were taxidermied animals in various states of confusion, as though they’d been thrown up in the air and tumbled down every which way or, more unsettling, as if someone had gone around arranging them in poses that were anything but the perfect scenes you’d see in the museum’s halls.

It wasn’t only taxidermy and early man come  to life.

The museum’s director gave him a tour, and believe it or not the artist rearranged nothing, just took the pictures as he found them. “Skeletons in the Closet” hits some primeval fear-buttons, at least for me.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has always been a favorite of mine, and not only because Maud put on her walking shoes there, toddling up and down the carpeted ramps of the Hall of Gems on the Museum’s ground floor. We lived a block away, on Columbus Avenue, and she probably spent as much time there in her preschool years as she did in our small apartment, clocking hours dancing under the gigantic suspended Blue Whale.

I remember a room of gold specimens in particular, which had a small bench on which you could be lulled into a trance by all that gleaming rock around you. Or maybe that was only a trance induced by chasing a toddler down the corridors all morning.

I thought of those gleaming rooms last year when a very smart reader I met persuaded me to get a copy of Relic, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Does everyone experience fascination with the idea of what lurks in the museum basement? Relic would not usually be my type of book, but I was hooked by the gothic quality of the setting.

It’s the first in a series of innumerable thrillers starring a detective named Pendergast, and the author booked some time as a  Museum staffer, so he knows his stuff. Something’s loose in the Museum of Natural History and I won’t tell you what but suffice it to say it’s big and savage and hiding behind that innocent looking exit sign just next to the dioramas.

The dioramas, of course, are the Museum’s beauty queens, now refurbished — a team of artists, conservators, taxidermists and designers dusted leaves, freshened fur, and restored the perfect but faded background vistas – and reopened this past October.

Everyone wants them to come alive (not a la Relic, though). Or to step into one. One man was responsible for the exquisite nature of most of these: James Perry Wilson (1889-1976) was a master of trompe l’oeil painting techniques and combined the real materials of the foreground with the painted background to create a mythic space.

It must have been magical to be in it, in the diorama, from the beginning, if you could. To actually make one.  Here are Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Horsefall in 1907, at work painting the background of the Wild Turkey Habitat Group in the North American Bird Hall.

I’m thinking of Gil and me at work on something like that – but we might rather do the Bongo Group or the Wild Boars.

Personally, I like the small dioramas at the entrance of the Mammal Hall, which house depictions of mammoths and other ice-age mammals – larger-than-life beasts here rendered miniature, more like playthings than real animals. I love the idea that while the other creatures here are taxidermied, the prehistoric predators here were built from the ground up out of clay or putty or whatever they use. Sort of like the the neanderthals in the basement of the Vienna Museum.

The bigger animals at the Museum of Natural History are naturally exciting, too. (This Vienna one, from Klaus Pichler, is maybe a little too exciting.)

Though truth be told I liked the critters a little mothbit, before their spa treatment. There’s that Mad Men scene from last season when tweenaged Sally clutches her belly after running off to the museum, standing in front of the glorious, imposing dioramas, complaining of stomach cramps, and it turns out she has “become a woman.”

What she feels is not just all that running around in the stuffed, gleaming museum, after all. It’s real.

I had been looking for days for an infant saguaro, knowing that they began tiny, nested under bigger, more mature, spreading nurse plants like mesquite trees. Not a one.

I found other babies.

But not those of the saguaro. It was almost as if the giant cactii sprang full grown from the body of the earth. But I was determined. At the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, I buttonholed a gardener who looked like a dashing, red-scarfed gent I once knew named Jorge.

He had silver duct tape holding together the crown of his straw hat,and when I first saw him he was supervising the planting of a smallish saguaro in a bed near the parking lot. In replanting, says my mother, you need to position them so that they face in precisely the same direction they did in the first part of their lives, or else they wither and die. Saguaros have to have the same relationship to the sun, always.

I knew this gardener knew saguaros. Could he point me in the direction of a baby? I asked. He led me through the winding walkways of the Garden. I wanted to find one that was no more than a nub growing out of the ground, just starting out. Jorge seemed to know exactly where it was.

We went through the grove of barrel cactus with its yellow fruit.

Past the blushing prickly pear.

Past the half-hidden nest of an absent bird.

There it is, Jorge said. He pointed beneath a sheltering shrub, which protected the saguaro like a baby Jesus in a creche.

Not quite an infant, he said. About five years old. It would take ten years to grow that big in the wild, he added with a touch of  pride. The Garden waters their plants so assiduously that they shoot up tall and bright, a technicolor green compared with the black and white of the desert that stretches all around.

Now that I had found my toddler saguaro, I could pay attention to the other fascinations of the Garden. An ebony-colored wood beetle chased us down the path, buzzing furiously. Art was everywhere.

This piece, of course, suggests the Renaissance produce painter Arcimboldo.

And Jeff Koons in his puppy flower phase.

My eyes were dazzled with not only organic but plenty of nonorganic growth, furnished by major sculptors.

The soft green and hard metal played off each other.

No, said my mother, I don’t like it. She was looking up at the Dale Chihuly forest of glass that welcome visitors to the place. It’s gilding the lily, she said.

I liked all that green glass. But maybe because the work was, first of all, monstrous, as were so many of the large-scale works scattered about.

I like monstrous.

Secondly, I was acquainted with Chihuly back in the early ’80s, when I visited his Pilchuck hot shop outside Seattle as a lowly member of a film production team, about the time he returned from the East Coast and blew up into a  legend. I was impressed with his pirate demeanor. And also with my experience of blowing a little glass, anything but monstrous, assisted by another dashing fellow, a tall long-haired Chihuly-ite gaffer who stood behind me and steadied my hands on the pipe. I thought that the keepsake I created would be mine forever. The thick-walled cup I made held exactly the right amount of vodka on the rocks, before it fell and smashed at about the same time I quit drinking a decade or so ago.

But maybe the natural vegetation was extreme enough. Lipstick cactus.

Dazzling enough in its nude simplicity. Agave.

Some specimens remained from the opening of the garden more than 70 years ago.

We had to go see how the butterflies responded, now that springtime had revealed its face to Arizona.

Who doesn’t like butterflies? As we waited to enter their enclosure, I felt I could hear the throb of wings.

They kind of make me nervous, said Maud.

Good for you, the docent told my mother, in her white t shirt. They like white shirts. And they’re very partial to redheads.

None of us had red hair, but I hoped in my peacock-feather-painted blouse to be a landing strip.

The netted area had been planted, surprisingly, with swiss chard, which appeared to be uninteresting to the butterfly population as a food source. The butterflies drank instead from the cups of flowers. They seemed to be half in the process of coming alive and half in the process of dying.

Leaving them behind rather sooner than I thought we would – They make some people uncomfortable, they’re insects after all! said a staff person – we progressed toward the Garden exit through the gray-green fleshy fields of cactii.

Three more butterflies hovered ahead of us.

Triplets, middleaged, each attired in a powder-pink windbreaker, cargo shorts and a floppy sun hat. I always wonder about multiples who dress alike above the age when their mothers outfit them. A matched pair of senior citizens used to roam Manhattan’s upper west side, mirror images in couture, nylons and cat-frame glasses. Related in spirit, the married couple who used to bike the streets to forage for horse manure for a Garden of Eden they planted on Eldridge Street, in the 1980s, when New York City was a simpler place.

Their names were Adam and Eve Purple. Their garden seemed to come out of nowhere. They dressed themselves, the two of them, in … purple.