The First Fauves

Both children's art and the work of primitive peoples have long since won their artistic due. Now, says Art Historian Clay Lancaster, writing in the current issue of the College Art Journal, an even more primitive art may be headed for popularity: that of the birds and the beasts.

Animals have been artists for millions of years, says Lancaster, although "their theories remain sealed in [their] little minds." The spider, for example, "is a marvelous craftsman . . . The common orb web is a triumph of symmetry and artistry." Then there is the ant, a master organizer, engineer and architect, and the termite, whose elaborate constructions make use of "scientific exposures to light and air, air ducts and airconditioning, concrete walls, roofs and gutters for shedding rain ..."

If most forms of animal life are architects rather than painters and sculptors, there are some creatures that indulge in purely decorative art: the bower birds of Australia. In addition to nests these happy birds build bowers of twigs and sticks, some exquisitely decorated with fern fronds, mosses and berries; the bower's sole purpose is for recreation and the entertainment of friends. The satin bower bird even paves his forecourt with shining bits of mica. But his crowning achievement is painting murals in the bower: "He collects charcoal from native hearths and, holding a strip of frayed bark in his beak for a brush, mixes the charcoal with saliva, which is forced through the sides of his bill to be spread with the piece of bark. He thus applies gesso or paint to the side walls of his bower."

Lancaster predicts that animal art may some day be admitted, alongside that of children and primitives, to "the sanctified galleries of art museums." Says he: "When we consider that animal art has remained constant for so many, many centuries, perhaps we should give the animals their full due and recognize them as the perennial modernists. Our present-day art is akin to theirs in essence ..."

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