True Facts and Fake News: Joseph Stella’s “Lyre Bird”
Learn more about Joseph Stella and “Lyre Bird” from Kyle Mancuso, one of the High’s curatorial research associates.
By Kyle Mancuso, Curatorial Research Associate, High Museum of Art
In the age of the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement, you would be forgiven for assuming that Joseph Stella’s Lyre Bird — magnificently feathered and pompously posed — is not a real bird (fig. 1). The animal dominating the canvas certainly doesn’t look real, and a name that references a musical instrument but also suggests a mendacious songbird doesn’t help either. Painted in the mid-1920s and exhibited at Valentine Dudensing Gallery in 1926, the work was singled out for being “in startling contrast to the earlier ‘New York’ series of panels on the themes of Brooklyn Bridge, subway entrances and exits, docks, skyscrapers, automobiles and gas-tanks.”[1] For critics familiar with the modernist painter best known for dramatizing the Big Apple’s soaring steel-cabled infrastructure (fig. 2), a fantastic-looking bird set against a dreamy landscape was a little hard to swallow.
Despite Stella’s imaginative treatment of the scene, featuring impossibly colorful plumage and improbable avian friendships, the lyrebird is indeed a real bird. Named for the distinctive shape of the male’s tail feathers, the superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) is native to eastern Australia and renowned for its remarkable feats of vocal mimicry (fig. 3). In addition to its usual repertoire of its down-under neighbors — like the Kookaburra, whipbird, and shrikethrush — the lyrebird has been recorded mimicking humanmade sounds as well: car sirens, camera shutters, and chainsaws. Days after five lions escaped their enclosures at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, a lyrebird perfectly reproduced the zoo’s evacuation alarm, clearly pronouncing the words “evacuate now.” David Attenborough’s encounter with one in 2007 for BBC Earth has become something of an internet sensation, viewed over twelve million times on YouTube with thousands of comments. One lyrebird groupie posted, “I wanna hear it play ‘Freebird.”
Fascination with the lyrebird is nothing new, however. “Discovered” in 1798 and unveiled at the Linnean Society in London two years later, the lyrebird quickly took ornithological circles by storm. Prints of the bird (fig. 4) circulated widely in journals and books, and stuffed specimens (fig. 5) began to enter the collections of natural history museums, with the male’s exquisitely arrayed tail feathers invariably the center of attention. Throughout the nineteenth century, multiple attempts were made to safely transport the lyrebird to Europe and rear one in captivity, which given the more primitive methods of early zoologists and the bird’s supposed inclination to depressive episodes, produced less than desirable results.
Fast on the heels of her colleagues, French illustrator and animalier Pauline Knip exhibited her take on the lyrebird at the 1812 Salon in Paris to great acclaim (fig. 6). “The most curious work of the genre,” one critic wrote, “the execution is perfect.”[2] One of the few women artists represented at the Salon, Knip could not resist a bit of fun, making her overwhelmingly male colleagues — as enamored with the lyrebird’s anatomy as they were dismissive of women’s artistic talents — the butt of the joke. Unusually represented from the backside, the bird peeks through its tail feather at the viewer as if to say, “I see you looking at my derrière.” Stella, never one to shy away from a lark either, executed a pastel of a peacock (fig. 7) in a similarly exposed pose.
By the early 1900s, interest in the bird also extended to the less scientifically minded of society. The male’s tail feathers had become such a hot commodity in fashion, women’s hats in particular, that in 1910 one expert warned that the lyrebird was “soon to pass away.”[3] Despite the threat of hefty fines, the feathers continued to flood the American market, a conservation concern that simultaneously contributed to the public’s increased familiarity with the bird.
Many American city dwellers of the period, however, would likely have encountered the lyrebird not through scientific illustrations or fancy hats but in the newspaper, where the humorous potential of the bird’s homonymic name — lyre or liar? — was shamelessly, and hilariously, exploited. “There are animals to suit every imaginable taste,” read one column from 1924, “giraffes for the delight of the throat specialist [. . .] birds of paradise for the clergy, lyre birds for the politicians.”[4] The bird even made a splash on the New York stage. In 1909, the famed Ziegfeld Follies performed “Lyre Birds” in mockery of Teddy Roosevelt’s decision to leave politics and embark on a jungle safari (fig. 8), and “The Lyre Bird and the Jay” was one of the hit songs of the 1912 musical Hanky Panky, performed into the next decade as one of the show’s highlights (fig. 9).
The Lyre bird and the jay | Library of Congress (loc.gov)
Joseph Stella could very well have read the funnies or sung along to the musical numbers, but for an artist with deep respect for and interest in New York City’s cultural institutions, it is more likely he would have come across the lyrebird at a natural history museum. In her contribution to the catalogue for the exhibition Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature — don’t forget to swing by the Museum Shop to pick up a copy! — Karli Wurzelbacher of The Heckscher Museum of Art explores Stella’s unique relationship to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and the way the institution shaped his nature-based work. “With sheer delight I was roaming through different fields spurned by the inciting expectation of finding thrilling surprises, especially going through the luxuriant botanical garden of the Bronx,” Stella wrote in relation to his innumerable paintings and drawings of exotic flowers.[5]
But what about New York’s other great institutions? For a subject for his peacock pastel (fig. 7), Stella would have been familiar with the many birds of the Bronx Zoo, just across the park from the Botanical Garden (fig. 10). For a period in the 1930s, Stella could even count the peacock as his neighbor, having moved within a stone’s throw of the zoo. To see a lyrebird, however, he would probably have had to travel to Central Park West and 77th Street in Manhattan to visit the American Museum of Natural History.
Opened in 1877 and successively expanded over the following centuries, the American Museum of Natural History (fig. 11) quickly became one of the country’s largest and most important repositories of materials and specimens of natural history. Exhibited in its galleries were dinosaur bones, elephant tusks, and whale teeth, and its extensive holdings of taxonomized birds from all over the world were among the museum’s showstoppers. By the late 1800s, there were already lyrebird specimens on display at the museum, with more skins accessioned into the collection throughout the early decades of the 1900s (fig. 12). Just as he wrote of his fondness for the Botanical Garden, Stella mentioned his visits to the Museum of Natural History, and he would have had plenty of opportunity to view stuffed specimens on his trips there, either in the rows of glass cases that filled entire halls of the museum or in the newly created habitat dioramas that were rapidly capturing the imagination of visitors around the country.[6]
Stella’s Lyre Bird owes something to both these modes of display. In Stella’s painting, the bird’s lyre-shaped tail feathers are dramatically and symmetrically arrayed, reflecting the quest for order that characterized the prints (fig. 4), paintings (fig. 6), and glass cases of nineteenth-century ornithological thinking — each species removed from its environment and scientifically categorized, its many poses and attitudes reduced to a single, definitive image. While early prints sometimes showed male and female lyrebirds side by side, they seldom introduced characters incompatible with the bird’s known behavior — the lyrebird was by most accounts rather shy. The interaction between these three birds in Stella’s painting, and the long blue sky, are more consistent with the diorama (fig. 5), where action poses were preferred to static ones and a sense of theater was achieved through painted backgrounds and foreground props.
But even while glass cases did away with native habitats and known animal habits, they inevitably created new relationships by fitting many different species into a single display — not every bird could have its own moment (fig. 13). The birds in Stella’s painting appear copied and pasted from one such display case, arranged as a sort of collage of stock photos forced into the same PowerPoint presentation, awkwardly and unconvincingly interacting within the space. As a prolific painter, Stella was by necessity a master recycler, repeating motifs across paper and canvas regardless of subject. Visits to the Botanical Garden and the Museum of Natural History would have provided him with the perfect opportunity to sketch representations of the flora and fauna that could be used to efficiently fill his tightly packed canvases. In both his monumental Flowers, Italy (fig. 14) and the High’s own Purissima (fig. 15), Stella hides among the flowers and foliage these smaller, attendant birds, their stances from Lyre Bird replicated almost exactly. Can you find them?
Lyrebirds, stuffed or otherwise, were not Stella’s only inspiration. The French Symbolists — members of a loosely defined artistic movement of the late nineteenth century who found the ambiguities of metaphor more compelling than the instruction of narrative — were not so interested in lyrebirds, but they were obsessed with lyres. Reimagining the Greco-Roman myth of Orpheus, who famously charmed the ancient world with his musical talents, Symbolist painters further dramatized the bard’s death by fusing his dismembered head (torn from his body by a group of irate Maenads, according to legend) with his trusty lyre (figs. 16–17), creating one of the period’s most indelible and recognizable motifs. Stella was unabashedly influenced by the Symbolists in his work — his countless lotus flowers and swans are proof as much — and even his dreamy musings are indebted to Symbolist poets.[7] In the case of the Lyre Bird, Stella builds on this orphic (and oneiric) tradition, explicitly arguing that art and nature are inseparable. For a painter who believed that art “should be so spiritual that it lifts the soul out of the realities of life,” the Lyre Bird is among Stella’s most powerful images of the transcendental potential of engaging with the natural world.
The story would end here if it weren’t for one small thing. Stella’s Lyre Bird, and the many visual examples that preceded it, were way off on an important detail — the feathers of a lyrebird aren’t really shaped like a lyre after all.
For centuries, the biggest problem facing those who wished to describe the lyrebird, visually or otherwise, was that very few people had seen one alive. Those that had left only cursory notes on its appearance, and so the job of visually representing them to the public fell largely to artists and taxidermists, who found little fault in embellishing the arrangement of the tail feathers, probably influenced by early and erroneous reports that the lyrebird’s feathers fanned out like a peacock’s. Instead, when performing its mating dance, the male lyrebird holds its tail feathers over its head, parallel (and not perpendicular) to its body (fig. 18).
While there were certainly ornithologists who were aware of this fact, it was not until the early 1930s, with the publication of The Lore of the Lyrebird, that more verifiable information about the bird became available. The book, authored by Ambrose Pratt and based on his visit to an Australian woman’s remote jungle hideout, set the record straight:
Conventional illustrations of the male Lyrebird with tail erect [. . .] err in representing him with his tail vertically upright and at right-angles with his body — in the manner of a peacock. [. . .] The living Menura does not display his plumes in such a fashion. [. . .] the plumes rise and spread fanwise in one sweeping movement until they assume a static position forming an acute angle with the line of his back, whereupon the tips of all except the lyre-shaped plumes (which remain laterally extended) droop gracefully forward and downward, and partially screen his head [. . .]. When not displaying, the bird carried his tail like a closed fan horizontally behind him. He never erects or spreads his tail except when about to dance or sing.[8]
The description included a photograph of a lyrebird caught in the act (fig. 19). Silhouetted against the distant landscape, the image became the new standard for visually representing the lyrebird, supplanting the traditional “peacock-esque” pose with the more accurate, if less striking, one. Whereas an early twentieth-century Australian stamp featured the lyrebird’s towering tail feathers (fig. 20), today Australia’s wildlife signs get the pose correct (fig. 21).
This is not to take anything away from Stella’s masterpiece. Despite what it inherits of a trumped-up tradition, Lyre Bird remains a seminal work in the artist’s oeuvre, condensing into a single painting so many of the themes — nature and New York, symbols and spirituality — that would occupy him for decades of his career.
It also hints at a bit of self-mockery. For an artist who on more than one occasion compared himself to a tree and even painted himself in the guise of an ox (fig. 22), Stella’s Lyre Bird could just as well be read as a sly self-portrait, suggesting that he was more than aware that he had made a career of mimicry, exquisitely adapting styles and subjects — from Symbolist swans to Futurist arabesques — to create a distinctive and powerful voice. In the international jungle of early modernist art, Stella could master any tune or tone he wished while still producing work that stood on its own and proclaimed, “This bird can sing.”
After flying south for the winter to be on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida (fig. 23), Lyre Bird is on its way back north and will alight in Atlanta on February 24 for all to see. Don’t miss Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, on view at the High through May 21 and continuing to the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania (June 17–September 24).
To learn more about the exhibition, the High has several related programs taking place. For more information, visit the following links:
· Drawing from Experience: March 4, 11, 18, 25
· Conversation Pieces: On-Site (March 7) and Virtual (March 21)
· Artists on Nature: Seeing Refuge: March 9
· Oasis: March 10
· Inquiring Minds: Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature: March 14
· Sanctuary in the Studio: Reimaging the Natural World (March 23, March 30, April 6, April 13, April 20, April 27)
· Teen Art Afternoon: Nature Rocks: April 1
[1] Grant Overton, ed., Mirrors of the Year: A National Review of the Outstanding Figures, Trends and Events of 1926–7 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1927), 268.
[2] Translated from French (“. . . l’ouvrage le plus curieux en ce genre [. . .]. L’exécution est parfaite”) in René-Jean Durdent, “Galerie des peintres français du salon de 1812, ou coup-d’œil critique sur leurs principaux tableaux, et sur les différens ouvrages de sculpture, architecture et gravure,” Paris, Au Bureau du Journal des Arts, no. 21 (1813): 74.
[3] “How America Has Lost Birds of Rare Value and How Science Plans to Save Those That Are Left” The New York Times, January 16, 1910, 7.
[4] Irvin S. Cobb, “The Fauna of the Bronx,” The Chat, June 7, 1924.
[5] Joseph Stella, “Autobiographical Notes,” Art News 59 (November 1980), quoted in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 214.
[6] “I went to the Museum of Natural History to be initiated by my ardent curiosity [. . .].” Joseph Stella, “The Birth of Venus,” 1941, quoted in Haskell, Joseph Stella, 209.
[7] Paul Valery’s Orphée is remarkably similar in language and metaphor to Stella’s “Pensieri — sensazioni, II” (“Thoughts-Feelings, II”). Valery’s final line — “À l’âme immense du grand hymne sur la lyre!” (“with the immense spirit of the great hymn of the lyre”) — is echoed in Stella’s evocation of a barren landscape: “L’alto silenzio fa pensare all’abbandono di uno strumento musicale cui l’Invidia abbia spezzate le corde. I rami, schiantati dal vento, pendenti come membra stronche, non sono forse le corde rotte dall’immensa lira muta della campagna?” (“The high silence makes one think of the abandonment of a musical instrument whose strings were broken by Jealousy. The branches, broken by the wind, hanging like severed limbs, are they not perhaps the broken strings from the immense, mute lyre of the countryside?”). Valery translation quoted in Dorothy M. Kosinski, Orpheus in Nineteenth-Century Symbolism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), 249. Stella quoted in Irma B. Jaffe, Joseph Stella (New York: Fordham University Press, 1970).
[8] Ambrose Pratt, The Lore of the Lyrebird (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1951), 46–47.
