- Throughout history, depictions of wildlife in drawing, painting and sculpture have struggled for acceptance in the larger world of fine art.

Today's guest on "Wyoming Chronicle," art historian Adam Duncan Harris, has spent many years working to elevate the reputation and respect of wildlife art, and he's succeeding.

This year he helped assemble and curate a nationally touring exhibition of the quartet of painters known collectively as the big four of wildlife art.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(bright music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities, thinkWY.org and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

Adam Duncan Harris, so welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle" and thanks for having us at your truly striking museum here, just outside Jackson this morning.

You have a title and I want to hear what that is and then have you talk a little bit about that.

- Great, thanks for having me and thanks for being here.

I'm the Grainger/Kerr Director of the Carl Rungius Catalogue Raisonné.

- Okay.

- Which is a long title.

- What is the, what does Raisonné mean in the world of art?

- So, in the art history world it's a very specific project that many people do.

A Catalogue Raisonné is a reasoned catalog.

So it's a well-researched and well-defined project that seeks to document either all of an artist's body of work or a section of it.

And in our case, we've chosen to look at Carl Rungius's finished paintings and his sculptures.

- Now Carl Rungius is one of the artists recognized colloquially, casually as the one of the big four of wildlife art.

And there are Rungius paintings in the background of the shot that we're in now.

And he's a specialty obviously of yours and a treasured component and foundational part of the museum as well.

Part of a larger exhibit going on, where the big four, so to speak, are being shown here at the same time in this one exhibition which is a rare thing in wildlife art, isn't it?

- It is.

We assembled this exhibit with the help of a museum in the Netherlands, and they're the only other museum in the world that we've found so far that has masterworks by these four artists.

And these four artists are important because they were all working at the same time period.

They all sort of defined a new vision of how we portray wildlife.

They took their studies out into the field.

They got to see animals in their natural habitat.

And so what you see in their paintings are animals living their lives in nature and without necessarily any human presence.

- I think I'm right in believing and understanding that way way back when, we're talking about the beginnings of art history here, if you even call it that, when the creature that we could recognize as being a human being first picked up a stick with some charcoal on the end of it, or got some blood maybe on her own finger or berry juice or something and made a marking on the wall of the cave or the cliff.

Very likely what that person drew or depicted or tried to depict was an animal from the wild.

And we know that to be true, right?

- Right, so some of the earliest art that we've discovered so far has been humans depicting animals.

And I like to think of that history as us, as creative beings, trying to figure out this relationship we have with the other living beings on this planet.

We can't talk to them, we can't necessarily know what's going on in their minds, but we can try to work that out by creating artwork about these other things.

And as you go through time, the artwork changes as our relationship to these creatures changes as well.

- So when I think of that, what that must have been for those first, let's call 'em artists, just how compelling that was.

What am I going to draw the first time it's ever been drawn?

First time I ever do it, it's gonna be an animal.

And so thinking of that foundational aspect of it, the question that's always nagged me, wildlife art seems to me has been sort of relegated in the world of the larger kind of construct or framework of what we'd call fine art.

- Yes, so wildlife art has, doesn't always have the greatest reputation in the fine art world.

Looking around here, looking around the museum, I think we counter that argument fairly well.

- I agree.

- But it is, yeah, an age old kind of prejudice, as time has rolled on, where depicting animals as a subject hasn't been at the top of the heap.

- I wonder why that is.

Is it because it was like the subject of a textbook or something or more of a scientific kind of illustration rather than an artistic one?

- Right, it oftentimes gets lumped in with natural history illustrations.

- [Steve] Okay.

- So, but that is very diagrammatic, you know, and so it's, you know, this is how the profile of an animal or this is what its head looks like.

Whereas these paintings and these sculptures that we have at the museum are much more artistically, you know inclined and informed.

There is, if you look back at the Paris Salon in the 1800s, there were different categories that people would submit art in.

And the highest form was, at a certain point, painting classical scenes from Greek and Roman mythology with humans doing noble or ignoble things.

And so animals didn't quite rise to that same level.

- The big four, name 'em for us.

And because you can have the expert pronunciation that I might not.

- Right, I think it's a very Wyoming pronunciation of most of these.

Richard Friese, Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors and Carl Rungius - Let's talk about them just in order beginning with Bruno Liljefors.

Tell us a little about him and what distinguishes him in the field.

- So Liljefors, among all these artists, especially in his home country of Sweden, has the best reputation.

So he's sort of a Swedish national hero, which is great.

Outside of Sweden, we don't really know that much about him but he spent almost all of his time in Sweden, in the archipelagos and the islands around Stockholm, depicting bird life- - [Steve] Birds, that's something I noticed- - Sea life, yeah.

And so that distinguishes him from these other artists who were more interested in charismatic megafauna and bigger creatures like elk and deer and moose.

- And there are Liljefors paintings within the permanent collection of your museum.

But we've also, for this exhibition that's on now, called "Survival of the Fittest," which showcases the four, you've brought in pieces lent from other institutions as well.

- Right, mainly just the Rijksmuseum in Enschede.

So we borrowed 18 pieces from them and complimented those with 25 pieces from the Wildlife Art Museum.

- I hope to get into some of the logistics of how in the world you do all that stuff.

But we'll talk about the art here for a moment.

Wilhelm Kuhnert, from what I could, have seen and have learned of a highly studio trained artist and academic artist, I might call it, what stands out with his work?

- So Kuhnert and Rungius were both at the art academy in Berlin at about the same time, Kuhnert being a little bit older.

He had the opportunity to go to Tanzania, which was then German East Africa, and go on safari.

And he went on three sort of years long safaris to document the animals, do studies of the habitat, and then bring all this stuff back to Berlin and create these beautiful finished paintings that we have.

And what we do like to point out in this exhibit is that especially for Rungius and Kuhnert they were only able to do what they did because of some of the more negative aspects of colonialism.

And you know, Europeans coming across the country and removing wildlife from their natural habitat and removing native people from their historic lands.

So as wonderful as all these paintings are we do have to acknowledge that aspect of it.

- Yeah, I mean, I think what, when we talk about or imagine how in the world they got the images that they did, when they were, especially when they first were working they weren't able to photograph them, at least not very easily.

So the truth is what they did was kill 'em probably, in many cases.

- Right, there's, so hunting is involved and behind almost everything you see in this exhibit.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And we also, we talk about that, especially in terms of the connection between hunting and conservation.

It does seem problematic to many people that it was hunters that were the driving force behind conservation.

But without that aspect of it, without Teddy Roosevelt saying, "We wanna save these creatures," in part just to save them, but in part so that they could be hunted by future generations- - Continues to be true today.

- Yeah, it's totally true today.

- Richard Friese, another German, rather than the smaller, the birds and the smaller animals that Liljefors did, for example, he liked the big, bold, dramatic creatures.

- Yep, and he's a good example of, he stayed in northern Europe and painted the creatures that remained in and around Germany and Prussia at that time, which were moose and red deer.

And he also went on an expedition to Svalbard and, above Norway, and got to see polar bears in the wild.

And so he painted these great polar bear paintings.

And this is another sort of interesting aspect of the hunting side of things that we were just talking about.

A lot of these creatures, especially the red deer from Europe, were only there because they were protected on royal hunting preserves for the Kaiser or somebody else to go out on their annual hunt.

If they hadn't been protected in that way, they probably would've all been hunted out and eaten by people.

- Who literally were sustaining their lives- - Right.

- In this way.

Friese, to my eye at least, tried for a much more sort of almost photorealistic approach, a much more finished kind of look, less Impressionistic perhaps.

I mean, you're looking at this and it's, he's clearly showing, "Look what I can do.

Here's the closest thing you're gonna get to actually seeing this in the wild."

And his technique is pretty stunning, really, the things he was able to do.

- So these artists were definitely classically trained which we think of as, before Impressionism really took hold on much of the art world.

So you see more naturalistic colors, a thinner brush, and you're right, they're just, they're going for as many details as they can in the whole composition.

- Because I think for many people, especially in their time, and they were working in the 19th century and into the 20th century as well but began in the 19th, a lot of people, this is their chance, the audience, to see what one of these animals even looked like.

"I'm never gonna see a giraffe or an elephant the way some of the paintings we see in the exhibition here are but here's what they look like in the wild."

And so they're trying to just zero in on it and depict it as accurately as they possibly can.

And there's an art to that of course.

- Oh, for sure.

And also in this era, there was a great zoo in Berlin that had a variety of creatures.

So they would combine studies they did in the wild with studies they did at the zoo and a field sketch of a certain landscape that they liked.

We were talking about being out in the field.

One of the interesting technological developments that made a lot of this possible was the invention of paint in tubes.

So you could take your paint out into the field.

And this, you know, is part of how Impressionism bloomed as a movement and this, what we're seeing here in the galleries today.

- What was it before?

What would be in the studio?

- So you'd have to mix your paint or I think they would take it out in little, like mix it up in leather pouches or something that was not as reliable.

So if you could take a little set of paints out into the field and record something right there en plein air, it was much more immediate.

And then you could take those studies back into the studio and use them to help you recall what it really looked like out there.

- Interesting, well, now we get to Rungius.

I know he's a favorite.

I don't, he's a specialty of yours.

He's mentioned in fact in your title.

And he has particular ties to Wyoming although he was German born, came to the US, came to Wyoming.

Much of his subject matter is Wyoming wildlife.

- Yep, so he came to New York City, Brooklyn, to go on a moose hunt with his uncle.

They were gonna go to Maine in 1894.

They apparently had a disastrous time and didn't even see a moose.

So his uncle invited him to stay on for another year.

That winter in New York City was a sportsman's expo.

And there was an outfitter from Wyoming who was there and invited Rungius to come and visit him in the Wind Rivers.

- Which he did.

- Yep.

- Wyoming's kind of what got him hooked on the West.

- [Adam] Yep.

- And it's the foundation or a foundational aspect of your museum, his work.

- Yep.

- It's a departure from the other three.

Why?

- He, I don't, it's hard to describe, but he- - [Steve] That's why you're here Adam.

- Right, that's my job.

He and Bruno Liljefors maybe began painting more like Richard Friese in a tightly rendered academic style.

But the more time they spent out in the wilderness and frankly the more exposure to Impressionism they gleaned, the more they incorporated those elements into their own work.

And so you do see with Rungius, as his career continues over time, he uses a broader brush and brighter colors.

And we just, you know describe them as being Impressionistic paintings.

- But also beautifully representational as well.

I mean, there's, here's what these animals look like but just in the way that they're presented, it's different.

And of course that's commonplace for artists to- You look at an early Jackson Pollock you'd never had no idea that's what it was, compared to what he became famous for.

I would assume that's true of Rungius as well.

You begin when you're studio training, "This is what I'm supposed to do," as an artist in training and then later, "I'm now doing what I want to do."

- His first, he had one stint in Wyoming in the late 1800s, up to about 1900.

And then he started, he went to New Brunswick and studied moose.

He went to the Yukon.

He started going to Banff in Alberta, Canada.

He had another stint in Wyoming from about 1915 to 1920.

And if you compare those two time periods, you see this incredible development and change in his style going from that tightly rendered style to the more Impressionistic.

And there's one other little key thing in there that ties into what we were talking about before.

In his later stint, 1915 to 1920, there were fewer animals in the Wind Rivers.

So he paid more attention to the cowboys and the roundup and the landscape.

- Very notably the landscape.

I'm glad you brought that up.

In comparing his work to the others in this exhibition, the setting is all beautiful for all of them.

- [Adam] Yep.

- But the attention that he pays to the landscape and you can see it in the ones that are in the shot with us now, he obviously could have been or was as a spectacular landscape artist as well.

- Yeah.

- And that's such a huge important part of what he's doing.

- So he began to win awards for his landscapes and his cowboy paintings.

And that afforded him a certain degree of success and recognition in the art world.

And once he had attained that and become a national academician and won a bunch of well-known prizes with these other subjects, he went back to painting wildlife.

- You see this dramatic representation of the landscape, these sharp angles and mountain scenes and that just, it's clearly a part of the painting.

It isn't simply a backdrop for this highly detailed creature.

Has his reputation grown and prospered and matured?

- Definitely, within this world of representational art, Western art, wildlife art, Rungius's star has definitely risen.

And that may be in part because of this museum and this collection and the mechanics of the market.

You're sort of pricing yourself out of the market when you're continually going after the best Rungius paintings.

But that's how we accumulated this amazing collection that we have here.

- Wildlife art is one of the great ways to get young people interested in drawing and painting and looking and distinguishing between styles of art.

I don't think anyone could come into this museum and not really, really enjoy it.

But a lot of it begins with the site.

The property itself, the building, it is a piece of art in itself.

This is all goes into what happened when the museum was able to expand from its original site, which was in a much more ordinary building in the town of Jackson to this setting outside of Jackson.

And how was that able to happen?

- The founders of the museum, Bill and Joffa Kerr, were really good at bringing in other people and sharing their vision of what this place could be with them.

So from very early on they wouldn't wanna be called the founders of the museum but founding members of the museum because they really like to think of it as a group effort.

So they had a small space on the Jackson Town Square for from 1987 to about 1993.

- I remember that.

- Yeah, and during that time period, they scouted other locations and tried to figure out where the best place for a permanent facility would be.

And this spot that we're sitting on right now became available.

It looks out over the Elk refuge, it's close to town, it's on your way to the park.

So it just seemed like a ideal location.

- And I know that Bill and Joffa Kerr were huge parts of this museum from its beginnings.

And we just recently lost Bill Kerr.

Who was he and why was he so crucial to what we have here?

- He and Joffa were really the impetus behind this museum.

Their love of wildlife art and their collection, throughout their lives, of it formed the corpus of what became the museum collection.

And so, yeah, Bill, in particular, was just a visionary in terms of his desire to create this place where people could come and see wildlife art and appreciate this subject that we mentioned is not always on the upper echelons of the art world, but he had such a passion for it.

- And he had a Rungius that he bought before Rungius was Rungius, so to speak.

- Right.

- And that became one of the first donations to the museum.

And it's here today.

- Yep, it's right behind us in the corner of the gallery over there.

There is a funny story.

He went into the gallery and saw that painting and really wanted it.

The dealer said, "Well, that painting's $6,000."

And Bill said, "I don't have $6,000."

And the dealer said, "Well, let me tell you, I'm gonna send it out to your house in Oklahoma, hang it on the wall, enjoy it, and just send in $500 whenever you can do it."

- So that's how he got it?

- Yep, that's the first Rungius, and then it just grew from there.

- Certainly you must think it's a world class facility?

- Oh, for sure.

I mean, just the synchronicity of the place, the subject, the building, all these things really coalesce in this place in an amazing way.

- What brings a person to, on a career trajectory to become an art museum curator?

What was that for you?

- I started off in sociology and then, I went to school back east, then I came back to Wyoming.

I got a master's in American Studies at University of Wyoming.

And so I started studying things that people made instead of people themselves.

And then I got invited to go to the University of Minnesota for my PhD.

And I was just finishing my dissertation when a woman that had known me since I was about this tall called my parents and said, "Hey, the Wildlife Art Museum is looking for a curator, Adam should really apply."

And I did.

And we had a interview down in Laramie at UW and I got the job and I was never happier.

- And that was at, when this facility was here?

- Yeah, so that was in 2000.

- You've mentioned your parents, both professors at the University of Wyoming you told me.

So you're not, some easterner parachuting in to tell us what's what about art?

You've got your Wyoming roots, your Wyoming ties and proud of that?

- Yeah, I grew up proud in Laramie, very proud of it.

I'm very proud that I was able to come back to the state and do art history.

There aren't that many places in Wyoming that you can do that as a career.

Yeah, no I'm very happy to be a Wyomingite and continue to be so.

- The museum, it's not just an art gallery, it is part of that and looking around us, it's a great part of it.

But to make the museum work you're doing other things all the time.

- In addition to changing exhibits, educational programs, there's always different events happening.

We have a major fundraiser called "Western Visions" that's been part of the museum's programming since the beginning.

So it's just a huge, you know, combination of different things, appealing to different audiences.

- There's a restaurant here, I might have lunch here after we're finished today.

That's a part of it?

- Right, there's a great restaurant "Palate," wonderful food, great service.

So the restaurant, there's a auditorium where films are shown, a gallery where we oftentimes have exhibits from local high school kids.

Yeah, it's just a range of different things.

- [Steve] Indoors and outdoors, on the grounds are monumental sculptures.

And there's a way to guide yourself through and see that part of it too.

- [Adam] There's a amazing sculpture trail designed by a world renowned architect named Walter Hood that goes the length of the property, great views of the Elk refuge.

And then, of course, we should mention that there's the museum shop as well.

- [Steve] We're here in late July.

The exhibition that we're talking about, the big four, called "Survival of the Fittest" is here for the time being.

Where does it go from here?

How does that work?

- [Adam] From here it's gonna tour to five other museums across the country.

It's gonna go in September through December, it'll be at the National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg, Virginia.

Then it's going to Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

- The logistics of taking paintings off walls and packing them for shipping and transporting them and doing it all again, just a enormous task.

And that again is part of what you have to learn to do, then do it right, if you're gonna have a world-class museum.

- Yep, the art packing and shipping field and world is a realm unto itself with just amazing people who take good, such good care of the objects and take great care in the building of the crates, the conditioning of the trucks so the truck's atmosphere matches what we've got in the museum.

It is a huge process, yeah.

- So when it's being transported to another state, the painting doesn't wanna have to react to huge changes in temperature and humidity- - [Adam] Right.

- And light and all that sort of thing.

It's TLC to the utmost.

- Yep, completely.

- Adam Duncan Harris, thank you for talking with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

Good luck with this exhibition and the future and so glad you're here.

- Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

(bright upbeat music)