The art of birds

In 2023, the Mauritshuis museum’s director, Martine Gosselink, came across an article by Simon Schama in the Guardian on the broken relationship between humans and nature. It contained an extract from Schama’s latest book, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, which described how the dramatic decrease in the south Asian vulture population – down from 40 million in the 1980s to a paltry 19,000 – was unpicking ‘the ecological threads that have tied human and animal culture together in India for centuries’.

The cows sacred to Hinduism had always been left to wander the streets on the assumption that once they had died a peaceful death their carcasses would be cleaned by vultures. Without the scavengers, their rotting bodies have attracted rats and feral dogs whose numbers have increased as the number of birds has dwindled. This has led to a rise in rabid attacks on humans, many of them fatal.

Deeply affected by what she had read, Gosselink approached Schama to act as guest curator for the exhibition ‘BIRDS’, a request to which he readily agreed. The resulting one-room show is an avian-themed cabinet of curiosities with items plucked from across cultures and millennia to reveal mankind’s multi-faceted, and often deeply problematic, relationship with birds.

The show’s starting point is The Goldfinch (1654), Carel Fabritius’s sublimely beautiful trompe l’oeil painting and one of The Mauritshuis’s most popular works. These little birds were popular pets in the 17th century. They could be trained to draw water from a bucket with a thimble, but to prevent them from flying away, they had to be caged, or in the case of Fabritius’s bird, chained to a perch. The cruelty of confining birds in this way is brought home immediately as we are guided towards the mesmerising murmuration of starlings captured in Jan van Ijken’s video artwork The Art of Flying (2015). Unconstrained, as nature intended, thousands of the tiny birds swoop and soar in a graceful aerial dance.

At the opposite end of the room is a very different ode to flight, Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1932-40), a later version of a work which has a unique place in art history. Brancusi had long sought a form that could encapsulate flying and, with this shimmering brass piece which reaches elegantly upwards, he felt he had succeeded. However, when the original was sent to be exhibited in the US in 1926, customs officials refused to recognise it as an artwork, classed it as an object ‘of utility’, and imposed customs revenue of $240. A furious Brancusi took the matter to court in a case that ended up challenging the US’s very narrow definition of art as ‘imitations of natural form’. Although the case involved such ludicrous exchanges as a witness being asked if they would consider taking a shot at it – the definition of a realistic bird obviously being something you might want to shoot – the judge did eventually, somewhat reluctantly, side with Brancusi.

The idea of birds as something to hunt has never been limited to America alone. Some of the most stunning, yet at the same time deeply disturbing, works on display are the 17th-century game pieces by father-and-son duo Jan and Jan Baptist Weenix, who catered to the Dutch patricians that saw game as a status symbol. Jan Baptist’s Dead Partridge Hanging from a Nail (c.1650-52), painted in the same trompe l’oeil style as Fabritius’s goldfinch, is so poignantly rendered that it is almost possible to persuade ourselves that we are looking at a memento mori. Less so Jan’s Dead Swan (1716) in which the titular swan hangs by its foot while a slaughtered peacock lies at its feet. The killing of these noble birds was the preserve of aristocrats, but also an activity aspirational to the wealthy owners of the artworks.

While game may be an acquired taste, unless we are vegetarian or vegan most of us do eat poultry and eggs from time to time. Seven Chicks (c.1665-68), Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s sentimental depiction of baby birds and Aelbert Cuyp’s Portrait of the Duck Sijchtghen (1647-50), a champion layer who produced 100 eggs a year and died at the ripe old age of 23 in 1650, lull us into a false sense of security of what this consumption actually entails. We are then jolted back into reality by an excerpt from the Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2005 documentary Our Daily Bread, an unsettling examination of industrial food production and high-tech farming, which shows newborn chicks being spat out of a funnel onto a conveyor belt where indifferent workers sort them for sex to enable the culling of unwanted males. Germany, France and Austria may have since banned the practice, with Italy set to follow suit this year, but it is still the norm elsewhere.

Mankind’s love of plumage transcends cultures, and the vibrantly coloured tribal costumes and headdresses are some of the most spectacular items on display; the finely constructed head dress made by the Siona people from the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1980s being a standout. It is therefore depressing to read that, since the discovery of oil, the Siona people have seen their habitat disrupted, resulting in a dwindling bird population. Age-old traditions have been impacted, such as using feathers in healing practices.

While the western European fans and headpieces made from the feathers of exotic birds are equally imposing, it is difficult to appreciate them in quite the same way when we learn that the desire for these accessories had reached such an insatiable level by the end of the 19th century that it was resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of birds every year. It’s heartening to hear that a League Against Cruel Fashion was founded in the Netherlands in 1891 in reaction to this, but one wonders what impact it had on a global level.

The fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s spectacular dress from her 2021 Roots of Birth collection proves that it is possible to show an appreciation for the beauty of plumage without harming a single bird. Based on a careful study of flight, the dress features feathery layers of laser-cut organza that delicately flutter and beat in the breeze.

It’s one of a select group of works in the exhibition created by, or showing, artists that clearly have a genuine love and respect for birds. There are the sketches of the anatomy of a bird’s wing and notes on flying by Leonardo da Vinci, a man who is said to have bought caged birds at market as a child in order to set them free. Then there is the touching photograph, taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1944, of an aging and infirm Matisse surrounded by the doves that gave him solace and which he allowed to flutter freely around his home. Matisse gifted one of his birds to his old rival and friend Picasso, who had his own aviary at home. He would use it as a model for The Dove (1949), the lithograph he produced for the World Peace Congress in 1949. Tracey Emin took ornithology classes at school and has been sketching and sculpting birds on and off for decades. The work on show here, You Saved Me (2014), is a particularly poignant small bronze of a bird in flight with a human body draped across its back.

Above all, quite literally, is Tamara Kostianovsky’s Big Vulture (2016) which hangs upside down from the ceiling in the centre of the room. Its wings, one of which is broken, are splayed open. Together with the open wounds in its torso, this turns it into an inverted Christlike figure, a victim of humanity’s careless disregard for the natural world. Yet, despite all evidence to the contrary, this tragic bird offers hope of redemption. Close inspection reveals that it is made from recycled fabric samples that would otherwise have gone to landfill. While it will clearly take more than recycling to save the world, in confronting us with the consequences of our actions, it nevertheless serves as a powerful message that we urgently need to change our behaviour, if we, and the birds we rely on in so many ways, are to survive. Visitors are likely to leave this stunning, thought-provoking show with a determination to do just that.