Volume 7, Number 9 · December 1, 1966
Larger than Life
By Lewis Mumford
The Original Water-color Paintings by John James Audubon for "The Birds of America"
From the Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Introduction by Marshall B. Davidson
American Heritage (Distributed by Houghton, Mifflin), 2 vols. pp., $75.00
John James Audubon: A Biography
by Alexander B. Adams
Putnam's, 510 pp., $7.95
The life of John James Audubon was full of ambiguities, contradictions, frustrations, alienations. with such attributes, his biography could easily meet the fashionable specifications of our own period. But he was also a man of heroic mold, and heroes for the moment are not fashionable. What is worse for his present fame, he was, within his strict avian limits, a skilled draughtsman, indeed a consummate artist; and that is a severe disqualification in an age populated by solemn popcorny jokesters who transfer nothingness to a canvas and sell it as art, or who crown such vacuous achievements by erasing nothingness and coyly signing their names to that double nonentity.
Review, 5817 words
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