Read this Wildlife Art Journal article

American Wildlife Art
Marquand Books, Seattle
424 pages;  $75


Constantin Brancusi, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Georgia O'Keefe, Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Maynard Dixon, Frank Benson, Jamie Wyeth, Picasso, Landseer, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo: They are among a long list of individuals whose credentials were never checked by St. Peter while passing through the vaunted gates of art history.

Each one painted or sculpted animals.

David J. Wagner's new 424-page, coffee-table sized book American Wildlife Art is unprecedented in its scholarship, certainly in the way it explores the history of wildlife art on the North American continent.

In this whale of a book, Wagner presents the strongest case yet for why animal imagery commands not only contemporary relevance for our time, but as fine art, scientific documentation, popular decoration for the masses, and yes, as icons, corporate logos, sports team mascots, and political expressions, it is the genre that perhaps most transcends social classes, national identity, age, religion and province.

Wagner is in a position to make a commentary.  For a decade between 1977 and 1987, he served as director of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin where he helped establish the museum's Bird In Art Exhibition as an international event.  Moreover, today he serves as a consultant for a number of traveling exhibitions, including a multi-venue event for Robert Bateman.

For a long time, the (primarily) Eastern art establishment in the U.S. has dismissed wildlife art and its...