Staff Picks: Animal depictions in the collection

The “Staff Picks” blog will spotlight some of the curators’ favorite depictions of animals—or in some cases, bizarre animal-like creatures—in the Museum’s collection. 

Extensive Landscape With Travellers on a Country Road 

Judith Mann is the Museum’s curator of early European art. She chose Jan Breughel the Elder’s “Extensive Landscape With Travellers on a Country Road,” which is on view in Opal and Arthur H. Meyer Gallery 238. 

Jan Breughel the Elder’s wonderful copper painting Extensive Landscape With Travellers on a Country Road has fascinated me from the moment we purchased it in 1996. It is filled with so many carefully observed details, including a heron taking flight in a salt marsh (far right), a woman balancing a basket of linens on her head (far left), and a distant view of the horizon of the city of Antwerp in the early 17th century. My favorite detail, however, is the small dog in the left foreground who waits by the side of his master, shown yoking his horses in preparation for travel. The dog was originally posed with its head facing right. At some point, Breughel changed the position so that the dog looks back at his master. Over time, the oil paint that covered the original head has become transparent, so that now the dog has two heads, one a ghostly phantom and the other fully realized in earth tones. Jan Breughel was a master of small-scale images on copper panels that are filled with carefully recorded fauna and flora. This scene contains 5 dogs, 12 horses, and 7 birds, along with a variety of meticulously painted grasses that border the marsh on the right.   

“Grasshopper” Floor Lamp (model 831)  

Genevieve Cortinovis, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, chose a floor lamp named “Grasshopper,” designed by Greta Magnusson Grossman. It’s on view in Gallery 130. 

It continues to surprise me how a jaunty tilt can imbue a design with so much character. Greta Magnusson Grossman manages it with impressively little: two lengths of tubular steel and an aluminum shade shaped like a speeding projectile. The trick is in the angles. The stem reclines just shy of 75 degrees. Balanced on a delicate, looped base, it reads more insect than appliance—a lithe, lightweight anatomy with hind legs ready to spring. Born in Sweden to a family of cabinetmakers, Grossman trained at Konstfack, Stockholm’s premier art and design school, before immigrating to the United States in 1940. Steeped in Scandinavian functionalism, she arrived in Los Angeles with a pared-back aesthetic that left many Americans hesitant. Of her early reception, Grossman recalled, “When I came here in 1941, I showed things of this type and could have starved to death. People didn’t know what to do with it.” After World War II, however, tastes shifted. Consumers were newly receptive to flexible designs that sat comfortably in the bright, open floor plans of postwar homes. With its slim, playfully zoomorphic profile, unexpected color, and swivel bulb and shade, Grossman’s Floor Lamp (model 831)—dubbed the “Grasshopper”—became one of her most popular designs.   

The Town (City Night) 

Melissa Venator, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Modern Art, chose Max Beckmann’s “The Town (City Night),” which is on view in Gallery 213.  

My favorite “animals” in the collection are not animals at all. They are the bizarre human-animal hybrids crouched at the bottom of Max Beckmann’s The Town (City Night). There are three of them, huddled on a rug strewn with discarded magazines, newspapers, and an empty champagne bottle. Strangely self-contained, they seem oblivious to the drama unfolding around them. At left, one creature wears a mailman’s cap and holds a candle and an envelope addressed to “Mr. M. Beckmann, New York, USA.” The address doubles as the artist’s signature—Beckmann was living in New York when he painted the work. The figure’s face is human, but its body is covered in hair and spots, complete with a cat’s tail. Beside him squats a crowned companion, turned away from us, though her long, dark hair spills down her back. The most normal of the trio is a monkey, absorbed in its own reflection in a mirror. A clue to these creatures’ meaning lies in Beckmann’s own nickname for the painting. In his diaries, he referred to it as “Midnight.” I take this as an invitation to read the scene as a dream rather than a literal narrative. In that light, the woman appears to be asleep, while the uncanny figures around her are projections of a dreaming mind. Fantasy is always present in Beckmann’s art, but in this late painting, it has overtaken reality entirely—and these impossible creatures make that collapse all the more convincing. 

Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman 

Hannah Segrave, SLAM’s curator of European art to 1800, chose Francesco Salviati’s “Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman,” which is on view in Shoenberg Gallery 236. 

My favorite animal in SLAM’s collection is the lion found in the wonderfully disorienting and enigmatic Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman by Francesco Salviati. The portrait uses bright, acid colors—green, pink, and blue—to provide a vivid backdrop for the noble sitter, clad in black. It’s the curious grouping to the left of the sitter’s shoulder—a white flower with a nude woman and stalks of wheat, an elderly nude man, and the lion—that sparks curiosity, though. Symbolic objects, figures, and even landscapes often speak to the identity of the sitters in early modern portraits like this one. We know the sitter must be Florentine because the lion is actually the Marzocco, a symbol of the Republic of Florence. The Marzocco is a public sculpture that was placed in the heart of the city, in the Piazza della Signoria. The original was lost to weather and time, so the best-known version, created by Donatello, now resides in the Bargello for safekeeping. Because of this lion—with the cutest startled expression—we know that the reclining male is a river god, specifically a personification of the Arno River that flows through the city center of Florence; the flower symbolizes the fertile ground of the area, which is present-day Tuscany.