Art: Audubon’s Heir

In some ways, Athos Menaboni is a better bird painter than was the great John James Audubon. He lacks Audubon’s infallibly dramatic sense of composition and of action, but Menaboni is even more accurate about details and he comes closer to approximating the faintly metallic sheen of plumage in paint. So it is no wonder that Menaboni’s Birds (Rinehart; $10) has become one of the season’s most successful art books, selling out its first 25,000-copy printing before publication.

A lean little sparrow hawk of a man, sharp-beaked, with bright hazel eyes, Menaboni roams the Georgia swamps and forests, hunting birds with a .410 shotgun, a camera, traps and a sketch pad (he has special state and federal permits to collect two of each species a year for his pictures). Whenever possible, Menaboni draws his birds from life, to get the action right, sometimes dispatches them to do the plumage. The fact that he can keep them fresh in a refrigerator, he says, is a big advantage that Audubon would have appreciated. Another and greater advantage is his ability to make use of highspeed snapshots that show precisely the motions of birds in flight.

Menaboni lives with his buxom, Georgia-born wife (who wrote the book’s text) in a tiny house on a wooded hillside near Atlanta. His studio, as big as the house, is always alive with birds, some to paint and others that have been hurt and need fixing. Among his guests last week were three Canada geese, a very angry golden eagle named Sergeant, an albino cardinal, a mourning dove, two red-winged blackbirds and a raucous blue jay with a broken wing. Menaboni makes pets of many birds; ducklings have swum in his bathtub, bobwhites have made themselves at home in his living room and a screech owl has perched on his easel.

The son of a Leghorn, Italy ship chandler (who named him Athos after Dumas’ musketeer), Menaboni collected birds as a child. “When I flunked an exam at school,” he recalls, “father would set them all free and I’d have to start collecting over again.” He worked his way to the U.S. on a freighter, made a precarious living painting everything from birthday candles to murals until his bird pictures caught on twelve years ago. Now, at 55, he has more work than he can handle. Sure of his talent though he is, Menaboni swoops on praise as voraciously as the next artist. His favorite tribute was from a fellow painter who looked at one of his pictures and said, “Gee! Oh, gee!”