Art: Menaboni’s Birds

Manhattan’s bird-painting fans flocked last week to Fifth Avenue’s Audubon House to cock their eyes and twitter over a new set of Southern bird pictures. Few bird lovers would crook their necks to look at a Rembrandt. But they will flock like wild geese to see a well-drawn picture of a roseate spoonbill’s rump sticking out of a swamp. And these pictures were unusual, not only for the meticulous exactitude with which they depicted the spreading wings of buffleheads, warblers and herons, but for the realism with which they reproduced the iridescent sheen of their plumage. Painted in thin oil paint on specially processed illustration board, the portraits glowed like old Chinese lacquer.

The artist who painted them is a little, beak-nosed, birdlike Italo-American named Athos Menaboni who lives in Atlanta, where he takes time off from jobs as a muralist to range through the Georgia swamps and forests, hunting birds with a paintbrush. In six years Painter Menaboni has made 250 paintings of 97 native birds, says he has 150 more to do before using up the species Georgia has to offer.

Born in Leghorn, Athos Menaboni was sent to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He made his way to the U.S. as oiler on a freighter, spent several years decorating wax candles and painting posters in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. In the ’20s he moved to Atlanta, met and married a girl from Rome (Ga.), started painting murals. When Tobacco Millionaire Dick Reynolds hired him to decorate a mansion on Sapelo Island, Ga., Painter Menaboni did a series of murals in which some of Reynolds’ best friends appeared with the bodies of jungle animals. Sapelo Island was full of birds, and Menaboni started to paint them too.

Today he paints little else. On a hilly, wooded seven-acre farm about eight miles from Atlanta, he lives with his buxom wife, a family of wild turkeys, two Canada geese, three mallard ducks, a sparrow hawk, two pigeons and three quail. The turkeys roam all over the yard, crowd around him while he paints, begging for grapes which he throws them between brushstrokes. Armed with a .410 gun and a special hunting permit allowing him one pair of any Georgia species per year, he makes frequent trips to south Georgia to shoot and trap models for his pictures.

For his great U.S. predecessor, John James Audubon, Menaboni has the greatest reverence. Says he: “I have studied every Audubon I can find. He was a very great artist.”